Show Us the Father

But even then there were some who did not understand. Thomas, who stayed unconvinced so long, said, “Lord, we do not know where you are going, so how can we know the way?” Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you had known me, you would have known my Father too; but from now on you do know him, and you have seen him.” And now we come to Philip. Stirred up by the hope of seeing the Father, and not understanding in what sense he was to take “seeing the Father,” he says, “Show us the Father, and that is enough for us.” Then the Lord answered him, “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me?” [a]

Now, who is it that he says they ought to have known? That is the one point at issue. Was it as the Father that they ought to have known him, or as the Son? If as the Father, then Praxeas must tell us how Christ, who had been with them so long, could ever have been — I will not say understood to be, but even supposed to be — the Father. He is clearly marked out for us in all the Scriptures: in the Old Testament as the Christ of God, in the New Testament as the Son of God. That is how he was foretold long ago, and that is how he was declared even by Christ himself — yes, and by the Father himself, who openly acknowledges him from heaven as his Son and glorifies him as his Son: “This is my beloved Son”; “I have glorified him, and I will glorify him again.” That is how his disciples believed in him, and that is what the Jews refused. And that is how he wanted them to take him every time he named the Father, gave the Father the first place, and honored the Father.

That being so, it was not the Father they were ignorant of after all that long time together; it was the Son. And so the Lord, while scolding Philip for not knowing who it was they were ignorant of, wanted to be acknowledged as the very one he had just reproached them for not knowing after so long — in a word, as the Son. And now we can see in what sense he said, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” — in the same sense in which he had said earlier, “I and the Father are one.” Why? Because “I came out from the Father and have come into the world”; and “I am the way: no one comes to the Father except through me”; and “No one can come to me unless the Father draws him”; and “All things have been handed over to me by the Father”; and “As the Father gives life, so the Son gives life too”; and again, “If you had known me, you would have known my Father too.”

In all these passages he had shown himself to be the Father’s deputy, the one through whom even the Father could be seen in his works, and heard in his words, and recognized in the Son’s carrying out of the Father’s words and deeds. The Father himself was invisible, as Philip had learned in the law and ought to have remembered at that moment: “No one shall see God and live.” So Philip is corrected for wanting to see the Father as though he were something visible, and is taught that the Father becomes visible only in the Son, and by the Son’s mighty works — not by any showing of his own person.

If he really meant the Father to be understood as the same as the Son when he said, “Whoever sees me sees the Father,” why does he add immediately afterward, “Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?” He ought rather to have said, “Do you not believe that I am the Father?” Why else dwell on the point so hard, unless to clear up the very thing he wanted people to understand — that he was the Son? And when he says, “Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father in me?” he leans on the question all the harder for this very reason: that after saying “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father,” he should not be taken for the Father. He had never wished to be regarded that way. He had always professed himself the Son, and to have come from the Father.

And then he set the joining of the two persons in the clearest light, so that no one would go looking to see the Father as if he were separately visible, and so that the Son might be taken as the one who stands for the Father. Even so, he did not leave out an explanation of how the Father was in the Son and the Son in the Father. “The words I speak to you,” he says, “are not my own” — because in fact they were the Father’s words — “but the Father who lives in me does the works.” So it is by his mighty works, and by the words of his teaching, that the Father who lives in the Son makes himself visible: by the very words and works in which he stays in the Son, and through the one in whom he stays. And what belongs to each of the two persons separately is plain from this very thing, that he says, “I am in the Father, and the Father is in me.”

So he adds: “Believe —” Believe what? That I am the Father? I do not find it written that way. What I find is, “that I am in the Father and the Father in me; or else believe me because of the works themselves” — meaning the works by which the Father showed himself to be in the Son: not to a man’s eyes, but to his understanding.

What comes after Philip’s question, and the Lord’s whole handling of it right through to the end of John’s Gospel, keeps giving us statements of the same kind, which distinguish the Father and the Son, each with what belongs to him. Then there is the Paraclete as well, whom he promises to ask the Father for, and to send from heaven after he had gone up to the Father. He is called “another Paraclete,” it is true; but in what way he is another, we have already shown. “He will take what is mine,” Christ says, just as Christ himself took what was the Father’s. So the connection of the Father in the Son, and of the Son in the Paraclete, makes three who hold together and are yet distinct from one another. These three are one thing, not one person, in the sense of the saying, “I and the Father are one”: a oneness of substance, not a singleness of number. [h]

Run through the whole Gospel and you will find that the one you take to be the Father — the one described as acting for the Father, though you, of course, suppose that since “the Father is the vinedresser” he must have been down here on the earth — is acknowledged once again by the Son to be in heaven, when he “lifted up his eyes” to it and put his disciples into the Father’s safekeeping. And in that other Gospel we have a plain disclosure of the Son’s distinctness from the Father: “My God, why have you forsaken me?” And again, in the third Gospel: “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”

But even if we had none of these passages, there is evidence enough after his resurrection and his glorious victory over death. Every restraint of his humbled state had now been taken away; if such a thing were possible at all, he could have shown himself as the Father to so faithful a woman, when she came up to touch him out of love — not out of curiosity, and not with Thomas’s disbelief. But he did not. Jesus says to her, “Do not touch me, for I have not yet gone up to my Father. But go to my brothers” — and even in this he proves himself to be the Son, for if he had been the Father he would have called them his children, not his brothers — “and tell them: I am going up to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.”

