Who is God? What is God? How can I see this God?
These are perhaps natural human questions to ask. On some level, we seek these answers. Once we know that there is a God, we seek to experience this God. But we also seek to know about this God. In today’s Gospel, Philip shows this when he says, “Master, show us the Father, and that will be enough for us.”
Let me see the Father. A basic longing. It reminds us of how Psalm 63 begins. “O God, you are my God— it is you I seek! For you my body yearns; for you my soul thirsts…”
In his exchange with Philip, Jesus gives us insight into how this Triune God works. And we continue to peel back the layers of what he has revealed. The Vatican II Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum, tells us, “In His goodness and wisdom God chose to reveal Himself and to make known to us the hidden purpose of His will (see Eph. 1:9) by which through Christ, the Word made flesh, man might in the Holy Spirit have access to the Father and come to share in the divine nature (see Eph. 2:18; 2 Peter 1:4).” And, “by this revelation then, the deepest truth about God and the salvation of man shines out for our sake in Christ, who is both the mediator and the fullness of all revelation.”
It is through Jesus that we know the Father. Jesus is the fullness of revelation. As Saint John of the Cross wrote, “In giving us his Son, his only Word (for he possesses no other), he spoke everything to us at once in this sole Word – and he has no more to say…”
He is also the mediator. God the Son took on a human nature. In his person, humanity touches divinity. It is through him that we are united to God.
This is what Jesus is telling Philip. Jesus himself is the manifestation of God to us. If we have seen him, we have seen the Father. It is through him that the Father makes himself known.
Through the Holy Spirit, we are united to Christ, our head in the Body of Christ. And we are brought to the Father. We enter the divine life of this Triune God and partake of the divine nature.
What a glorious and mysterious gift!