When we look at today’s Gospel, we hear the Apostles asking Jesus to show them the Father. They don’t quite understand. Jesus responds, “No one comes to the Father, except through me. If you know me, then you will also know my Father.” If we pause and look at Jesus’ life, we see an unbroken connection to His relationship with the Father. From age 12 (according to the Scriptures) until the moment He dies, Jesus reveals the intimacy shared with this Person. Both are caught up in love with each other. Both are caught up in the look of love — the gaze of love, eternally. The Father begets the Son, who then returns this act of self-gift with His own gaze, both eternally. It is that eternal gaze that walked with Christ every step of the way during His time on earth. The Scriptures give us glimpses of what lies beyond. “This is my Beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.” “I give you praise Father . . . Abba, Father.” “When you pray, say Our Father . . .”
Into the Divine Union
When we look at Jesus Christ, we are carried into the divine union between Father and Son. Christ reveals the invisible. He is the face of the Father. We cannot see the Father, but we can and do know Jesus. “God so loved the world that He sent His only Son so that anyone who believes in Him may not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). Christ came to tell us how good this Father is.
St. John Paul II, in his general audience on July 8, 1987, spoke to this unity between Father and Son when he said: “The New Testament is completely marked by the light of this Gospel truth. The Son is the reflection of the Father’s glory, he is “the very stamp of his nature” (Heb 1:3). He is the “image of the invisible God” (Col 1:15). He is the epiphany of God. When he became man, taking on “the form of a servant” and “becoming obedient unto death” (cf. Phil 2:7-8), at the same time he became for all those who accepted his teaching “the way”— the way to the Father, whereby he is “the truth and the life” (Jn 14:6)”.
Prayer
This leaves one option: prayer. Prayer must be the occasion to rise and begin again. It must then be the place to draw us into this intimacy. It is there that Christ awaits. There, Christ calls and seeks each of us out. It is there that He will love us and bring us to this place He has prepared for us. “And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back again and take you to myself, so that where I am you also may be.”
Christ desires us to share this intimacy with His Father. Let us be formed by Him. “Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me, or else, believe because of the works themselves. 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” (Jn 14:11-12).
