“Show me your glory.” This was Moses’s request of Yahweh in Exodus 33. The Israelites had committed heinous idolatry by forging a golden calf for worship. Consequently, Yahweh commands the Levites to kill three thousand Israelites, and afterward sends a plague upon them. Then Yahweh directs Israel to go to the Promised Land — but without His presence.

Moses threw himself desperately into the role of mediator between Yahweh and His people — a role he had lately become accustomed to. Yahweh and Moses would meet in a tent outside of the Israelite camp, and they would speak as friends. Moses reminds Yahweh of the promises He made them and pleads for His presence to stay with His people. In His mercy, Yahweh relents, and emboldened by their friendship, Moses asks Yahweh to show him His glory.

Yahweh responds by detailing His terms: He would cause His goodness to pass in front of Moses, but Moses would have to watch from a cleft in a rock. And Moses could only see His back because no one could see the face of Yahweh and live.

That must have crossed the prophet Isaiah’s mind, when he was given a vision of Yahweh’s throne room. He described seeing the Lord, high and exalted, seated on a throne, with the train of his robe filling the temple. Winged heavenly creatures are calling, “Holy, holy, holy is the LORD Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory,” (Isaiah 6:3) and at the sound of their voices, the temple shakes and fills with smoke.

At this point, Isaiah is nearly certain that he is going to die, and he declares that he is ruined, because he is sinful, and has seen the King, the LORD Almighty. Instead, a seraph takes a coal from the altar, touches it to Isaiah’s lips and declares Isaiah’s sin atoned-for. In John 12:41, John identifies the King in Isaiah’s vision as Jesus, and writes that Isaiah had seen His glory.

“Show me your glory.” On this Passover night in the 14th chapter of John, this is what Jesus’s friend Philip asks for too! Philip asks Jesus to show them the Father! In some ways, this feels like the climax of John’s gospel, because this is what John has been building toward since his prologue. In the first chapter, John takes a cosmic view of the history of the world, paralleling Genesis 1 when he writes, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Near the end of the prologue, he writes that “the Word became flesh” and that “we have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son.” Finally, John closes out his prologue by writing, “No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is Himself God, and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made Him known.”

That’s the genius of this scene in John. The heart cry of Yahweh’s people has always been to see Him — to get a glimpse of Him — and when Jesus talks of going away, back to the Father, Philip is the one bold enough to ask for it!

You can imagine the room in a deafening silence as Jesus gives a pregnant pause. His friends’ hearts are in their throats, awaiting their rabbi’s response. Would Jesus show them the Father? Would they finally get to see what no man before had seen? Would they see more than what Yahweh had revealed to Moses? Would they see more than what Yahweh had revealed to Isaiah?

Philip asks Jesus to show them the Father. And Jesus says that He already has! If they have seen Him, they have seen the Father. This was an earth-shattering moment. The God of their ancestors — the God who they knew they could not see face-to-face, lest they die — had revealed Himself in full glory to them.

How could they have missed this? It’s as if Jesus is pointing back at all the signs and wonders from the first 12 chapters of John and saying, “I turned water into wine. I healed that royal official’s son with a word. I made that lame man at the pool walk. I fed 5,000 people with a boy’s lunch. I walked on water. I gave sight to a blind man. I raised our friend Lazarus from the dead. What do you make of that?” He seems to ask, “Isn’t that evidence enough?” Then this very night the God of the universe reveals His glory in the person of Jesus by getting down on His knees and washing their feet.

“This is how to be human,” Jesus seems to say. “This is what it looks like to love me.”

Consider how important this is: Jesus will go on to tell them that when He goes away, He’ll give them even MORE of a revelation of God in the person of the Holy Spirit. And with the Holy Spirit, they will do works just like Jesus had done — not only that, but greater works indeed.

Notice that Jesus doesn’t promise this on the heels of walking on water, or miraculously multiplying food, or raising someone from the dead. He promises this on the heels of stooping low and serving his friends.

“This is the glory of the Father,” Jesus says. “And not only that, but this is also how you glorify him.”