Friends, the Gospel for today centers around a theme that we can never speak of enough: the divinity of Jesus. There has been a disturbing tendency in recent years—you can see it clearly in Eckhart Tolle’s bestselling book The Power of Now—to turn Jesus into an inspiring spiritual teacher, like the Buddha or the Sufi mystics.
But if that’s all he is, the heck with him. The Gospels are never content with such a reductive description. Though they present Jesus quite clearly as a teacher, they know that he is infinitely more than that. They affirm that something else is at stake in him and in our relation to him.
In our Gospel today, Jesus plainly declares his relationship with his Father: “I did not come on my own, but the one who sent me, whom you do not know, is true. I know him, because I am from him, and he sent me.”