Above: Cross from the Oscott College seminary chapel, Birmingham, U.K. Photo by Father Lawrence Lew, O.P.
Who are you? One may ask this question impertinently, as the Pharisees did, for the sake of accusation and condemnation: Who do you think you are, to be speaking in this way? To be teaching us, the teachers? Or one may ask it piously, for the sake of knowing Jesus. But who do you say that I am? Jesus asks his apostles. And Peter answers well: You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.
But in today’s reading from John 8, Jesus gives an answer more sublime even than Peter’s: When you lift up the Son of Man, then you will realize that I AM. Jesus is not only the Son of God, He is also, as we confess every Sunday in the Nicene Creed, God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made, consubstantial with the Father.
This is the great revelation of the Triune God, that although God is one, He is not alone, for He is also a communion of Persons. St. John of the Cross has expressed this beautifully in one of his poems (translated by Roy Campbell, 1967):
In the beginning of all things
The Word lived in the Lord at rest.
And His felicity in Him
Was from infinity possessed.
That very Word was God Himself
By which all being was begun
For He lived in the beginning
And beginning had he none.
He Himself was the beginning,
So He had none, being one.
What was born of the beginning
Was the Word we call the Son.
Even so has God conceived Him
And conceived Him always so,
Ever giving Him the substance
As He gave it long ago.
And thus the glory of the Son
Is the glory of the Sire
And the glory of the Father
From His Son He does acquire.
As the loved-one in the lover
Each in the other’s heart resided:
And the love that makes them one
Into one of them divided,
Then with one and with the other
Mated in such equality,
Three Persons now and one Beloved
They numbered, thought they still were three.
There is one love in all three Persons:
One lover all the Three provides;
And the beloved is the lover
Which in each of them resides.
The Being which all three possess
Each of them does possess alone:
And each of them loves what that Being
Itself possesses of its own.
This very Being is Each One,
And it alone, in its own way,
Has bound them in that wondrous knot
Whose mystery no man can say.
Thus lives undying and eternal
The love that has entwined them so,
Because one love the three united
Which as their Essence now we know,
And this one love, the more in one-ness,
The more and more in love will grow.
In the spirit of St. John of the Cross and of St. Dominic, true lovers of the Word, may we today renew our faith in the Triune God and seek to enter more deeply into this blessed and saving mystery.
