Posts Tagged ‘John: 4:23-26’

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, Monastic Intern

John: 4:23-26

“The hour is coming – the hour is coming and is now here when we will worship in spirit and truth”.

These words from today’s gospel exasperated me, clashing against a long-held belief of mine about time and the end of the world. 

John makes beguiling use of time in his writing, each sentence pushing and pulling us into the past and future. His style evokes how mortal time ceases to be meaningful in the person of Jesus, who often discusses the coming kingdom of God in the present tense.  In today’s gospel, Jesus bends time around Himself and brings the future into the present – “the hour is coming and is now here”. 

This signature malleability of time is also evoked one of John’s other books, the book of Revelation – one of my favorites. In Revelation, the pace is dizzying, with events overlapping or happening multiple times, and people, angels, and Jesus all speaking, praying, and crying out at the same time. In John’s telling, at Jesus’s second coming all our senses and knowing will overflow with God in perfect union of spirit and truth.

Revelation testifies to one aspect of the end of time and consummation with God – at some future point, God will erase the boundaries between us and heaven and all will rejoice in perfect unity with divine love. This is a huge comfort to me. My own future is still murkily unclear, and uncertainty about what lies ahead has kept me awake staring at the ceiling for many sleepless nights. I feel like it’s impossible to know what’s in store for me, and when I can’t see the next ten moves on the board, I panic.

My anxious faith is that Jesus will come again and bring an end to the chaotic uncertainty of our world. I find that fact quite helpful, and most days I really wish He would hurry up and get along with it.

But, today’s gospel is enough to make me reconsider.

Certainly Jesus says the hour is coming, the future hour of the Messiah who will bring God’s kingdom to the world

But – He says the hour is now here. Jesus refers to His own incarnation as the moment of God’s unity with humans.  This is another dimension of the end of time, but this angle catches me off guard. 

Don’t sit around waiting for God to act – the hour is here because Jesus is here, and with Jesus’s arrival, deeper and closer union with God is immediately upon us – unity with God not just in the future at the trumpet’s blast of the second coming, but a deep relationship with God now, an intimate and loving companion in Jesus, human and divine, perfect oneness of spirit and truth in humanity.

In the incarnation of God in Jesus, eternity and human time become intertwined.  Jesus promises us that just as He is one with God in heaven now, we have the exact same potential when we love God now and follow His commandments.

So yes, the time is coming – heaven and earth will fall away, martyrs and saints and angels will bow before the throne of God, and the world as we know it will dissolve into the glory of God’s love.

And – the time is already here. God’s kingdom isn’t waiting in the wings, and my anxious hope that God will eventually arrive to sort things out for me is just another earthly dream.

The eternity of God, manifested in Jesus, has touched that ticking clock in the back of my brain. The hour is now here, redemption and freedom and peace are at hand.

In this moment, I can’t passively wait for further instruction from God – I’ve got it. Our future and our present are simple. Worship and love God, in genuine spirit and in earnest truth, for God is here among us and desires nothing but our hearts, our souls, and our time. The hour is now.

Amen.