Today's reading continues with the important self-revelation of Jesus throughout St. John's Gospel. It follows a short discourse from John the Baptist. After the Baptist exalts Jesus, we learn more about the Son of God. We learn that the one who comes from above, Jesus, is above all. He is not merely one among many, not an instance of a kind. Rather, He is the very God who creates all things. Nothing could in principle be higher or better than the divine Son.
The Son speaks to us about things which we could never know about on our own. Key elements of the Christian faith, including the inner life of God, are not discoverable via unaided human reason. Many things are within our capacity to discover, things within the world on the same plane of existence and subject to discoverability beginning with the senses. But there are so many things beyond this that God has graciously shown us. He creates within us the capacity to know these heavenly things and then actualizes this capacity in the Person and Work of the Divine Logos (Son). Through the Son, the Father speaks to His creation. He speaks in a plenary way, via the creation itself - the very calling into being of the finite. He speaks to us through the words of the Son and through the words of the prophets. All voices of truth speak the words of God.
Being the infinite plentitude of Being, God does not ration His gift of the Spirit. The Holy Spirit, as true God, pours out over creation at the beginning (Genesis 1:2) and pours out into the cosmos. The Father gives everything to the Son. Another example of the limitless love within the divine essence. Love is non-competitive, inexhaustible giving for the sake of the other. The limitless giving of the Spirit and the giving of everything to the Son testifies to the nature of God as Goodness and Love.
Receiving and, in turn, pouring out the love and existence given to us by God ratifies our reception of it. In this very reception of divine love, we are drawn up into the divine life, becoming partakers of the divine nature itself (2 Peter 1:4). The rejection of this great gift is perilous, it is to reject life itself and therefore to experience a dearth of it. To disobey the Son is to disobey the Father, it is to turn away from the unrationed gift of the Spirit and to spurn that which is meant to actualize the fullness of our being.
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