“All things have been handed over to me by my Father. No one knows who the Son is except the Father, and who the Father is except the Son and anyone to whom the Son wishes to reveal him.” These words of Jesus found in Luke’s Gospel (a similar passage can be found in St. Matthew) sound a great deal like Jesus in the Gospel of John. That serves as a reminder how blessed the Church is to have the four canonical gospels. They are not histories of Jesus as such but rather faith documents, each of them presenting the Lord as one worthy of belief. We read each of the gospels through three lenses: what Jesus said and did, how the Church remembered what Jesus said and did (they four gospels were written forty or more years after the events), how the writer, the evangelist, presents Jesus so that those reading it will come to faith. Shows and movies which illustrate the life of Jesus might be entertaining but they cannot compare with the four gospels in their powerful depiction of how God was at work in Jesus.
