The Father and I Are One

Homily for Tuesday of the Fourth Week in Easter

The affirmation, “The Father and I are one,” gathers up the cumulative evidence about Jesus’s relationship to God that has been building throughout his confrontations with his adversaries in chapters five through ten of St. John’s Gospel. He does only what the Father does and accomplishes the work (including judgment) that the Father has sent him to do; he is the true bread from heaven, the bread of life that the Father gives; he knows God, because he comes from God who sent him. He is from above, the “I AM” in whom we must believe or die in our sins, who speaks as he was instructed by the Father, and who always does what is pleasing to God; he is the son who makes slaves free, who declares what he has heard in the Father’s presence, the “I AM” who was before Abraham; he is from God; he knows the Father just as the Father knows him, and he lays down his life for the sheep and takes it up again just as the Father has commanded him.

In the context of this sequence of affirmations, Jesus’s statement that “The Father and I are one” means that the Father and the Son are one in what they do. Those to whom Jesus addressed the claim, however, understood that more was at stake than obedient subordination and the family resemblance. Jesus here claims the union with God that is unique. There is no functional distinction between him and God. Those who heard the claim clearly did not believe it, evidenced by the fact that they picked up stones to kill him. According to Jesus’s teaching in this text, they could not believe it.

This is precisely what distinguishes us from them. While they could not believe it, we have come to believe it and hold these truths in our minds and hearts. John the Evangelist has, as was his purpose in writing, shown us that Jesus is God in the flesh. Because we have eaten his body and drunk his blood, we, like him, will have everlasting life. By the proclamation of John’s Gospel throughout the Lenten and Easter Season, the Church proclaims these truths to the whole world.