Lent Day 4 | 40 to Life

Hello Redeemer family, I'm the reverend Grace Rigby. Welcome back to our 40 to Life daily reflections. Today is the fourth day of Lent. 

This reflection is inspired from the Gospel lesson appointed for today’s Daily Office, John 17: 25-26, which reads: “Righteous Father, the world does not know you, but I know you; and these know that you have sent me. I made your name known to them, and I will make it known, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.” 

These verses remind me of one of my favorite sitcoms, Friends, which is a show about six young adults navigating friendships, romantic relationships, and careers in New York City. The particular scene that comes to mind takes place when two of the friends begin dating each other in secret. Slowly, more friends in their circle begin to find out and what results is a game of cat and mouse: the friends, who discover that their two friends are in a relationship, do all that they can to force the couple to come clean and reveal that they have been in a relationship for months. But the couple soon begin to realize what is going on and so they start to play along… and at one point, one of the friends named Phoebe exclaims, “[But] they don’t know, that we know, they know, we know!” 

This confusing and yet hilarious statement is all about knowing. Who knows? What do they know? How do they know it? We see the importance of knowing in the verses I read earlier, which included the verb “to know” five times. This scene takes place at the conclusion of Jesus’ prayer for the disciples at the Last Supper. To paraphrase, Jesus says, “God, people do not know you, but I know you, and the people I’m at dinner with know that you sent me. They now know about you because of me because I made you known to them.” Jesus acts as a kind of broker of information between God and the world. And this begs the question why? Well as Jesus says, “So that the love with which you have loved me may be in them.” That is to say, so that all of us may know the love of God. This is a beautiful and powerful thing.

It makes me wonder, where have you known the love of God in your life? How did you know it? What did it feel like? How might you help others know the love of God? 

The Rev. Grace M. Rigby 

Associate Rector

The Episcopal Church of the Redeemer, Midlothian