Show us the Father

Show us the Father, and that will be enough for us.

No matter who you are or where you come from, one thing is true about you, you long to see and know your heavenly Father.  It is a deep craving, so deep, in fact, that some of us do not even know it is there.  But that is how God has made us with a built in desire for him,  so that we would feel moved to try to find him.

God throne is in heaven

For many people, though, God seems too otherworldly to get to know.  His throne is in heaven, and we live on earth.  His thoughts are so high, and ours seem so earthbound.  We perceive clues about him through scientific discoveries or through the beauty of art, but these are just observations, not a relationship.  Can we really know him who stretched out the universe?

The answer is yes.  We can, and we already do know him because we know Jesus.  As we proclaim every Sunday at Mass, Jesus is “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God.”

His disciples did not know

The disciples did not know that yet. That is why Philip asked Jesus to show them the Father.  Mayb they thought Jesus would give them some new insight or, even better, a brief glimpse of his glory.  they did not realize that the Father was already revealing himself through Jesus.  How happy they must have been when they finally understood that God had been with them all the time through his Son!

We do know the Father, because we know Jesus.  And as it is with anyone else, we can grow to know him deeper still.  This does not mean that we always have to discover something brand new about our Father, although that could happen.  He has a way of challenging our assumptions about things.  Usually it means that he shows us something we already know about him, like how much he loves us or how glorious he is, but he lets us experience it in a deeper way.

Is not it amazing?  No matter how close to God we grow over the years, there is always more to learn.  There’s always more to experience.

May the prayer of Philip echo in our own hearts.

-word among us