Commentary on Acts 6:1-7; 1 Peter 2:4-9; John 14:1-12

The close identification of Jesus with God the Father is the over-riding theme of today’s Gospel passage. There is also a secondary and related emphasis on our identification with Jesus and his mission.

The context of the Gospel is Jesus’ long discourse with his disciples at the Last Supper. They are aware that Jesus is about to leave them. There is a heavy air of gloom and anxiety as the enemies of Jesus close in around him.

A call to trust
Encouraging words are spoken by Jesus to the Apostles:

Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me.

This is a call to total faith in the Father and in Jesus. It is a single act of trust, for to have faith in the one, is to have equal faith in the other. And, towards the end of the passage, Jesus appeals to the evidence of all they have seen him say and do.

Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me, but if you do not, then believe because of the works themselves.

The disciples cannot be too happy to hear that Jesus is about to leave them. It is no wonder that their hearts are “troubled”. This, in spite of the promise that Jesus is going away to “prepare a place” for them, that he will return to take them with him, “so that where I am, there you may be also.”

The Way
They should have no trouble understanding and accepting this. Jesus has now been with them for three years and has taught them continuously all during this time. They have seen him teaching and working among the people, and they are told:

…you know the way to the place where I am going.

Thomas, the man who likes to confront and the one with the very literal mind, protests:

Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?

He is clearly thinking in geographical terms. In fact, all Jesus’ words about going and coming are spoken on quite a different level of meaning altogether. However, we can be grateful to Thomas for drawing out of Jesus one of the great sayings of John’s Gospel:

I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

Here we see another “I AM” statement. It is obvious from all that has already been said that the Way of Jesus, all the coming and going, and the “places” which are being prepared are not to be understood in any literal or spatial sense. They are to be understood totally in terms of mutual relationships, i.e. the mutual relationships between Jesus, the Father and his followers. The ‘Way’ of Jesus, through his coming suffering and death, will end in the new and abundant life he wants for all his followers.

Where does the Way go?
To follow the Way of Jesus is not to ‘go’ anywhere. It is to become a special kind of person, a person whose whole being reflects the Truth and Life that Jesus reveals to us. It is to be a person who is totally identified with the vision and the values of Jesus. To be such a person is to be a person of Truth and Life.

Truth is here understood not in a purely intellectual sense. Truth here is that complete integrity and harmony which Jesus himself, revealed not only in what he said, but in the total manifestation of his life and person. Truth for Jesus was not just something he knew or accepted or believed in; truth for Jesus was what he was in his whole person: thoughts, feelings, actions, relationships. It was that total conformity between his inward self and his outward behaviour. For us to live Truth in that way is also to be fully alive, fully engaged and responding totally to that abundance of life which Jesus came to give us.

Truth and Life
And God the Father is, of course, also Truth and Life. But we go to God the Father through Jesus and we call Jesus the “Way” because he is the visible manifestation in human form of all that his Father is. It is this incarnation of the Father’s being in the human person of Jesus, a man “like us in all things except sin”, which makes him the accessible model for us to grow ever more in the likeness of our God and to experience to the full his love and life in us.

And so Jesus says quite logically,

If you know me, you will know my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.

Now it is the naïve Philip’s turn to interject:

Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.

It was the hope of every good Jew some day to see God face to face. Says Jesus (with a tinge of disappointment?),

Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?

Seeing God in Jesus
For, as Jesus continues, he is:

…in the Father and the Father is in [him].

However, this statement must be understood with some qualifications. Jesus is the Son of God and is one with the Father in all things. But to say that when we see Jesus we see God is both true and not altogether true. In his humanness, we see God in Jesus as:

…only a reflection, as in a mirror… (1 Cor 13:12)

And it is a dim reflection because of the veil of his humanness. But when he speaks, certainly it is God who speaks. When he heals, certainly God heals. But when Jesus died on the Cross, God also died? Surely not; God cannot die. The death of Jesus in his humanity was a sublime witness of the love and compassion of the Ever Living God.

Pale reflection
Jesus, in his humanity, is but the palest reflection of the infinite Truth, Goodness and Beauty of God. When we see Jesus, we see God, but there is much that we do not see. And so we speak of Jesus as the Way. We go through him to find the total reality of God. Only a few mystics have been given glimpses of the reality of God. It is a reality for which most of us will have to wait until after we have left this earth to understand. And it is important that we recognise this, because many people tend to speak rather loosely of the relationship between God the Father and Jesus. If we make Jesus, not the Way, but the End, we tremendously limit our understanding of God. Philip thought he knew Jesus very well, spending every day with him. Yet he had not come to recognise God in the words and works of Jesus, and so he did not really know Jesus.

God’s many dwelling places
Today, perhaps, our problem is not so much recognising God in Jesus. In fact, as mentioned, we can go too far in doing so. Our problem is that we fail to recognise God in our world and in the people around us.

At the beginning of today’s Gospel, Jesus says that there are many “dwelling places” in his Father’s house. We can understand this, of course, as ‘heaven’, but God’s dwelling is also the Church—every Christian community is a dwelling place of God. And indeed, each and every disciple who believes in Christ is a part of God’s Temple. There is now no longer for us a material Temple. Furthermore, as Paul told the Romans:

Ever since the creation of the world God’s eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been seen and understood through the things God has made. (Rom 1:20)

This is to say, that not only in Christian communities, but indeed in people everywhere and in the whole of our created environment, God’s presence is shouting out to us. The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote: “The world is charged with the grandeur of God”. Every little flower, every singing bird can say to us, “Who sees me sees the Father”.

The same works as Jesus—and even more
Lastly, Jesus has a word for us:

I tell you, the one who believes in me [and in my identity with the Father] will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father.

The Church and every member of every Christian community is called on to continue the mission of Jesus.

But how can we do greater works than Jesus? And how can we do them because Jesus is going to his Father? The Church and every Christian community is called on to continue the mission of Jesus. That is evident from the Acts of the Apostles onward. But doing more than he did? Yes! Because by leaving us for the Father, he passed his mandate on to us.

Continuing Jesus’ work
We can do more than Jesus not in terms of more spectacular signs, but rather because Jesus in his humanity here on earth was limited to a very small section of space and time. In his lifetime, he reached only a relatively small number of people. In fact, when he died, all he could show for all his preaching and miracles was a handful of women at the foot of the cross. Peter and the rest were nowhere to be seen. Strangely, it was only by his leaving us that the energy and life he brought was released. By his going, he set in motion a process by which his message—his Way of Truth and Life—could reach every corner of the world.

There are now very few places where Jesus’ message has not been heard. Moreover, the pope or some other religious leader, hooked up to satellites and the internet, can simultaneously reach literally billions of people. Jesus on earth could not do that.

Show the Way
But whether we are pope, bishop, priest, office worker, truck driver or stay-at-home parent, our duty is the same: to lead the people with whom we come in contact along the Way of Jesus—the Way of Truth and Life. By working together, we can do more than Jesus did; or rather, he does it through us. The gospel still needs to be preached with greater enthusiasm, with greater relevance, with greater integrity. As in Jesus’ day, the masses are calling out to be fed and we, the friends and companions of Jesus, have been called to continue to bring the Bread of Life to the world.

Jesus said:

…apart from me you can do nothing.

It is important for us to realise that the opposite is also largely true: without us, Jesus can do little in our world and in our time. This concept is beautifully illustrated through these words attributed to St Teresa of Ávila:

Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours.
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
compassion on this world,
yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,
yours are the eyes, you are his body.
Christ has no body now but yours,
no hands, no feet on earth but yours.
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
compassion on this world.
Christ has no body now on earth but yours.