Jesus said to him, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you know me, then you will also know my Father. From now on you do know him and have seen him.”
Philip said to him, “Master, show us the Father, and that will be enough for us.”
Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you for so long a time and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I speak to you I do not speak on my own. The Father who dwells in me is doing his works. Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me, or else, believe because of the works themselves. Amen, amen, I say to you, whoever believes in me will do the works that I do, and will do greater ones than these, because I am going to the Father. And whatever you ask in my name, I will do, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask anything of me in my name, I will do it.”
In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus tells Philip and all present in the Upper Room (and by extension of their ministries, me and you today as well) that to know him is to know God, to have heard him speak is to have heard the voice of God, and that the will of God is evident in his works.
For those of us who have been pushed to the edges of society, whose truths have been questioned, or whose lives have been made to feel less valuable – these words can feel both profound, but also perhaps out of reach. How can we grasp this invitation to know Jesus as the way, the truth, and the life from the margins?
But Jesus himself was no stranger to living life on the edges of society. His people were politically oppressed by the powers of the time, he was raised by a humble family in a humble town, and he ultimately came to be crucified as an unjustly accused criminal. We can further see his connection to the margins in those he chose to engage with: the outcast, the Samaritan, the tax collector, the sick, the disabled, the sex worker – those whom the dominant culture often labeled as “other” or worse, “unworthy”.
When Jesus says, “The words that I speak to you I do not speak on my own. The Father who dwells in me is doing his works. Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me,” he invites us to see God not in those places of domination or oppression, but in the radical love and empathy that Jesus demonstrated. For us on the margins, this is a powerful affirmation. God is not some distant and uncaring being who resides only in places of privilege. Instead, through Jesus we can see God as someone who walked among the rejected, who challenged the structures of oppression with his compassion, and who ultimately gave his life for the sake of love and grace. We can see God as someone who would not only spend time with people like us – but also someone who loved us enough to die for your sake and mine.
This reading ends with Jesus telling us that prayers in his name will be answered. And when those of us on the margins pray in Jesus’s name, we do so from a place of unique understanding of what it means to cry out to God for justice, healing, and belonging. Jesus’s promise that our prayers will be answered gives us faith in a God that sees us, hears us, and understands our cries for affirmation and liberation, and that those cries are not in vain.
Prayer: God, you sent your son Jesus to earth so that we might see the holy in the ordinary, and the ordinary in the holy. Help me to continually see your image reflected in the soul of my fellow man, especially in those society has deemed to be “the least of these”. These things we pray through Christ our Lord, amen.
Evolving Ecclesia 