In today’s Gospel reading, from St John, the tension is building around Jesus and His message. John says: ‘Jesus proclaimed, as he taught in the temple, “You know me, and you know where I come from? But I have not come of my own accord; he who sent me is true, and him you do not know. I know him, for I come from him, and he sent me.” So they sought to arrest him; but no one laid hands on him, because his hour had not yet come’. They thought they knew Jesus, and where He came from. Jesus challenges their arguments, but takes the dialogue to a deeper level. There are several moments in John’s Gospel where ‘the hour’ is mentioned as not yet having come, significantly at the wedding of Cana.

The ’hour’ will come at the Last Supper when Jesus, in John 17, prays: ‘Father, the hour has come’.

May we have the grace to follow Jesus on this path of ‘the hour’, right through to the glory of the resurrection. May God bless you richly in it.