Jn.7:8-10 – Go up to the feast yourselves; I am not going up to this feast, because My time has not yet fully arrived.” Now having said these things to them, He stayed in Galilee.
But when His brothers had gone up to the feast, then He Himself also went up, not publicly, but as though in secret.
In the beginning of John’s gospel he said that “the Word became flesh and tabernacled among us”. He was speaking of God revealed in a man called Jesus. He surely also had in mind this hidden picture that was so familiar to all of the Jews, the Feast of Tabernacles. In this annual celebration the Jews would create booths, something like a tent, to stay in for eight days remembering their forty years in the wilderness. This whole passage speaks of Jesus being hidden away until His time would come. It also speaks of us as Christians, hidden away in our humility until the time when the glory of God will be revealed in us. Here is how Augustine describes this.
“At the present time, then, before we come to the land of promise, namely, the eternal kingdom, we are in the wilderness in tabernacles. Those who acknowledge these things are in tabernacles; for it was destined that some would acknowledge this. That person who understands that he is a stranger in this world is, as it were, in a tabernacle. That person understands that he is traveling in a foreign country when he sees himself sighing for his native land. But while the body of Christ is in tabernacles, Christ is in tabernacles. But at that time he was so secretly and not out in the open. For as yet the shadow obscured the light. When the light came, the shadow was removed. Christ was in secret: he was there in the feast of tabernacles, but hidden. At the present time, when these things are already made known, we acknowledge that we are journeying in the wilderness. If we recognize it, then we are in the wilderness.”
So today we are hidden away as Christians. We are ignored and looked down on by the world like the Jews were, but the day of the manifestation of the children of God is coming near. We too may be wandering through the wilderness of this world but we don’t go on alone. Christ is with us and He is in us. We may be in humble tabernacles of clay but the glory of God will be put on full display in us at His return.