Word of the Week

5th Sunday in Lent

Hour: Hora (Gk.): meaning “hour; season; time”

Christ’s hour commences with the entrustment of his spirit into his Father’s hands (Jn.19:30; Lk.23:46). His hour was the death that finally destroyed death, the hour of atonement and reconciliation. Christ’s mission to restore man back to God is at once a joint mission with the Holy Spirit. His paschal death opened the door to the gift of the Holy Spirit, which was poured out upon the first Christians (CCC 729-730). “From this hour onward, the mission of Christ and the Spirit becomes the mission of the Church” (CCC 730).  Man for his part, is to respond in prayer to contemplate the mystery of Christ’s hour, “Keeping watch with Christ” (CCC 2719).  Furthermore, the concluding article to Section Four of the CCC on Christian Prayer, addresses the Prayer of the Hour of Jesus. This priestly prayer “sums up the whole economy of creation fulfilling the great petitions of the Our Father” (CCC 2758).

The above Greek term can be located 108 times in the New Testament. John frequents the term 24 times, the most of any NT author. As I noted last week, John writes with a rich liturgical sense. This week is no different. Dr. Scott Hahn, in Scripture Matters: Essays on Reading the Bible from the Heart of the Church, draws out this liturgical application in his essay on John’s theology of the ‘hour’.  I direct you to this book for an exhaustive biblical study on the relationship between Christ’s hour, the events upon Calvary, and its relationship to the Mass. For this short study, I will examine John’s first use of ‘hour’ in the Wedding Feast at Cana along with his passage that comes to us this Fifth Sunday in Lent: the request of the Greeks and Jesus speaking about his death (Jn.12:20-32). I will do so to draw out the ‘hour’ as it relates to the Eucharist.

The Wedding Feast at Cana (Jn.2:1-112). Upon Mary’s statement to her Son, “they have no wine”. Jesus replies, “O woman, what have you to do with me, my hour has not yet come” (Jn.2:3-4). Now, at first glance, this response appears quite strange if not downright offensive to his mother. Yet, further examination of the story reveals something else. The Wedding Feast at Cana was the first of his “signs”. A word that John explicitly uses instead of “miracle”. He does this to communicate the symbolic meaning behind the miracle. For a sign signifies something greater that is yet to come. This ‘something greater’ is the ‘hour’ in which he would provide for us a new wine at the occasion of another wedding feast, the marriage supper of the Lamb, the Mass (Jn.17:1-2) (Hahn, 107-108).

The inquiry of the Greeks and Christ’s surprising response (Jn.12:20-32). In this gospel passage, we have the Greeks request to have an audience with Jesus. Our Lord, upon hearing of this request tells Phillip and Andrew, “Send them in. The hour has come for the Son of man to be glorified…I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls to the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit…Now is my soul troubled and what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’ No for this purpose I have come to this hour” (Jn.12:23-28). A simple request, and like the events at Cana, a response that directs our attention to his suffering and death. A closer look into these verses reveals why Christ responds as he does. First, ‘the wheat falling to the ground and it bearing fruit’. This addresses Christ, as the slain Lamb of God, whose death leads to life in the Spirit, which is sustained in the grain of the Eucharist. Second, the inclusion of all peoples. The new covenant that Christ came to establish was just not for the Israelite nation, but for the whole world. It was a universal (Catholic) covenant.  Consider that Christ goes into this commentary on the hour of his death on the heels of people from a gentile nation simply requesting to see him. Our Lord and Savior makes it pristinely clear that he has come to “draw all men to himself” (Jn.12:32) (Hahn, 110-113).

In the aforementioned accounts of the ‘hour’, I have highlighted a point of reflection into John’s rich liturgical sense. From Christ’s first sign (miracle) of turning water into wine on the occasion of the Wedding Feast at Cana to his heralding of the hour of suffering and death in his response to the Greeks. One thing is for certain, Christ wishes to bestow blessing upon all peoples in the first fruits of the Liturgy in the new grain and the new wine.

Just as Christ lived with his ‘hour’ in mind so should all Christians live out their earthly mission with their ‘hour’ in mind, and just as that hour defined his earthly mission so Christ’s ‘hour’ should define our earthly mission. As we draw closer to Holy Week, let us live in the “pasch” of Christ’s ‘hour’, dying to self to live in Christ.

“Whenever Jesus focused on His ‘hour’, He saw His death and Resurrection yes; but he also saw beyond these events to their extension throughout time and space in the celebration of the Eucharistic liturgy.”

 

--Dr. Scott Hahn
Primary Texts Consulted

Catholic Bible. Suggested trans. Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition.
Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd Edition, 1997.
Hahn, Scott. Scripture Matters: Reading the Heart of the Bible From the heart of the   Church. Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Road Publishing, 2003.

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