Pope Leo on God's Revelation in Christ

Pope Leo, in a wonderful and succinct audience of January 21, 2026, offers us a beautiful summation of many of the themes that we have been exploring. Let us spend a few moments “abiding” with his words and letting them center us anew in the heart of God’s love and truth, in the heart of the gift we have received from the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit of love.

There are four central points that the pope makes, elucidating upon the beautiful self-revelation of God by which the Trinity makes himself known to us and unveils his own heart, his own love, and his own life, that we may share in it.

1. First, Leo emphasizes “that God reveals himself in a dialogue of covenant, in which he addresses us as friends. It is therefore a relational knowledge, which not only communicates ideas, but shares a history and calls for communion in reciprocity. The fulfillment of this revelation takes place in a historical and personal encounter in which God himself gives himself to us, making himself present, and we discover that we are known in our deepest truth. It is what happens in Jesus Christ.”

What a rich and condensed expression of the central dimensions of our faith! God writes salvation history, inscribing his own loving presence into our lives and our history—both as individuals and as a community—not primarily in order to impart ideas to us, to give us things to think about, or a framework of life, or even lofty ideals to attain. No, he enters into our world and writes his history into ours and ours into his precisely to draw us into a covenant of love, into a dialogue of intimate and loving reciprocity between Lover and beloved, Father and child, Bridegroom and bride.

God’s self-giving is not an imposition or an abstract or moralistic demand, but the approach of One who is in love with us, who is drawn by longing for us and delight in us, who lays his heart and his affection naked before us, hoping to elicit our reciprocal openness, affection, and love. For in this reciprocity the intimacy of mutual belonging is born, the sweet kiss of encounter by which God breathes into us the Spirit who gives us life—his own life, his own joy—and by which in the Spirit we breathe ourselves back to the One who loves us. In this encounter, in this weaving together of hearts and lives, we find ultimate security and peace in the shelter of God’s Love, boundless wonder and ceaseless play, and fulfillment in the communion of his life, which he lives eternally in the consummate intimacy of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, which we are granted to share to the full and without any veils separating us from the overflowing abundance of his glorious beauty and ravishing love.

2. As his second point, Leo writes that “Jesus reveals the Father to us by involving us in his own relationship with Him. In the Son sent by God the Father ‘man might in the Holy Spirit have access to the Father and come to share in the divine nature.’ We therefore reach full knowledge of God by entering into the Son’s relationship with his Father, by virtue of the action of the Spirit. This is attested to, for example, by the Evangelist Luke when he recounts the Lord’s prayer of jubilation: ‘I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will. All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows who the Son is except the Father or who the Father is except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him’ (Lk 10:21-22).” We need not expound upon this any further, since it has occupied us extensively in this book, and indeed was the very context with which we opened these pages, and has occupied us throughout.

3. The third point is this:

Thanks to Jesus we know God as we are known by Him (cf. Gal 4:9); 1 Cor 13:13). Indeed, in Christ, God has communicated himself to us and, at the same time, he has manifested to us our true identity as his children, created in the image of the Word. This “eternal Word … enlightens all men” (DV 4), revealing their truth in the eyes of the Father: “Your Father, who sees in secret will reward you” (Mt 6:4, 6, 18), says Jesus, and he adds that “your Father knows that you need all these things” (cf. Mt 6:32). Jesus Christ is the place where we recognize the truth of God the Father, while we discover ourselves known by Him as sons in the Son, called to the same destiny of full life. Saint Paul writes: “When the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son … so that we might receive adoption as children. And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “’Abba!’, Father!” (Gal 4:4-6).

Amen to this! Truly, Christ is the revelation of the tenderness and predilection of the heavenly Father’s gaze upon each one of us, cherishing us as his beloved children and thus both revealing our identity and setting us free, in love, to the fullness of love, to the joy of intimacy in reciprocal belonging. As the Son delights to remain always in the gaze of the Father’s delight, and in his presence plays without ceasing, so too he has come among us to awaken us to this same delight, to incorporate us into this same play, to welcome us into the innermost heartbeat of this same intimacy.

4. The final point that Pope Leo makes is:

Finally, Jesus Christ reveals the Father with his own humanity. Precisely because he is the Word incarnate that dwells among men, Jesus reveals God to us with his own true and integral humanity: “To see Jesus is to see His Father (Jn 14:9). For this reason, Jesus perfected revelation, fulfilling it through his whole work of making Himself present and manifesting Himself through His words and deeds, His signs and wonders, but especially through His death and glorious resurrection from the dead and final sending of the Spirit of truth” (DV, 4). In order to know God in Christ, we must welcome his integral humanity: God’s truth is not fully revealed where it takes something away from the human, just as the integrity of Jesus’ humanity does not diminish the fullness of the divine gift. It is the integral humanity of Jesus that tells us the truth of the Father (cf. Jn 1:18). It is not only the death and resurrection of Jesus that saves us and calls us together, but his very person: the Lord who becomes incarnate, is born, heals, teaches, suffers, dies, rises again and remains among us. Therefore, to honor the greatness of the Incarnation, it is not enough to consider Jesus as the channel of transmission of intellectual truths. If Jesus has a real body, the communication of the truth of God is realized in that body, with its own way of perceiving and feeling reality, with its own way of inhabiting and passing through the world. Jesus himself invites us to share his perception of reality: “Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?” (Mt 6:26).

God himself becomes man in Jesus Christ, his only-begotten Son sent into the world. God becomes man, a unity of body and spirit in perfect harmony in the single Person of the eternal Son. God becomes man, experiencing the three faculties of intellect, will, and affection, rooted in the inner “I” of his own Sacred Heart, radiating forth as the very “I” of the divine Son who is always in the bosom of the Father. God becomes man, feeling with human skin, walking with human legs, working with human hands, holding with human arms, and welcoming into himself, through his body, the whole beauty and brokenness of our world. And through his body the inner mystery of his Person pours forth into our world, radiant and beautiful. He is, even in the flesh, “the most beautiful of the sons of men” (cf. Ps 45:2), and yet this beauty is but the irradiation of his divine Beauty. He is good, in every act, every word, every thought and expression, with the very Goodness of the God who he is. He is the living Truth incarnate in our flesh and walking our earth, teaching us in human words, touching us palpably, and yet through all of this welcoming us into the spiritual space of his inner Being, so that, resting against his breast, we may find ourselves sheltered in the very embrace of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit…the ceaseless throbbing of their eternal heartbeat enveloping us and indeed stirring within our own hearts.
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Jesus reveals God through his way of perceiving and feeling reality in the body, through his own way of inhabiting and passing through the world in the body, and he invites us to share in this way of perceiving and living, that as he lived, so we too may live. As he beheld the beauty of the Trinity shining forth through all created things, with eyes of flesh that see the invisible, so too can we, in him. We are by grace called and enabled to look out upon the world with the very eyes of the incarnate Son of God, to behold the grass waving in the wind as a revelation of divine love, to behold the flesh of the human body as a sacrament of God, to behold all the creatures of God as signs of divine generosity and care, and indeed to embrace our own bodies as living sanctuaries of the Spirit and tabernacles of Christ. Through union with the body of Jesus, through union with him in the whole of his integral humanity, we are made capable of passing with him into the very heartbeat of the divine mystery of the Trinity, to find ourselves caught up into the innermost heart of the everlasting embrace and eternal play of the Father and the Son in the single kiss of the Spirit whom they share.