In today’s Gospel, Jesus is speaking to His apostles at the Last Supper. He has just washed their feet and is giving them His last exhortation before He enters into His passion, death, and resurrection. Before He goes, He leaves them His peace, promises the Holy Spirit, and communicates His and the Father’s love to them. Yet, Jesus’ last line in the gospel gives us possibly the most convincing argument for the existence of God, and that Jesus is who He says He is: And now I have told you this before it happens, so that when it happens you may believe.
Pope Benedict XVI taught us that God is pure communication. He is constantly relaying and giving himself to us. And since the moment of creation, He has spoken to us. Throughout the Old Testament, God communicates to His people through thoughts, words, and actions, and He does so for the purpose of revealing Himself to His people. He did this in veiled ways because we were not ready to receive His fullness. Once we were prepared, He then speaks through Jesus Christ, His Son, to fully reveal His love for us. Now in the time of the Church, He speaks through the Holy Spirit, affirming the message of Jesus and guiding the Body of Christ to eternal life.
We are fortunate to have this communication. Besides revealing to us the meaning of life, it gives us the litmus test for whether or not God exists. If what is relayed by the Word of God is true, then God exists. If it is not true, then He does not. It is simple because that is how God works – in simplicity. So we must ask: What has God tried to communicate, and has He kept His promises?
The answer, like the question, is simple. Yes! It may take faith and humility to understand the entirety of God’s revelation, but God has indeed fulfilled the promises that He has made, and He continues to do so to this day. Beginning with His first promise to Adam and Eve that the offspring of the woman would crush the head of the serpent, to the prophecies of Isaiah, God has stayed true to His Word. With typological references of the Sacrifice of Isaac, the Passover, the Temple, the Ark of the Covenant (and more!), God has made it clear that He has been working for thousands of years in human history, and is still doing so. The fulfillment of all of His communication to the human race is His Son, Jesus Christ, and this is made abundantly clear for all of those who have taken the time to study and know Him.
Jesus continues the work of His Father. He foretells the type of death He would die, the destruction of the Jewish temple, and even His betrayer. All these prophecies come to fruition (and more!). In this passage, Jesus tells His apostles His plan of sending them a helper, the Holy Spirit. He explicitly states that the reason why He is saying this is so that they would believe when it happens. And it does happen fifty days after His resurrection. Jesus, like His Father, keeps His promises, and there are countless instances of this happening on a personal and public level even to this day.
So for the skeptic, God leaves little room for doubt in the case for His existence. He has clearly shown that He is active in human history by speaking into the lives of individuals and the nation of Israel, fulfilling all the things that He has said and done. He fully revealed Himself to the world in a systematic and beautiful way. He revealed Himself as Truth. It would be intellectually ignorant to say otherwise. We may not like who God is (or who we think He is), His rules, or what His existence means for our lives, but to say that He is not real does not critically hold up. He has communicated Himself to us, and He continues to do so if only we have the eyes to see and the ears to listen.
