Good morning, I am Fr. Jihad Krayem, a Franciscan friar living in Lebanon, and I am responsible for youth ministry in Lebanon.
Today, there is something dramatic in this page of the Gospel of John. Jesus speaks. The Pharisees listen. But they do not understand each other. Jesus announces that He is going to the Father, and they think He wants to kill Himself. He speaks about eternal life, they see only death. They speak the same language, but they inhabit two different worlds.
And Jesus Himself explains this abyss, "You are from below, I am from above. You are of this world, I am not of this world."
We all know well the logic "from below". It is the logic that measures everything in terms of loss and gain, of security and danger, of what can be controlled and what slips out of our hands.
In the Middle East this logic takes on the concrete face of war, houses collapsing, families scattering, a future that cannot be imagined. But in each person’s life, in different ways, this same logic is at work, it is the fear that grips the heart, it is the weariness that does not pass, it is the feeling that the weight is too great for one’s shoulders. When one lets oneself be dominated by this vision, one risks seeing only darkness. And the greatest danger is not the difficulty itself, it is losing the horizon.
This is the drama of the Pharisees. They lack a horizon. And without this horizon, even the words of Jesus become incomprehensible.
Then Jesus declares, "If you do not believe that I Am, you will die in your sins."
"I Am." It is the name that God revealed to Moses before the burning bush. It is the name of absolute presence, of life that depends on nothing and no one. And it is this name that Jesus claims for Himself.
And He adds, if you do not believe this, you will die in your sins. Sin, in Johannine theology, is not a simple moral transgression but a radical closure to this Presence. It is living as if the "I Am" did not exist.
And it is already a form of death, the most subtle death, the one that empties life from within, even when outwardly everything still seems to stand.
But then Jesus opens a glimpse of light. "When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will know that I Am."
The verb, "to lift up", carries within it a double meaning that only John uses in this way, it is the lifting up on the cross, and at the same time the exaltation in glory.
They are the same thing. The hour of the greatest humiliation is the hour of the greatest revelation. On the cross, in the moment when everything seems to end, when death seems to have won, there, exactly there, it will be fully revealed who Jesus is.
This is what the Church has learned from her lived experience through the centuries. God has not remained distant from human suffering. He has descended into it. Completely. And it is also what Christians today who live in lands of war experience in an acute way, when everything outside collapses, prayer is no longer a moment of the day, it becomes the only place that holds.
Because in that silence filled with fear and hope one can touch with one’s hand a certainty, that the Lord is with me, He is my security and my salvation.
It is precisely this faith that Jesus proclaims a few steps from His passion, "He who sent me is with me, He has not left me alone."
God is the Father who accompanies and protects, not from trials, but within trials.
We too, a few steps from Holy Week, this Gospel calls us to renew our faith, to learn again to listen to the voice of the Lord, and to rediscover that deep peace that is born from a simple and absolute certainty, I am loved. My Lord is present, He lives with me every pain and every suffering, and He will raise me with Him from every death in which I find myself.
