Jesus, Revealer of the Father
John 6:46 No one has seen the Father except the one who is from God; only he has seen the Father.
John 14:9 ¶ Jesus answered: “Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?
St. Paul tells us that humanity can infer through reason the existence and nature of God through observing His creation. St. Paul also tells us that there is a higher level of understanding and knowledge of God that comes from God himself – eg. Wisdom of God vs Wisdom of man.
Jesus is the embodiment of that wisdom and it is only through a relationship with Jesus, the Only Son of the Father, that we can enter into a revelation of the Father and thus come into relationship with the Father.
The Word of God Tells us that …
God is the creator of all that exists and there is no other.
God is a personal God, a God of relationships ( Father, Son, and Holy Spirit).
God is Love and He created us in order to express His Love directly to us.
God desires that we, his creation, through the freedom he gave us, freely respond to His Love.
God desires to express His Love by communicating and relating to mankind in a personal manner.
Mankind became separated from God through unbelief actualized by man’s disobedience.
Through this break in relationship humanity lost the ability to know God in a personal way.
Because of this break with God, man became spiritually dead to God.
God, in His Love, ordained from the beginning the means by which we are to be restored to his Love.
God, through the Son, became one of us , except for sin, and died to remove the barrier of sin and restore us to eternal life,that is, to a renewed relationship with Him.
It is the Father’s deliberate design, then, that only through a relationship with the Son will He reveal Himself to us.
An excerpt from the “Encyclical on Faith and Reason”
In this excerpt Pope John Paul II tells us about the type of Faith that rises above reason and delves into the topic: “Jesus the Revealer of the Father”..
( http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_15101998_fides-et-ratio_en.html )
7. Underlying all the Church’s thinking is the awareness that she is the bearer of a message which has its origin in God himself (cf. 2 Cor 4:1-2). The knowledge which the Church offers to man has its origin not in any speculation of her own, however sublime, but in the word of God which she has received in faith (cf. 1 Th 2:13). At the origin of our life of faith there is an encounter, unique in kind, which discloses a mystery hidden for long ages (cf. 1 Cor 2:7; Rom 16:25-26) but which is now revealed: “In his goodness and wisdom, God chose to reveal himself and to make known to us the hidden purpose of his will (cf. Eph 1:9), by which, through Christ, the Word made flesh, man has access to the Father in the Holy Spirit and comes to share in the divine nature”.(5) This initiative is utterly gratuitous, moving from God to men and women in order to bring them to salvation. As the source of love, God desires to make himself known; and the knowledge which the human being has of God perfects all that the human mind can know of the meaning of life.
8. Restating almost to the letter the teaching of the First Vatican Council’s Constitution Dei Filius, and taking into account the principles set out by the Council of Trent, the Second Vatican Council’s Constitution Dei Verbum pursued the age-old journey of understanding faith, reflecting on Revelation in the light of the teaching of Scripture and of the entire Patristic tradition. At the First Vatican Council, the Fathers had stressed the supernatural character of God’s Revelation. On the basis of mistaken and very widespread assertions, the rationalist critique of the time attacked faith and denied the possibility of any knowledge which was not the fruit of reason’s natural capacities. This obliged the Council to reaffirm emphatically that there exists a knowledge which is peculiar to faith, surpassing the knowledge proper to human reason, which nevertheless by its nature can discover the Creator. This knowledge expresses a truth based upon the very fact of God who reveals himself, a truth which is most certain, since God neither deceives nor wishes to deceive.(6)
9. The First Vatican Council teaches, then, that the truth attained by philosophy and the truth of Revelation are neither identical nor mutually exclusive: “There exists a twofold order of knowledge, distinct not only as regards their source, but also as regards their object. With regard to the source, because we know in one by natural reason, in the other by divine faith. With regard to the object, because besides those things which natural reason can attain, there are proposed for our belief mysteries hidden in God which, unless they are divinely revealed, cannot be known”.(7) Based upon God’s testimony and enjoying the supernatural assistance of grace, faith is of an order other than philosophical knowledge which depends upon sense perception and experience and which advances by the light of the intellect alone. Philosophy and the sciences function within the order of natural reason; while faith, enlightened and guided by the Spirit, recognizes in the message of salvation the “fullness of grace and truth” (cf. Jn 1:14) which God has willed to reveal in history and definitively through his Son, Jesus Christ (cf. 1 Jn 5:9; Jn 5:31-32).
10. Contemplating Jesus as revealer, the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council stressed the salvific character of God’s Revelation in history, describing it in these terms: “In this Revelation, the invisible God (cf. Col 1:15; 1 Tim 1:17), out of the abundance of his love speaks to men and women as friends (cf. Ex 33:11; Jn 15:14-15) and lives among them (cf. Bar 3:38), so that he may invite and take them into communion with himself. This plan of Revelation is realized by deeds and words having an inner unity: the deeds wrought by God in the history of salvation manifest and confirm the teaching and realities signified by the words, while the words proclaim the deeds and clarify the mystery contained in them. By this Revelation, then, the deepest truth about God and human salvation is made clear to us in Christ, who is the mediator and at the same time the fullness of all Revelation”.(8 )
