John 14:10: Philip Asks for One Look

Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me? The words I say to you I do not speak on my own authority. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work.

John 14:10 (NIV)

Philip Asks for One Look

He sleeps in the afternoon, in the bunk behind the seats, and wakes at five without knowing which five it is. The light along the edge of the shade could be either one. He lies still and works it out from what he can hear in the lot, the traffic on the ramp, whether there are voices at the picnic tables.

Philip wanted a look instead of working it out by ear. Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us. He had been with Jesus such a long time by then, and he was not asking for an argument. He wanted a sight of God he could set everything else against, one look, and then he would be all right.

Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me? The words I say to you I do not speak on my own authority. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work. The answer comes back as a question and then as a claim about ordinary talk. Every sentence Philip had been listening to all that time came from the Father living in him and doing his work. The thing Philip wanted shown to him had been going on in front of him at the table and in the talking, hour after hour.

The answer gives Philip something he can go back and check. He can take the sentences from that evening, the ones he could still repeat, and ask who was doing the work in them. A vision would have settled it in an afternoon and left nothing to go over.

The request is not a rare one. Somebody who has prayed for years can still want a single clear sighting to set the rest against, and the answer comes back pointing at words that have been in the house the whole time.

Wanting more evidence does not get treated as a scandal here. It gets an answer, and the answer is the person Philip has been eating with.