FROM CHILDHOOD A FACE BEGAN TO REVEAL ITSELF

Gianfranco Ravasi

«Christ placed us in front of a mystery, he put us in the situation of his disciples faced with the question: But, who do you say that I am?». These words which explain clearly and immediately every experience of meeting or confrontation with Christ, were written by an author whom I was lucky enough to know personally, Mario Pomilio who used them in his "Fifth Gospel". Well, that question which came from the lips of Jesus at Cesarea di Philippi does not only cross the centuries, it echoes in the heart of every person. And the reply is given in a thousand ways, at times surprising, at times disconcerting. I have always been impressed by the answer Kafka gave to his friend Gustav Janouch: «Christ is an abyss of light, into which, unless you close your eyes you will fall headlong». Modest and marginal, my testimony - as that of others - may seem awkward precisely because the question goes to the innermost point of conscience and "angles" in that profundity dominated by personal silence, intimacy, which perhaps can never be expressed. Two considerations however, are possible and immediate. First of all my experience is that of a believer, a priest, that is someone who has committed himself, his identity, his human story, linking it with that of Jesus Christ. In this dimension the fundamental element is paradoxically foreign to the "I" of the witness. Enlightening in this sense is Paul when he describes his "way to Damascus" using two verbs of revelation and one of struggle: «Christ appeared also to me (...) God deigned to reveal to me His Son (...) I was taken hold of by Christ» (1 Corinthians 15,8; Galatians 1,16; Philippians 3,12). In other words, at the beginning of the encounter with Christ there is "an epiphany", that is not my searching, but his appearance. This is why Soeren Kierkegaard, philosopher and believer, noted in his Diary on August 16th, 1839, this invocation: «Jesus, come looking for me along the paths of my distortions where I hide from you and from others!». In my intimate experience there is precisely this revelation of the divine not so much on a road, struck by a heavenly voice, as for Paul, but rather in a series of gentle, delicate epiphanies which began in childhood. And curiously they enter into a spirit which carried with it - then in an intuitive and fragile form - already an intense sense of the fragility of life and of things, of the flow of time and the inconsistency of reality.

Faced with a fruit in decomposition, the whistle of a train which lacerates the night and dies, at the first encounter with death, the suffering of war, a politically persecuted and therefore absent father, in my child's soul there grew not desolation or natural sadness, but slowly there took shape that "Epiphany" unexpected and still without form. It was Paul who helped me later to understand this contrast and its pacification when, amazed by the words of Isaiah («the prophet dares to say») he wrote this divine "confession": «I have been found by those who did not seek me and revealed myself to those who did not consult me!» (Romans 10,20). Before the reply to the question "Who do you say that I am?", for me (and for all) Christ had already said who he really was.In the beginning then, there is his word which shakes you and leaves you disconcerted. Certainly it is always possible to look elsewhere and block your ears with other voices and sounds and this is true for me and for more or less everyone, with the passing years, along the paths, not always straight, of life. This is why I consider just as important another question of Jesus, the one posed in Capernaum. It was used as a title for a "Life of Christ" by another writer particularly dear to me, Luigi Santucci: «Will you also go away?» This question is asked of the apostles immediately after a great "epiphany", that of the continued presence of Christ under the signs of the Eucharistic bread and wine. A question which does not always receive Peter's instant reply: «To whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life». However, even if we do go away, Christ does not stop following us, with discretion or with insistence. When, later, I studied theology I was impressed by a phrase by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a theologian killed by the Nazis, who in his Christology affirmed: «Christ is not such, to be Christ-for himself, but in reference to me. His being-Christ is his being-for-me».

In my personal story there is however second dimension which I must mention and it is that I have been an exegete, a scholar of Sacred Scripture and therefore of the evangelical words of Christ. Already as a boy after primary school I began to study Greek on my own - I was fascinated by those 64.327 Greek words which make up the four Gospels. Later I studied those verses ever more deeply; I discovered new iridescence in every term and gradually there emerged the profile of Christ made up of two images. On the one hand there was the figure of Jesus of Nazareth, the travelling rabbi whose lips said surprising things but in a "barbaric" and concrete tongue, whose hands worked gestures, amazing but not "advertising", whose feet walked towards a great and heavenly destination but stepped along the dusty roads of Palestine, whose interlocutors were often a group of non-people, or proud bureaucrats of the sacred and the law, even traitors. For a long time I was interested - to use a more "technical" term - in the historical Jesus, as he can be found through critical analysis of the Gospel texts.On the other hand, there is the figure of Christ, Son of God whose face is illuminated by the splendour of Easter.

The Gospels are in the first place a hymn to the Risen one, a hymn which springs from an encounter with him, from the faith and from joyful proclamation. This is why I have sought to emphasize, in my writings, conferences and almost ten years of television work, this aspect which in the past was so dominant that it became exclusive, and erased the historical face of Christ, but which, in recent times, has almost always been put in parenthesis. First a "sociological" vision, then a historical and apologetic concept was offered to show the historical Jesus, with the conviction that only thus is the basis for true Christology. Well, Jesus Christ is one, but in two natures, any division impoverishes and distances him. He is one of us, with us, but he is also beyond us, above us. He is, to use the vocabulary of John, Logos, "word" perfect, supreme and divine, he is sarx "flesh" and history. To preserve the unity of Jesus Christ, not to separate his person in a Jesus of Nazareth and a Risen Christ, is an important duty of faithful proclaimers of the Gospel.Exegetical study therefore is not a cold philological exercise (although it does demand digging into the text with rigor and precision). It is also an adventure in our spirit which is invited to respond to the question at Cesarea from where we set out. I have always liked a phrase of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus logico-philisophicus: «I wanted to examine the outline of an island; but I discovered the boundaries of the Ocean». One begins by encountering a concrete language, a figure, dated and confined to that anicent province of the Roman Empire, historical events and dates, but in the end one realises that the person is immersed in the Ocean of divinity, he is precisely "The Christ, the Son of the Living God", as Peter, son of Jona, answered that day.

(Gianfranco Ravasi, a priest of the diocese of Milan since 1966, is Prefect of the Ambrosian Library, docent in Biblical Exegesis at the Theological faculty of Northern Italy and a memebr of the Pontifical Bible Commission. He has written numerous books and works for television.)