When Moses was shepherding the flock of his father-in-law Jethro near Horeb, the holy mountain, God appeared to him in a bush that burned without being consumed. There he received the extraordinary mission of his life: to lead the chosen people out of the slavery to which they were subjected by the Egyptians and take them to the Promised Land. And as a guarantee of the undertaking, the Lord said to him: I am with you1. Moses could not have imagined then to what extent God would be with him and his people in the midst of so many vicissitudes and trials.
Nor, because of our human limitations, do we fully know the extent to which God is with us at every moment of our lives. This closeness becomes especially close when God sees that we are on the path to holiness. He is like a Father who cares for his little child. Jesus, perfect God and perfect Man, speaks to us constantly, throughout the Gospel, of this closeness of God in the lives of men and of his loving fatherhood. He alone could do this, for no one knows the Father except the Son and the one to whom the Son wishes to reveal him2 , he tells us in the Gospel of the Mass. The Son knows the Father with the same knowledge with which the Father knows the Son. Never has there been or will there ever be a more perfect intimacy. It is the identification of knowledge and knowledge that implies the unity of the divine nature. Jesus is declaring with these words his divinity.
And as Son, who is consubstantial with the Father, he manifests to us who God the Father is in relation to us, and how in his goodness he gives us the Gift of the Holy Spirit. This was the core of his revelation to mankind: the mystery of the Most Holy Trinity, and with it and in it the wonder of the divine fatherhood. On the last night, when he seems to sum up in the intimacy of the Cenacle what those years of surrender and deep confidences had been, he declares: I manifested your name to those whom you gave me. To "manifest the name" was to show the way of being, the essence of someone. The Lord made known to us the intimacy of the Trinitarian mystery of God: his fatherhood, always close to mankind. Countless times Jesus gives God the title of Father in his intimate dialogues and in his teaching to the crowds. He speaks at length of his goodness as Father: he rewards every small action, he weighs every good thing we do, even that which no one sees, he is so generous that he distributes his gifts to the just and the unjust, he is always solicitous and provident for our needs6. 6 The name of Father is often quoted as a refrain that Jesus was happy to repeat. He is never far from our lives, any more than is the father who sees his little child alone and in danger. If we seek to please him in everything, we will always find him at our side: "When you truly love the Will of God, you will not fail to see, even in the moments of greatest trepidation, that our Father in Heaven is always near, very near, at your side, with his eternal Love, with his infinite affection".
Hablar con Dios