No one has ever seen God. It is the only Son, himself God, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.

John 1:18

There is a reflection that we can make regarding what Pisani has included in this rather crowded painting and which is related to the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity that the Church celebrates on the first Sunday after Pentecost. If we start looking at the other figures surrounding Jesus, immediately we notice John, the beloved disciple, reclining close to his heart, as described in the Gospel according to Saint John, during the Last Supper before the Passion (see Jn 13:23).

The identity of this disciple remains unknown. The sacred author introduces us to this disciple that Jesus loved precisely at this point in the Gospel where the Lord’s hour had come. We come across this disciple again near the Cross, at the empty tomb and when Jesus appears again to the disciple near the Sea of Galilee. And in these three instances, this disciple shows that faith which Jesus expects of his disciples when he insists with them that they should believe in him. We could therefore say that he is the ideal disciple, a mirror image of who the disciple of Christ should be.

It is exactly this faith in the Master and total loyalty to him that draws him so close to Jesus, to the extent that he can recline close to his heart. The Evangelist uses the word κόλπος (kolpos) to describe the pose of the disciple. The word can mean both ‘chest’ and ‘bosom’. It might seem like a superfluous detail, but on considering the other instance when the Evangelist uses that word (the sentence quoted above from the Prologue), one soon realises the great importance of this word. The disciple is in the Master in the same way that the Son of God is in the Father. And so, gradually, the disciple also finds himself cradled in the bosom of the Father, at the heart of the Most Holy Trinity.

We might envy this disciple’s proximity to the heart of Jesus, but this privileged place is not denied to us because we are all disciples that Jesus loves. It only depends on whether, like the first disciples, we are prepared to follow the Lord until he leads us to the place where he is staying, and to remain with him (see Jn 1:35-39). The way may be long and dark, but it is possible to be embraced within the eternal love and intimacy between the persons of the Most Holy Trinity, and to start to dwell there starting from today for eternity.