The Daily Office: John 7:1-13

John 7:1-13

Jesus' brothers said to him, "Leave Galilee and go to Judea, so that your disciples there may see the works you do. No one who wants to become a public figure acts in secret. Since you are doing these things, show yourself to the world." For even his own brothers did not believe in him. Therefore Jesus told them, "My time is not yet here." (John 7:3-6a)

"This is not an infrequent exercise in the life of discipleship. We want him to accompany us (so to speak) on some enterprise, and to vindicate what is said on His behalf by us or by others through some success that He enables us to win. But we are left to toil on with no glad sense of His presence as our companion; and at the end we find Him awaiting us with the Prophet's rebuke for our defect of wisdom or of loyalty…Yet that judgement too is mercy; for the goal of the 'call upwards of God in Christ Jesus (Philippians 3:14) is not our service of Him, with which He can easily dispense, but that we should, like Him, 'be perfect as our heavenly father is perfect' (St. Matthew: 5:48)."*

My comment: Understand that to be made "perfect" really means to be made "complete." To be completed is a process. It doesn't happen in the blink of an eye or the snap of a finger. We are all in the process of being competed as disciples of Christ. We who follow Christ, however imperfectly, will be completed. We will become perfect, in our loving Father's good time.

*From Readings in St. John's Gospel, by Archbishop William Temple