Knowing Jesus, knowing the Father

John 14 : 7 - 14

Have I been with you so long, and yet you do not know me.......?

The "hidden" God, at least that's the way some people have experienced God......is the same one who said, "he who has seen me has seen the Father..." There is a kind of hiddenness to his deity, but he is also a God who wants to reveal himself to humankind, and did so in human form two thousand years ago.

I think the difficulty we are faced with is, what does it mean "to know God"? The intellect has been the chief means after the Reformation and especially in Christian traditions that emphasize the ultimate authority of Scripture. I, and I suspect many good "Baptists", have been down that road, and many still find themselves nourished by this tradition. This is the tradition that aims at a more exterior knowledge which is achieved through rational analysis. But there is another tradition, sometimes attributed to the monastics whose aim was wisdom, or an intimate knowledge of God. It was rooted in personal experience as one reflected prayerfully upon the Word of God. The Word is still important but more crucial than that, it was a bridge to connect one with God himself. Of course these two traditions are not mutually exclusive, but in this world where knowledge is equated with the rational mind more than any other perception, the emphasis of the second way is usually downplayed in preference for the first.

This makes it difficult when people try to grapple with and try to seek God within their experiences in life. They may find that the God they 'knew' (were taught about) just does not make sense, given their experiences of life. But if they were only to engage in the first way of learning from Scripture, they would have to accept very 'orthodox' answers about God's involvement in human life and more or less come away with a notion that God does not care about their experience. This is a great hindrance to the growth of an intimate relationship with God.

I realized how stuck I was at times when contemplating the gospels - that happened when I sought insights (a residue of the analytical mindset) more than I allowed the Scripture to lead me to an encounter with Christ. Nothing wrong with analysis when it remains in the classroom! But to 'know' Christ, to know the Father, as he assured Philip would be possible, comes through the tradition of 'intimate knowledge'. We fear this because it seems less controllable and can lead to 'error' and 'excesses'. But with appropriate cautions, at the end of the day, I believe that we all need and yearn for that "intimate knowledge" of our loving God.