Feast of Saint Philip and Saint James, Apostles
I often hear people saying that they wonder why God doesn’t make his existence more obvious to people. Why is it that God often seems to be hidden from our sight? If God wants to be known, then why is it so hard for people to get to know God and to come to have faith? One of the themes in the gospel reading for today is that God has in fact done a great deal to reveal himself in the person of Jesus Christ.
The gospel passage (from John 14) tells the story of what Jesus told his disciples at the Last Supper. Philip asks Jesus to show them the Father. Jesus’ reply to Phillip is that if they have seen him they have seen the Father. What could Jesus mean by this? If Jesus is God, as we Christians believe, then by seeing Jesus they have seen God. Yet Jesus seems not to be pointing only to his divinity here. For he goes on to explain that he is in the Father and the Father is in him. It seems that he is saying that he—as the second person of the Trinity and as an incarnate human being—is participating fully in God’s life. He is divine because he is God, but he is also a man who has lived a life that is totally dedicated to the God the Father. When we get to know Jesus, we are getting to know what God is like, not just because Jesus is God but also because he is an example in human flesh of God’s love for us and for the entire world.
The gospel of John is very focused on the revelation of Jesus’ divinity through signs, focusing as it does on seven major signs or miracles that Jesus performs. In the reading for today, Jesus is telling the disciples that he expects that they will believe in him because of the signs he has done. The signs are evidence of Jesus’ divinity. Yet Jesus urges the disciples to look beyond these signs. He promises that they too will be able to do great things—namely by performing signs and wonders. And the Bible speaks of such signs and wonders performed by early Christians, above all in the book of Acts. But such signs and wonders remain external. Going deeper than this, Jesus in effect here is inviting his disciples to be like him by living as he lives. To love Jesus is to share in his life, to do what he commands.
So we who call ourselves followers of Jesus have the opportunity today to share in God’s life through our devotion to Jesus. If we have seen him, then we have seen God. On this feast of Saint Philip and Saint James we are reminded of two of Jesus’ disciples who took seriously his call to live as he lives. Let each of us pray for the grace to follow in the footsteps of the holy women and men who have gone before us in order to serve God and one another.
- Joel Schickel