by Gianni Gennari

I concluded our last dialogue by recalling the first passage of the first writing of the entire New Testament, the First Letter of Saint Paul to the Thessalonians, which certainly dates back to the end of the 40s, noting that there is already, explicitly, the whole reality of our faith: God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the Church, the Apostle as "episcopos", overseer of communion and also our human life enlivened by the three theological virtues.
This is the consequence of the revelation and gift of God which is perfected in Jesus of Nazareth, God and Man, in whom everything was created and everything is saved from the dominion of sin and with his historical story concluded with the revelation-gift of the mystery Paschal: Passion, death, resurrection, Ascension, Pentecost, creation in the Holy Spirit of the new Community of salvation which is the Church-Mystery, the Mystical Body of Christ which lives through the historical event of the all-priestly People of God institution of the "royal priesthood" of all the baptized, as Saint Peter teaches from the beginning, and in which there are different ministries and charisms which over the centuries have manifested the grace and goodness of God united in his mercy even with the limitations and miseries that come from us , men of Baptism and all the Sacraments, when we want to substitute our "ways" for his. I realized that the period is long, but have the patience to read it little by little, without rushing to the next word...

So, when we say “I believe in God” we implicitly say all this. Jesus of Nazareth arrived, and his historical story changed everything. God made himself known in Him, God is believed and credible, and is present in Him. Here is his response to Philip, true representative of all the desires of humanity over the centuries, up to us today. Philip had asked him: “Lord, show us the Father and it will be enough for us”. And Jesus marvels: “Philip, have I been with you for so long and you still haven't known me? If you know me you also know the Father… Whoever sees me, he also sees my Father”. (Jn. 14, 7-9)
A curiosity for the readers of these lines. I reread Philip's question in the Latin of Saint Jerome: “Ostende nobis Patrem”. “Ostende” means “show us”. Jesus is the "Monstrance" of the Father, it is the "exhibition" in which God is seen and reached. The monstrance of our adorations is Jesus in the Eucharistic species. Let us think back, with the sense of the perpetual necessity of the fullness of our faith, to the Pange Lingua, to the T'adoriam Ostia divina, to the Ave Verum... And let us move forward.
Jesus makes the Father present, "shows" him, and not only to the Apostles. He had also made the same speech in front of the Temple (Jn. 8,19), when he had said to everyone: “You do not know me and you do not even know my Father. If you knew me you would also know my Father." It was – says Giovanni's sequel – the reason why they had decided to eliminate him…   
For this he was crucified. One who becomes God, in a conception in which God was the unnameable, the untouchable, what other fate could he expect?
Therefore a first port of call in this research on our belief: faith is faith in God, and God is this absolutely new God of the Christian revelation in which all of Scripture culminates. The revelation that occurred with facts and words little by little in history and finally fully realized in the incarnate Word, Jesus of Nazareth, brings a faith that implies the knowledge of the true God, the fulfillment of the law and the prophets and in it - I connect to the previous thoughts on the Ten Words and on the knowledge of God in the Prophets and finally in the New Testament knowing and loving God means recognizing him and loving him in man, his true image, as it is written in the first letter of John (4,20): "If anyone if he said: I love God and he hates his brother, he is a liar. Indeed, anyone who does not love his brother whom he sees cannot love God whom he does not see." Filling your mouth with God to forget man, to trample on him is the greatest blasphemy. If this has been done, in history, it is authentic betrayal and maximum infidelity.
The Eucharist and the other Sacraments, if they are not animated, if they are not placed in this framework, become useless rites and God continues to repeat his indignation and his opposition to useless sacrifices, as we have seen in the book of Isaiah. One is not a Christian alone, God did not want to remain alone, but to communicate salvation to man by entering history in person, in the divine and human person of the incarnate Word. Mysteriously, God calls everyone to salvation through the revelation and gift of Jesus of Nazareth. Everyone! We have had a special grace for having known this hidden name that Jesus revealed to humanity who had waited for him for centuries. His disciples recognize themselves in life because they love their brothers. And loving our brothers also means showing them God in Jesus Christ, the salvation of all men created "in the very image" of him. And so the theme of the image, and with the fullness of man as the "image of God", which has accompanied us from the beginning in these reflections of ours, returns again. it is a specific theme of Jewish-Christian revelation. All other religions are based on competition, whereby man tries to take control of God, and God asks man to cancel himself, in the name of his transcendence. The core of Judeo-Christian revelation, and in particular in the fullness of the New Testament, is this. We are still at the first words of our Creed: "I believe in God". But the path taken so far will be useful immediately, as soon as we say Father, and as soon as we say Almighty. This “fatherhood” is not in the image of our human “fatherhoods”, but the opposite, in the sense that these should be modeled on that one.
It didn't always go this way. In the middle of the last century Alexander Mitscherlich, a sociologist, wrote a book whose title said that we were, literally, "On the path to a society without fathers". Terribly prophetic. The failure of many fatherhoods, in recent decades - ideological, political, economic, industrial, spectacular, technological fatherhoods - so often illusory and tragic, and so often unfortunately also in the family sphere, and even in the ecclesial sphere, tells us the duty to recover the traits of the true Paternity of God. Saying "I believe in God the Father", and saying it in the light of the revelation and the human-divine, wonderfully "fraternal" and liberating story of Jesus... We will do it in the next dialogue...