If You Have Seen Me, You Have Seen the Father
Looking at Jesus changes the way we read the Gospels and understand God.
More than a decade ago, a worship leader in one of the churches I was pastoring said something to me that has stayed with me ever since.
She had been reading the words of Jesus to Philip in John 14:
“Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.” (John 14:9 NIV)
She told us that the verse had begun to change the way she read the Gospels. I don’t remember her exact words now, but the idea was something like this: whenever she read something Jesus said, or watched something Jesus did, she had begun asking herself, What does this show me about God? What does this tell me about what God is like?
It was a fairly simple observation, but it lodged somewhere in my thinking.
I have come back to it many times over the years. In fact, I suspect the series I am working through now is really me finally trying to take her question seriously.
What if we really did read Jesus that way?
Show Us the Father
The conversation in John 14 begins when Philip says to Jesus:
“Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us.” (John 14:8 NIV)
It sounds like a reasonable request. Show us God. Make him visible. Give us something we can understand.
Jesus’ answer is remarkable:
“Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.” (John 14:9 NIV)
Philip asks to see God, and Jesus effectively says, Philip, you have been looking at him.
The New Testament makes the same claim in a number of different ways. Paul describes Jesus as “the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15 NIV). Hebrews says the Son is “the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being” (Hebrews 1:3 NIV).
God is invisible. We cannot photograph him or point towards some location in the universe and say, “There he is.” And yet Christianity makes the extraordinary claim that the God we cannot see has made himself known in someone we can.
Jesus makes the invisible God visible.
That does not mean the physical appearance of Jesus somehow tells us what God looks like. It means the life of Jesus shows us what God is like.
When Jesus welcomes someone others have rejected, we are seeing something about God. When he touches someone considered untouchable, we are seeing something about God. When he confronts hypocrisy, forgives sinners, shows compassion to the suffering, welcomes children, restores the ashamed and gives himself for others, we are not simply collecting inspiring stories about a remarkable religious teacher.
We are being shown the Father.
The God We Carry in Our Heads
All of us carry ideas about God. Some come from Scripture. Some come from church. Some come from our families, our culture, our experiences, our disappointments and perhaps our fears.
Sometimes those ideas do not sit particularly well together.
God is loving, we are told, but perhaps we quietly imagine him as reluctant. God forgives, but perhaps we picture him keeping a careful record against us. God is near, but perhaps we experience him as distant. God is Father, but perhaps that word itself carries difficult associations.
Then Jesus says: look at me.
That is why John 14:9 matters so much to me.
When I am unsure what God is like, I need to look again at Jesus.
Paul’s words in Colossians make the same point from another direction. Jesus is not merely someone who teaches us about the invisible God. He is “the image of the invisible God.” Paul goes on to say that all things were created through him and for him, that he is before all things and that in him all things hold together (Colossians 1:15–17). A little later he says that God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in Christ (Colossians 1:19).
This is much more than saying Jesus is a particularly good representative of God.
God has made himself known in the Son.
The Question That Stayed With Me
That brings me back to the question that worship leader planted in my mind all those years ago.
When we read a Gospel story, we can certainly ask what Jesus is teaching us about discipleship. We can ask how we should live, love, forgive and serve. Those are good questions.
But perhaps there is an even more basic question that comes first:
What is Jesus showing me about God?
Before Jesus is our example, Jesus is our revelation.
We look at the compassion of Jesus and discover the compassion of God. We look at the holiness of Jesus and discover the holiness of God. We look at the authority of Jesus and begin to discover what the power of God actually looks like. We look at the cross and see how far God’s self-giving love will go.
And when the picture of God in our minds seems different from the God we encounter in Jesus, perhaps Jesus should be allowed to challenge the picture.
Philip said, “Show us the Father.”
Jesus’ answer is still the place I think we need to begin:
“Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.” (John 14:9 NIV)
The invisible God has made himself visible in Jesus.
And I want to keep asking that question:
What does Jesus show us about God?