“Omnia tempus habent”: a time for everything, the question at Caesarea, and the hour of Cana

By Prof. Dr. Daniel C. Afonso · Updated 19 October 2026

Omnia tempus habent, et suis spatiis transeunt universa sub caelo. […] Vos autem quem me esse dicitis?
Eccl 3:1 and Lk 9:20

Friday of the Twenty-Fifth Week in Ordinary Time brings together the most famous poem of Ecclesiastes and the decisive question of the Gospel of Luke. Qoheleth lists fourteen pairs of opposite times and concludes that God has placed in man’s heart the succession of the ages without giving him the key to understand it. Jesus, after praying alone, asks the disciples who they say He is, receives the right answer from Peter, and immediately corrects it with the announcement of the Passion. One text says there is a time for everything. The other shows that recognizing the Messiah is not the same as accepting His time.

I. The first reading: Eccl 3:1-11

The poem is built with relentless symmetry. “Everything has its time, everything has its hour under heaven” (v. 1), and the pairs follow: to be born and to die, to plant and to uproot, to kill and to heal, to tear down and to build, to weep and to laugh, to mourn and to dance, to keep silent and to speak, to love and to hate, war and peace. There is no moral preference here. The sage is not saying that it is better to laugh than to weep; he is saying that both have their hour and that the hour is not chosen by us.

The true center of the passage comes at the end and is one of the densest sentences in the Old Testament: God “has made all things appropriate to their time and has placed in the heart of man the succession of the ages, without his being able to comprehend the beginning and the end of God’s work” (v. 11). The Hebrew term translated as succession of the ages is olam, which also means eternity or duration without end. God placed in man the sense of the whole, and denied him the vision of the whole. From this springs human restlessness, which is not a defect to be corrected but the mark of a creature made for more than what it can reach.

II. The Gospel: Lk 9:18-22

Luke introduces the scene with a note that only he provides: “one day, Jesus was praying alone, with only the disciples with him” (v. 18). The great questions, in this Gospel, always arise from prayer. And the question comes in two stages, first “who do the crowds say that I am?”, then, without transition, “and you, who do you say that I am?” (v. 20).

The answers of the crowd are the same ones Herod had heard a few verses earlier: John the Baptist, Elijah, one of the ancient prophets. Peter breaks the series: “you are the Messiah of God.” And then the unexpected happens. Jesus strictly forbids them to tell this to anyone, and explains why by adding the first announcement of the Passion: “the Son of Man must suffer greatly, be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, be killed, and rise on the third day” (v. 22).

The order of silence does not protect a secret; it protects the meaning. The word Messiah, spoken at that moment and in that setting, would evoke a political liberator. Before it could be pronounced in public, it had to be corrected by the cross. Peter got the title right and did not yet know what it contained.

III. The time that is not anticipated

The two readings say, by different paths, that man does not control God’s calendar. Qoheleth observes it from the side of wisdom, looking at the cycles of life. Jesus enforces it from the side of revelation, postponing the announcement until it can be understood without misunderstanding.

This has a spiritual application that is learned slowly. There are truths that are possessed before they are understood, and to announce them too soon is to distort them. There are sufferings that cannot be explained at the moment they happen. And there are consolations that arrive only after the hour has passed. What God placed in the human heart, according to Qoheleth, was the sense of the whole without its map, and the life of faith consists largely in bearing that disproportion without resolving it artificially.

IV. Mary, the one who kept the times without forcing them

If there is anyone in Scripture who lived all of Qoheleth’s pairs without anticipating any of them, it is the mother of Jesus. She had a time to dance, when Elizabeth proclaimed her blessed and she responded with the Magnificat (Lk 1:46-55). She had a time to keep silent, during the thirty years in Nazareth that the Gospels sum up in a single line. She had a time to weep, standing by the cross (Jn 19:25). She did not confuse the hours, and that is what distinguishes faith from religious impatience.

The Gospel of John preserves the scene in which this is seen best. At Cana, Mary notices the lack and presents it: “they have no wine” (Jn 2:3). The Son’s answer is apparently a brake: “my hour has not yet come” (Jn 2:4). She neither insists nor argues. She tells the servants, “do whatever he tells you” (Jn 2:5), and leaves the scene. She presented the need and handed over the time. It is the exact definition of Christian intercession, and it is the opposite of the prayer that demands a deadline.

As for the question “and you, who do you say that I am?”, Mary answered it before it was asked and without using titles. She answered with “let it be done to me according to your word” (Lk 1:38), which is a confession of faith in the form of availability. The Council recalls that she faithfully preserved her union with her Son even to the cross (LG 58), which means that her answer already included what Peter could not yet hear. She said yes to the Messiah before knowing the price, and kept saying yes after learning it.

Friday of the Twenty-Fifth Week therefore leaves a task that is not intellectual. It is not a matter of discovering God’s plan ahead of time. It is a matter of recognizing the hour that is passing and not exchanging it for another.