Irony abounds at 4 am in the lobby of a hotel in NY while waiting for a shuttle van to the LaGuardia Airport. I can barely think, music and TV blare in the background, and I sit with my laptop trying to think straight about one of the more interesting entries of MUFHH. Can I hurt my Master? According to Chambers, I can. It seems that his perspective on John 14:9 is that Andrew did when he asked to see the Father. It hurt my Master when He was asked to show the Father? Why does that seem hard to accept?
I suspect that I can grieve the Holy Spirit, and therefore I do something to which my Master responds with sadness. But hurting the heart of my Master by asking an ignorant question does not seem to fit in the list things I can accept. While I accept that He is God and knows all things, I’m not and I don’t, and that is one of the things He knows. So, why would He be pained by an ignorant question I might ask?
What I believe Jesus was doing when He asked Andrew the rhetorical question, “Have I been with you so long and you don’t know me?” is point out to Andrew that the answer to his request to see the Father had already been answered. Andrew asked because equating seeing Jesus and seeing the Maker of the Universe was not on his mental radar. It is difficult for people today.
The concept of the Trinity is baffling, and rightly so. So, why would Andrew, standing before the Son of Man be expected to have made the leap of logic and faith to see Him as also the Father? No, I believe Jesus was again teaching His disciples that what they were wanting was not as far or as unreachable as they assumed.
What they saw was so much more than they expected. What Jesus was about to do was so much more than the event witnessed by so many in Jerusalem. What the elders of the Jews, the Roman political leaders, and the soldiers accomplished was complicity with the design of the Father. How would even the disciples be expected to grasp that? I’m not sure I really do. I read it and accept it, but I doubt I understand it.
When I consider that Jesus, the Agent of Creation, entered that creation, and submitted to death within it, I am at a loss. Does that loss cause my Master pain? Perhaps a level of frustration at my inability to understand, but I doubt that as well. The shuttle is coming, the plane will be leaving soon, and I must drag my tired old bones and fuzzy brain on the bus. Perhaps tomorrow will be more lucid.
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