Now, does that mean: I am going up as the Father to the Father, and as God to God? Or as the Son to the Father, and as the Word to God? And why does this Gospel, at its very close, say why these things were written at all, if not — to use its own words — “so that you may believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God”? So whenever you take statements out of this Gospel and use them to prove that the Father and the Son are the same, imagining they serve your case, you are working against the declared purpose of the Gospel. These things were certainly not written so that you may believe that Jesus Christ is the Father, but that he is the Son.

Besides Philip’s conversation and the Lord’s answer to it, the reader will notice that we have run right through John’s Gospel to show that many other passages, plain enough in their sense, both before that chapter and after it, agree exactly with that one prominent saying. It has to be read in line with all those other places rather than against them — and in line with its own natural sense as well. [q]

I will not make much use here of the support of the other Gospels, which back up our belief by the account of the Lord’s birth. It is enough to note that the one who was to be born of a virgin is announced in so many words by the angel himself as the Son of God: “The Spirit of God will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; and so the holy thing that is born of you will be called the Son of God.” They will want to pick a quarrel over even this passage, but the truth will win. Of course, they say, the Son of God is God, and the power of the Most High is the Most High. And they do not hesitate to slip in what would have been written down if it were true. Who was the angel so afraid of that he did not say plainly, “God will come upon you, and the Most High will overshadow you”? By saying “the Spirit of God” — although the Spirit of God is God — and by not naming God outright, he meant us to understand that portion of the whole Godhead which was about to pass over into the name of “the Son.”

The Spirit of God in this passage must be the same as the Word. Just as, when John says, “The Word was made flesh,” we understand the Spirit too under the name of the Word, so here we recognize the Word under the name of the Spirit. For the Spirit is the substance of the Word, and the Word is the working of the Spirit, and the two are one and the same. If the Spirit is not the Word, and the Word the Spirit, then John must mean one being when he speaks of him as “having been made flesh,” and the angel another when he announces him as “about to be born.”

For just as the Word of God is not the very one whose Word he is, so the Spirit — even though he is called God — is not the very one whose Spirit he is said to be. Nothing that belongs to something else is the very same thing as that to which it belongs. Clearly, when anything comes out of a person and so belongs to him, since it comes from him, it may well be exactly the same in quality as the one it comes from and belongs to. And so the Spirit is God, and the Word is God, because they come from God; and yet neither is the very one from whom he comes. Now what is God from God, although it is a thing that really exists, still cannot be God himself in the exclusive sense. It is God so far as it is of the same substance as God himself, and is a thing that really exists, and is a portion of the whole.

Much more, then, will “the power of the Most High” not be the Most High himself — because power is not a thing that exists in its own right, as Spirit is; in the same way that God’s wisdom and God’s providence are not God. These are not substances; they are the accidents of a particular substance. Power happens to belong to the Spirit, but power cannot itself be the Spirit. So these things, whatever they are — the Spirit of God, and the Word, and the Power — were bestowed on the virgin, and what is born of her is the Son of God.

He testifies himself, in those other Gospels too, that this is what he was from his very boyhood: “Did you not know that I must be about my Father’s business?” Satan likewise knew him to be this in the temptations: “If you are the Son of God.” The demons acknowledge him as this as well: “We know who you are — the Holy Son of God.” He himself worships the one he calls his Father. When Peter acknowledges him as “the Christ, the Son of God,” he does not deny the relationship. He rejoices in spirit when he says to the Father, “I thank you, Father, that you have hidden these things from the wise and the clever.” He states as well that no one knows the Father except his Son. He promises that, as the Son of the Father, he will acknowledge before his Father those who acknowledge him, and deny those who deny him. He tells a parable about a mission to the vineyard — the Son’s, not the Father’s — sent after so many servants, killed by the tenants, and avenged by the Father. He does not know the last day and hour, which the Father alone knows. He grants the kingdom to his disciples, as he says it was granted to him by the Father. He has the power to ask the Father, if he chooses, for legions of angels to help him. He cries out that God has forsaken him. He commends his spirit into the Father’s hands.

After his resurrection he promises his disciples, as a pledge, that he will send them what his Father promised. And last of all he commands them to baptize into the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit — not into one single person. And indeed it is not once only but three times that we are immersed into the three persons, at each separate mention of their names.