In this morning’s gospel Jesus has an encounter with people who shared a very particular perspective, and a perspective very different from his own. As we know throughout the gospels, he is pursued by the Jewish lawyers, Scribes and Pharisees, who are doing everything they can to try and trip him up.

And in this morning’s encounter it says they “gathered round him”, words which we could perhaps better interpret as encircling him, because the particular Greek verb used by St John was the word that they used to describe for example when an army encircles a besieged city. It was a military term.

And so the Jewish authorities encircled him, and you can imagine the group of them forming a kind of pincer movement around him. And as we hear in the gospel, they ask him, actually, a very straight-forward question: “How long are you going to keep us in suspense? Just tell us very plainly, are you the Messiah, or are you not?” And I think Jesus gives them a very straight-forward answer: “I have already told you, but you didn’t believe me. Look at the things I’ve done, all in the name of my Father. My actions speak louder than words”. But then he goes on. “The trouble is”, he says, “that you are incapable of hearing, because you are not sheep of my flock”.

Or as the very gritty, ultra-modern translation of the Bible, the ‘Word on the Streets’, has it, “You wouldn’t recognise God if he were standing in front of you.”