“Master, show us the Father, and that will be enough for us.”
If Jesus had only been a prophet or a teacher this would have been his greatest task, to show others God as one pointing to another. In that case, he himself would step aside so that the disciples could rest in the Father alone. Philip was correct in intuiting that Jesus could reveal the Father. But he was wrong in expecting this revelation to be something other than Jesus himself.
Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you for so long a time
and you still do not know me, Philip?
Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.
Philip did not yet realize that Jesus was so united to the Father that to truly know Jesus would mean knowing his Father also. In human terms, children do bear the likeness of their parents to varying degrees. Yet Jesus was related to the Father as "the refulgence of his glory, the very imprint of his being" (see Hebrews 1:3). At a basic level we might be tempted to assume that this meant that the Father was the same sort of being as Jesus. But Jesus was revealing something deeper, that he was in fact one in being with the Father, without losing his own identity in the unity.
Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?
The words that I speak to you I do not speak on my own.
The Father who dwells in me is doing his works.
In himself Jesus revealed the interpenetration of love between the Father and the Son. He was saying something that was not only a revelation of their unity of substance, but also about the way that looking at Jesus revealed the relation that existed within that unity.
Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me
Jesus lived in a continuous obedience to the Father, loving what the Father loved for the sake of the Father. He lived in continual dependence on the providential care of the Father with absolute confidence in the Father's plan for his life. He relied on the Father so entirely that his life could not help but reveal him. If the Father was not who he was the life of Jesus too would be rendered unintelligible. It was only precisely because everything Jesus had was from the Father and in turn offered back to the Father that Jesus revealed the Father so completely. It was really true that seeing Jesus was in a spiritual way was a vision of the Father himself, not only a unity of the divine nature considered abstractly or as a static idea, but also because of the love, individually expressed, in which they nevertheless remained perfectly united.
Are we not also tempted, however, to ask, "Show us the Father?" We have been with Jesus perhaps for a long time and yet have we really allowed him to make the Father known to us in the way that he desires? The belief is important because fundamental to becoming like Jesus, to becoming Christlike, is entering into his own relationship with the Father. We too are meant to live lives that make sense only if what Jesus said about himself and the Father is true.
Amen, amen, I say to you,
whoever believes in me will do the works that I do,
and will do greater ones than these,
because I am going to the Father.
We need faith to receive the word of God and to do the good works that God prepared for us in advance. We need faith because on our own apart from that grace we aren't disposed to live as his disciples.
When the Jews saw the crowds, they were filled with jealousy
His revelation will always impinge on our pride and selfishness. It will force us to reconsider our priorities, to decide whether we will be jealous of the prerogatives he claims in our lives, or whether we will instead choose to experience the freedom that comes when that pride and selfishness is finally surrendered.
Faith that Jesus is in the Father and that the Father is in Jesus, and faith that we can share in that relationship, is how we can become disciples who are so convinced and convicted of the truth that we it becomes the fundamental motivating force in our lives. We will lose concern for the rewards and consequences of merely human social and political structures and become true missionaries and evangelists. When we believe, speak, and act on the word of God we will experience the promises contained within it.
So they shook the dust from their feet in protest against them
and went to Iconium.
The disciples were filled with joy and the Holy Spirit.
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