Experience and knowledge of Christ

Jesus came to our world; but the world did not know Him He came to what was His own, but His own people did not accept Him (Jn 1:10-11). He came to every town around the Lake of Galilee proclaiming the Kingdom of God. He called His first disciples from the fisherfolk. He did not just preach; he also cured the sick, expelled devils from those possessed, worked miracles like the healing of a paralytic and a man with a withered hand, he commanded the storm to calm down. In a word, He went about doing good.

When He came to His own town of Nazareth, His townsmates rejected Him. How can He work such mighty deeds like that? Where did He get all that wisdom? He of all people, the carpenter son of Mary? "And they took offense at Him" (Mk 6:3). Why the offense? The attitude is very typical of the common envy which possess society’s upper-crust if someone from the lower ranks would be accorded some honor beyond his status in society. Can anything good come from the squatter area, or the hovels built atop garbage dumps, or the nipa huts by the countrysides with nothing to their name except that they are poor farmers or laborers?

For this reason, we cannot but decry the emergence of the old Jewish dichotomy which traced a boundary line between the powerful like the high priests in their day and the powerless like the common crowds who were tired, hungry both physically and spiritually, the sick and the suffering, those who needed healing from all kinds of malady including possession by the devil. Base on the experience of those to whom Christ ministered, how did each person know Christ? As an ordinary faith-healer like our Filipino arbularios? A philanthropist, His good works robbed of all its transcendental dimension, stripped of all the fundamental law of human perfection which is love, the new commandment which transforms the world?

Unfortunately this is the way, one could summarize the diverging lines of current thought and of Christian action. The cause of this dichotomy, of this meaningless fragmentation of the Christ in the Gospels is the fact that we are not fully aware through experience and knowledge of the facets of the love of God which has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit (Rom 5:5). Only this awareness and lived experience of Christ in faith and charity, will enable us to present Christ whole and not mutilated. We can do this only if we have obtained the spirit of wisdom and perception of what the Spirit reveals to us about Christ, through our experience of Him in prayer (Eph 1:17-18). Only from Him, in whom abides the fullness of divine life – and not from theorizes or from any power of this world – can we receive that life and lead others to the fullness of the whole Christ, which is the Church.

The idea we have formed of Christ – not to raise problems or to argue or debate, but only to feel His presence and love Him, to seek Him and find Him – determines our relationship to God and Christian relationship with man and the world. Of utmost importance, therefore, is the response that each of us gives interiorly to the question Jesus put to those who were about to follow Him: "Who do people say the Son of Man is" (Mt 16,14)? The whole history of the Church, its whole present state and the whole future of the Kingdom, awaits the response we will give, both collectively and individually; a response which no doubt, in its countless valid formulations serves as a basis for fraternal dialogue for mutual enrichment and for the fuller understanding of Christ’s inner self.

Fourteen Sunday in Ordinary Time, Mark 6.1-6.