Revelation of the Father

Gospel Reflection for July 17th, 2024

Courtesy of Catholic Answers

“All things have been handed over to me by my Father. No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son wishes to reveal him.” Matthew 11:27

All of salvation history is a movement by God to reveal Himself to mankind. From the very beginning, God desired to have a relationship with man, to invite him into His communion of persons. When man rejected that invitation in the Garden of Eden, we separated ourselves eternally from God. In His justice, God could have left us in that state. There is nothing about God that requires that He do anything to repair what had been broken. Truly, God does not need us. He could have let all of mankind reap the reward of our rejection of His love. Instead, in a movement of His great mercy, God began to draw us back to Himself and steadily revealed His Trinitarian life to us.

With the Incarnation of Christ, man receives the greatest form of revelation that there has ever been. In today’s Gospel, Christ reveals to the people His very identity. There is an infinite divide between the Divine and the human. As finite humans, we cannot cross that divide of our own accord. This is why God became man. When Christ reveals His identity to the crowds on this day, He is telling them that He is the only one who knows the Father. Why can He say this?

Because He is the eternal Son who has been with God from the very foundations of the world. The Trinitarian life within God is one of unity and co-eternity. The Father loves and gives Himself to the Son who receives everything that He is from the Father. The Son then reciprocates this eternal love to the Father. The love of the two is the Holy Spirit. The Trinitarian life of God is being revealed by Jesus Christ in these moments. Only the Son, equally divine and eternal, knows the Father. Only the Divine can bridge that infinite gap between God and Man. Christ bridges that gap through the Incarnation and begins to reveal to man the God who has been seeking them since their creation.

As humans, we are completely reliant on God to show us WHO He is. It is possible for man to come to a knowledge of God naturally speaking. It is within his power, through human reason, to know that a God exists, as St. Thomas Aquinas tells us:

The existence of God and other like truths about God, which can be known by natural reason, are not articles of faith, but are preambles to the articles; for faith presupposes natural knowledge, even as grace presupposes nature, and perfection supposes something that can be perfected.¹

But that natural knowledge, guided by human reason only goes so far. We can come to know a God exists, but we need something more to reveal to us who that God IS. St. Thomas teaches:

Even as regards those truths about God which human reason could have discovered, it was necessary that man should be taught by a divine revelation; because the truth about God such as reason could discover, would only be known by a few, and that after a long time, and with the admixture of many errors. Whereas man’s whole salvation, which is in God, depends upon the knowledge of this truth. Therefore, in order that the salvation of men might be brought about more fitly and more surely, it was necessary that they should be taught divine truths by divine revelation. It was therefore necessary that besides philosophical science built up by reason, there should be a sacred science learned through revelation.²

This is why Christ became man. This is why Christ reveals the Father to us. It is necessary for our salvation that He do so. This goes back to the beginning. When man rejected God, God did not reject man. Even while He casts man from the garden, He promises to send the redeemer, born of a Woman to bring man back to God:

“I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; she shall crush your head, and you shall strike their heel.” Genesis 3:15.

Christ comes to reveal the Father to mankind and to call us back to God whom we are created for. The most perfect revelation that is given is through the redemptive act on the cross. Through the cross, Christ reveals the Father’s great love to mankind. Only the Son knows just how much God loves mankind, and now, since He has revealed it, mankind can know as well.

1. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae Ia q. 2, a. 2.

2. Ibid. q. 1, a. 1.