Saturday of the Fourth Week of Easter Yrs 1 and 2 2025
Easter • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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· 12 viewsWe talk about seeing being believing in terms of sense experience. So we want to see God. Jesus says “You have seen God when you see me, for the Father is in me.” He is opening to us the mystery of the Trinity so that we can with inner sight grasp the unity in what we see with outer sight. Then he goes further and says that his going to the Father will draw those committed to him into the divine love union or perichoresis and out of this love union we will love like God and see what the Father wants to do and ask in union with Jesus so God will be glorified in the son. This is the spiritual experience that we grow in for a lifetime. The examples of Catherine of Sienna and Judy’s psychologist friend come to mind as people who live it.
Notes
Transcript
Title
Title
You Have Seen the Father
Outline
Outline
Seeing is believing
Seeing is believing
That is a common saying. We trust our sensory experience more than we trust reports or instruction manuals. Even living in a world of AI generated images including in 3D (including the AI generated self-circulated image of Mr. Trump as Pope) has not shaken that trust, for it is a survival instinct.
As a result it is no surprise that Philip says, “Show us the Father.” People have often wanted to see God either to assure themselves of his reality or to exercise some ability to influence him.
Jesus says, “You have seen.”
Jesus says, “You have seen.”
You have seen, but cannon see deeply enough to realize “I am in the Father and the Father is in me.” “You have heard, but cannot get that I truly speaking and the Father in me is one with me in my speaking.” “I have done works - he does not specify which - and the Father in me has been doing those works.” In other words, “You saw that person of the Trinity who became flesh, but cannot grasp that the whole Trinity is in that one divine-human person.” This takes believing, for the Trinity is beyond sense-experience since God is being itself. “Just believe because of what you can see, the works.”
Because you believe in me you will experience such works from the inside
Because you believe in me you will experience such works from the inside
The basic premise is that of trust in or commitment to Jesus who in his going to the Father draws us into his oneness with the Father because of our oneness with him. Then “you will ask” not what you will, but “in my name,” expressing my will and it will happen, not to make you a big cheese, but “so that the Father may be glorified in the Son.”
Sisters, there is a world of spiritual experience packed into this passage
Sisters, there is a world of spiritual experience packed into this passage
Think of a Catherine of Sienna who did not set out to influence popes, but whose closeness with Jesus led to her knowing that God wanted to be glorified through Jesus in the pope’s return to Italy. So she went.
Think of a psychologist friend of my wife’s who quit his practice and first spent time caring for street kids in Kenya and now travels the Middle East with eyes open looking for what the Father wants to do through Jesus and prays for a shopkeeper, a taxi driver, a policeman in the name of Jesus and sees them healed, offering them a short booklet or an Arabic New Testament afterwards.
They key is asking Jesus to open our eyes to see the Father in him and him in the Father and then letting him draw us into that vision of love and allowing that love to flow through us into the world so that we can see with his eyes and pray with his will for the Father to be glorified in the Son.
