4th week of Easter, Saturday

John 14:7-14

“If you know me…”

In an intimate friendship, there is the deep sense of feeling truly known and understood. Jesus longed for his closest friends to know him truly.

“Have I been with you for so long a time and you still do not know me, Philip?”

After three years, Jesus still felt deeply alone in his heart of hearts—his oneness with the unseen Father hardly made an impression on the disciples.

“Whoever has seen me has seen the Father… Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?”

Walking with the disciples day after day, Jesus prayed and gave thanks to the Father, blessed in the name of the Father, and shared his mission from the Father. The Father’s voice was heard at the river Jordan and at Mount Tabor, “This is my beloved Son.” Moreover, there must have been hundreds or thousands of intimate, unrecorded moments in which Jesus shared the Father’s heart with his disciples. St. John himself testifies at the end of his Gospel that the world could not contain all that Jesus said and did, had they all been written down.

To know Christ Jesus is to know and love the Father. If anyone shared that deepest intimacy with the Lord, it was the Blessed Virgin Mary who shared with the Father the privilege of begetting the Son—the Father from eternity and the Virgin in time. Contemplation of the Blessed Virgin Mary and her Son may give us a hint of the ineffable heart of the Father.

-GMC