I believe what the Bible says of itself, that it is God speaking to us. And because I’m convinced the Almighty is never superfluous, I find myself drawn with curiosity to passages containing words that don’t at first glance seem necessary. Over the years, I’ve learned that these are usually designed to attract our attention and reveal rich meaning when carefully considered.
John 10:22 and 23 contain one of these. They open a section describing a confrontation of Jesus by the Jewish leaders that took place about two and a half months after his parable of the Good Shepherd. They provide us with the time of year, location, reason for his being there, and a description of the weather. That’s the one that gets me. Why do we need to know what the weather was like?
I’ll come back to that in a minute, but first let’s note that this showdown took place in Solomon’s porch, a covered, outer corridor on the east side of the temple complex. But it would also become the meeting hall of the first Christians following the birth of the church on the Day of Pentecost. And I think it’s super cool to contemplate that Jesus would so thoroughly triumph over his opposition that this location where the Jewish elite tried to rhetorically and literally ambush him would become the fountainhead of his gospel’s global triumph as his followers took the good news from there to the ends of the earth.
The text also informs us that this event occurred during the Feast of Dedication which was celebrated in mid-December. That lets us know when Jesus was there, but it also explains part of the reason why. This feast was an annual commemoration of the cleansing of the temple by the Maccabees in 167 B.C. and the restoration of worship there after it had been very purposefully desecrated by Antiochus Epiphanes. It was an event worth celebrating for sure, but this was not one of the feasts prescribed by God in the Old Testament and requiring a Jerusalem pilgrimage. So why did Jesus visit the temple during that time and why is his attendance noted?
I think he was using the occasion of this celebration of temple-cleansing as a not-so-subtle announcement that he would soon be offering his life’s blood as the ultimate agent of cleansing for all the ways sin has desecrated our lives so that he could make it possible for us to become temples of the Holy Spirit as described in 1 Corinthians 6:19.
And that brings me back to the weather report.
The fixed date of the Feast of Dedication already established the time of year as the month of December, so why add the phrase, “it was winter,” unless God wanted us to notice something else?
The Greek word translated as “winter” here literally means storm or tempest. So, the Bible is calling attention to the fact that Jesus had entered Jerusalem that day during a rainstorm. I’m sure you’ve noticed that good novelists often set the mood for dark scenes in their stories by using vivid descriptions of bad weather. And although I’m certainly not equating this passage from the Gospel of John with a work of fiction, I do think God has included this phrase to evoke a feeling.
As Jesus’ earthly ministry was about to enter its final months, I think God intended us to engage our spiritual imaginations at this point by visualizing him in an open portico, exposed to a cold rain, bracing for another round of harassment by the religious elite, but advancing steadily toward the cross.
It’s way too easy to read the Bible dispassionately like a textbook. But this simple phrase calls to us, inviting us to reconnect with the narrative in a deeper, more emotional way and to feel something we may have lost touch with – gratitude.
As we read the account of our savior moving through the gathering spiritual storm toward our redemption, let’s not forget that although fully God, he was also truly human and experiencing all of this from that perspective. And let’s allow this simple image of Jesus in the rain to fill our hearts with renewed reverence and grateful worship.