Jesus Christ - God Father In John Gospel

         By Thich nu Minh Tam

The most impressive thing that has still caused me moved since I was a teenager is the woeful and majestic look towards God Father of Jesus Christ when He was crucified.  Although I am a Buddhist, I always feel deeply moved whenever I admire the statue of Jesus on the cross.  I still hear His last words that are so emotionally desperate, sorrowful, receptive and compassionate: "Father, Father, could you leave me alone?  I return to You, Father!"
What does that sentence mean?  It means the true relationship between God Father and Jesus, the inter-being of God and man, the existence of God Father in Jesus and the returning Father's home of Jesus during His last minutes of living after His great holy mission to guide people in the right path to salvation and to sacrifice His life for human's happiness.  That mission of Jesus, through the transformation and transfiguration of God Father, is very clear in John 17: 1-6, 20-26: "That they all may be One; as thou, Father art in me, and I in thee,  . . .that thou hast sent me," "I in them, and thou in me," "Father . . be with me where I am . . ."" O righteous Father . . . . the love . . . .and I in them," or in John 6: 47-51, 53-58; 14: 15-21, 25-27; 15: 2-11: "At that day, ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in me and I in you," "I kept my Father's commandments, and abide in His love."  These emotional verses have much illustrated the Unity of Jesus and God Father and the Spirit.  It is through the very holy God Father or we can say the Absolute Truth, the True Self, the Eternity, the Infinite Existence . . . that Jesus Christ came into the world to begin with, and it is also through God Father that He will reign the world.  Jesus is the magnificence of the Ultimate Truth, the Most High where God Father has hidden, as if in His own breast, His only Son . . .That transformation of mind is so mystical and subtle that you cannot use ordinary logical theories to understand it, like the space which is embracing you: you cannot touch it, cannot taste it, but you can feel, feel with experience of deep meditation, of concentration that your whole being absorbs into God, into Love, and you have transformed and mixed into Him as well as a dew drop falls into the vast ocean.  Now the dew drop is not a dew drop anymore, it has transformed into the ocean and now is the ocean.
That last sentence of Jesus is very humane, very close to us.  Nothing in this world can compare parents' love to children as well as God's love to human beings.  So, when Jesus was terribly painful on the cross, whom did He can ask for help, whom did He rely on?  Only His God Father; the same to us, ordinary people, anytime we face trouble in life, the first persons we think and rush towards are our parents.  That idea makes us think that we are very close to God through Jesus Christ, that we are not separate from God because that is All in One, One in All.  Let's read these words of Gregory of Nyassa: "All that the Father is, we see revealed in the Son; all that is the Son's is the Father's also; for the whole Son dwells in the Father, and he has the whole Father dwelling in himself . . . The Son who exists always in the Father can never be separated from him, nor can the Spirit ever be divided from the Son who also receives at the same time the Son and the Spirit.  It is impossible to envisage any kind of severance or disjunction between them: one cannot think of the Son apart from the Father, nor divide the Spirit from the Son.  There is between the three a sharing and a differentiation that are beyond words and understanding."
That ultimate relationship, for the Christian mystic, is every human being is one with Jesus in His God Father - His divine soul - and the aim of human life is to know that Presence of God consciously and to live the calm, fearless, and selflessly loving life that arises from this knowledge.