Jesus asked Philip in today’s gospel, “Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?” It was difficult for Philip to grasp that Jesus and his Father were one person. We can understand his difficulty in understanding this. It is a difficult concept to grasp that the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are the same person.
We shouldn’t be too hard on Philip for his lack of understanding, because Christian people, including the Church’s most famous theologians, have struggled with understanding the Trinity for the past two thousand years and have finally come to the conclusion that the Trinity is a mystery of faith. In fact at every mass we attend, the priest proclaims the “Mystery of Faith”, because our faith will always be somewhat of a mystery and we will never completely understand it.
However, we do understand that the Trinity is made up of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, which are three separate beings, yet one God. Saint Patrick taught the Irish people about the Trinity using a shamrock with three separate leaves on the same stem. The Trinity is also often illustrated by using a triangle sometimes. Three equal lines connected together form a single triangle. These are good visual aids to help people understand the basic concept of the Trinity, but there is so much more that we can learn about the Holy Trinity than this.
One of the best illustrations of the Holy Trinity, is to compare the Holy Trinity to a marriage. A husband and wife are two separate people who love each other but they form “one flesh”. God and Jesus are separate persons who love one another, but they form one being too. God and Jesus love one another, and the love they share between each other is known as the Holy Spirit, which they send into the world, completely separate from them as a third person. A husband and wife love one another, and their love often produces a third person too, in the form of a little baby who will grow up and one day leave them and go into the world as well.
Every time we look upon a husband, we think of his wife and every time we see the wife we think of her husband, they are one unit. Yet, we also know their child “belongs to them” when we see their child. This couple’s child is their own flesh and blood, even if they are a separate person. The husband, wife and child are a family unit and so is the Trinity. A family is in a relationship with one another through the bonds of love. God loves his son Jesus, Jesus loves his Father, and the Holy Spirit is the love they share with one another (and all of us as well).
Jesus understood this was a hard concept for Philip to grasp in today’s gospel though, and he didn’t get upset with him for his lack of understanding. He simply told Philip to, “Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me, or else, believe because of the works themselves.” This is a pretty standard answer for Jesus, because he repeats this often in the stories from the gospels. He frequently told people that if they didn’t believe him, believe the works themselves, or to judge a person by their “fruits”. A good person produces good fruit. People know what kind of a person we are, not by what we say, but by what we do. Our actions speak for themselves.
The “fruits” of the very powerful miracles that Jesus performed could have only been accomplished by our creator, by God Himself. There has never been another human being before Christ’s birth, or since his death, that ever performed miracles of the magnitude that Jesus did. These miracles attest to the great love that Jesus and his Father both have for us. The miracles validated who Jesus Christ was. He is the son of the living God.
People know what kind of person we are too, not so much by the words we say, but by what we actually do. We need to be very careful that what we claim to believe, is actually followed through in our actions, or in how we live our life. Our feelings are not what makes love genuine. God and Jesus both love us tenderly, but they did not express their love for us with just their feelings. They expressed their love for us in concrete ways like the death of Jesus on the cross for the forgiveness of our sins, the many miracles Jesus performed for the people of his time, and the Eucharist that Jesus gave to us, so that we would truly experience that he is with us always – until the end of time.
In the same way, we can not say that we love our child, but not give them a birthday cake, or a present, or in some way celebrate our love for them in a concrete, physical way. It isn’t enough to just say “I love you”. There isn’t any place in the gospels where Jesus said we will be judged on our feelings of love. He did say that we will be judged by our actions though.
What do our actions say about us? Do we follow through with what we say we believe, by how we actually live our lives? Our words and feelings are sometimes beside the point. Remember the parable Jesus taught us about the father who asked his two sons to work in the vineyard? One said no, but later changed his mind and went, and the other said yes, but never went. It wasn’t their feelings or words that mattered to Jesus, it was what the sons actually did that mattered to him.
Jesus understands our weaknesses as human beings and never condemns us for them, though. On the contrary, at the end of the gospel today, Jesus made it very clear that he completely trusts us to carry on with his good works. He said that “the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father”.
Jesus has no hands or feet now, but ours. What an awesome responsibility we have been given. May we use our hands, our feet, our mind, and our resources to serve the Lord Jesus, by serving the people in our own families, parish, and the community that we live in.
Daily Mass Readings: 1 Corinthians 15:1-8; Psalm 19:2-5; John 14:6-14
