John’s Gospel spends a lot of time with Jesus identifying himself with God the Father.  For the most part, his claims to the intimate closeness that he has with the Father confuses the disciples.  I wonder if this type of talk confuses us as well.

“If you know me, then you will also know my Father.
From now on you do know him and have seen him.”
Philip said to Jesus,
“Master, show us the Father, and that will be enough for us.”
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.
How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?
Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?   (Jn 14:7-14)

What is the point of this back and forth, identity puzzle that Jesus spends too much time and energy in trying to get the disciples to understand?  It has to be more than some type of metaphysical pondering.  What is its significance?

In looking at Jesus’ response to Philip’s request to be shown the Father, the inter-spiritual Catholic mystic, Raimon Panikkar, claims that these scriptural texts are intended to radically revise our notion of God as separate, and more importantly inaccessible.[i]  Panikkar points out that if we look closely at how Jesus responds to Jesus, we will get a hint as to what this is all about.  When Philip asks to see the Father, Jesus’ reply is “Have I been with you so for so long a time and you still do not know me, Philip?”  Jesus does not say, “…and you still don’t know him (the Father).”  Instead, he says you still don’t know me.  As Panikkar concludes, this is another way of saying, “ after all this time, you then have not seen me.”[ii]

This is ultimately not only a question about the relationship between the Son and the Father, but also it points directly to our relationship to or in God as well.  This is a question of accessibility.  Jesus as the Son of the Father, is saying that he and the Father are one, not in the sense that he is the same as the Father, but he is united by something that goes beyond an individual identification, specifically an identification based upon pure relation.  The relationship between the Father and the Son is unbreakable – it actually identifies the Father and the Son through the relationship.  As Panikkar points out, the Father cannot be the Father without the Son, and likewise, the Son cannot be a Son with the Father.  Although different, not identical, the relationship itself constitutes their entire ‘being.’[iii]

This is radical in that it flies in the face of how we normally operate within the subject-object way of identifying things and even people.  We normally operate in that fashion of “I am this individual and you are that individual.”  This is the subject/object split to which the western mind defaults.  When we do this, the identity through difference distinction relegates any relatedness to a secondary status.  In doing this, accessibility is called into question because of the sense of an ever-growing gap that seems unbridgeable.  If we begin with the relatedness as the very source of our identity, then accessibility is here already and beyond measure.  We don’t have to go anywhere to get related, we are already in the relation. 

So what is Jesus trying to point out to Philip and the disciples in saying that, if they cannot see and hear the Father in him (Jesus), then they really cannot see and hear Jesus?  Perhaps it is that the Father and the Son are just that close – inseparable yet distinct, a flow of relationship kept open by the Spirit itself (the Trinity).  They have complete and infinitely full access to each other by the relationship because it is the source of their being. 

This is important to us as disciples, because we are also caught up in that relatedness, yet we don’t realize it perhaps. More than just caught up, it is our source as well.  However, when we don’t see our connection in Christ, here specified as how the Son is the filiation (read family) generated by the Father, we don’t see that we too are in that family – the Holy Trinity family.  We too are being addressed by God, like the Son, to participate in the works of the Father that generate, or give birth to more and more.  God’s generation is Life ongoing and always more.  Panikkar calls this radical relativity wherein what I am and what you are is only in relation to another.[iv]  And this is the Spirit working as the relatedness!

Amen, amen, I say to you,
whoever believes in me will do the works that I do,
and will do greater ones than these. 

So, it’s not just that the pure relation of the Father and the Son in the Spirit means direct accessibility, but also it carries a responsibility to participate to the fullest extent of that accessibility.    The kicker is that we will do greater works than the ones Jesus performed. In a word, we will do more, life will grow more!  That can sound intimidating perhaps, but perhaps it is intended to underline the infinite expansiveness of the Incarnation.  It’s not just about Jesus.  It’s about the divine-making creativity simultaneously becoming fully human, which carries with it the task of continuing the incarnation and creation.

This is another facet of the Easter mystery, accessing the always available radical relatedness or relativity that is our divine inheritance as sons and daughters.[v]  Just as Christ came not to so much to teach doctrines, but to communicate life (as received from the Father), so we must communicate this same life that we have received through the utterly unsubstitutable voice that we each have been given in the Divine access.[vi]

And whatever you ask in my name, I will do,
so that the Father may be glorified in the Son.
If you ask anything of me in my name, I will do it

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[i] Raimon Panikkar, CHRISTOPHANY: The Fullness of Man (ORBIS Books:  2004), 109.

[ii] Ibid., 108.

[iii] Ibid, 111.

[iv] Ibid, 113-114.

[v] Ibid., xxi.  Panikkar would insist on the term MAN instead of human, to point up his contention that the fullness of MAN is not the same as human fullness, precisely because the complete man is divinized. 

[vi] Ibid., 116.