The Purpose Of Our Celebration Series

Saturday of the Fourth Week of Easter 2023

When contemplating this reading from the fourteenth chapter of St. John’s Gospel, it is very important to realize that this is taken from Christ’s last prayer and teaching at the Last Supper, the beginning of Jesus’s own Passover. Jesus has just told his disciples that He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and that nobody comes to the Father except through Jesus. So to know the Father it is necessary to know Christ, and from that Passover on, they will know and see the Father.

Phillip’s question is, then, logical, but disturbing. “Show us the Father and that will be enough for us.” It’s true. We are made for union with God, with the whole Trinity, and our hearts are in a state of disquiet until that experience. But the primitive understanding of seeing God face to face means instant death for the human who does. That’s why after encountering God, Moses veiled his own face. It acquired a scary aspect that his people didn’t want to see.

The reality is this. At the Last Supper, Jesus shared His own self under the forms of bread and wine. The purpose of any Eucharistic celebration is to make us more like Jesus, to make us more loving, less sinful, more willing to follow His path and serve the poor and outcast, as well as devote more quality time to prayer and contemplation. That kind of fellowship with Christ is the true meaning of believing in Jesus and doing the Father’s works. Paul and Barnabas exemplify this in their lives, becoming lights to the nations/Gentiles.

Once we are in that way of living, once we are centered out of ourselves and toward doing the will of God in work and prayer, then we can ask anything that will give God glory. Ask it, because what we ask will always be well tuned to God’s will and purpose. Then Christ will do it, either through a divine miracle, or, more likely, through our word and labor. May we all adopt that attitude in every day of our lives.