JESUS CHRIST: THAT INSATIABLE THIRST FOR TRUTH AND BEATY

George Weigel

If Jesus Christ is the answer to the inherent question in every human life - like John Paul II has so eloquently taught - then what is the question put by my life and for which Jesus Christ constitutes the answer? The big issue of my life - the big issue of every life - is the issue of salvation. We were born with an insatiable thirst for the truth, for goodness and for beauty. But from the moment we cross the threshold of adulthood we learn, often at our expense, that that thirst cannot be satisfied by this world. And yet the thirst persists. We love and yet we crave for a total love. We understand and yet we would like to understand more in depth. In the face of beauty we are left speechless, but every terrestrial beauty fades away. We sin, we repent, we experiment pardon: yet we would like to live a new life, purified from guilt. All this means that we look for redemption, a redemption that will transform us to the point of truly becoming «new men». Jesus Christ is for me, above all and over everything, my saviour: the redeemer of the world, the redeemer of man. In the conversion to Christ we really are born to new life. When I was baptized in Christ, on 29 April 1951, I was offered the gift of salvation: not for any merit of mine, but through the true grace of God. And grace is an incessant gift. In the Eucharist, in the Sacrament of Reconciliation, in the sacramental life of marriage, I am constantly conformed to Christ who invites me to communion with the Holiest Trinity, in which I will find only the fullness of truth, goodness and beauty - the redemption - which I crave for.

My experience of Jesus Christ alive was, and is, mediated for me through culture: at the beginning, when I was a child from the culture of the family, through the example of my parents. Later I arrived to know Christ better through the culture of the parish, of school and of ecclesial organisations. Subsequently my knowledge of Christ was deepened through the study of theology. But these cultural «mediations» of the living Christ must always lead to a personal meeting with the Lord - to what our Protestant brothers define «the personal experience of Jesus Christ». This personal meeting takes place in prayer, in the sacraments, in the many and surprising, sometimes troubling, forms in which the Lord presents himself to me in the world of men. Yet at whatever moment and wherever you meet him, it is the Person of Jesus Christ that comes to me in answer to that question which is my life. The Lord defines himself a way of access; this means for me that Jesus Christ is the portal of the Church, its mystical body. To configure oneself to Christ in the Baptism, in Confirmation and in the Holy Eucharist is not a privilege of a few: it is the authentic incorporation in the community, the communion of saints. «Taking on» Jesus Christ is thus equivalent to «taking on» the Church itself.

My personal relationship with Jesus Christ, the redeemer, therefore implicates a commitment towards his Church. This is my first community, faithful and binding. In the first place I am a citizen, an intellectual and also a husband and a father, I am a member of the Body of Christ and here resides the deepest locus of my tie. But precisely because incorporating oneself to Christ is not a private privilege, the incorporation in the communion of his Church is not a journey to the catacombs. And it is precisely as a member of the Church that I can be the kind of husband, father, citizen, thinker and writer that I must be. Precisely because the Church exists, not for itself but for the evangelisation of the world, my belonging to the Church is not a heritage to hide, but a gift to hand out at the service of those who the Lord has placed beside me as companions in life.

All this could appear easy, but in fact it is not. Taking on Jesus Christ means undertaking with the Lord the path of the Cross. It means learning, day after day, that the realisation of oneself is carried out only through the abandonment of oneself. And learning, going against the current of contemporary culture, that the gift of oneself, not «self-esteem», represents the truth of life. In the final analysis, it means, learning that the Pascal mystery of death and resurrection is not simply something that happened two thousand years ago; it is rather the authentic dimension of reality as it was created, redeemed and sanctified by God. Christianity cannot be - in my opinion - defined appropriately as a sub-layer of that universal human phenomenon that they call «religion».

«Religion» as it is intended in today's culture (with its recent opening to «spirituality») is man in search of God. Christianity is God in search of man. Or, to define it more correctly with Hans von Balthasar, «religion is the world travelling toward God. Christianity is God travelling toward the world and those who believe in Him who follow the same direction». This truth comes knocking imposingly on our doors at Christmas. It's the same truth that the angels announced to the shepherds in the fields above Bethlehem: God, to reach the world, made himself man in order to be able to fully enter the pain of the world to transform it into joy. This is the journey that the shepherds are invited to undertake: to go in search of God, not in the splendour of an angelic procession in the skies, but «dressed in bandages as he lay in a manger».

Nearing Christmas with the shepherds is therefore recognising that Jesus Christ is also, and always, a scandal. The Incarnate Verb, through which all things were created, subordinates itself and its freedom to a bond of human nature. The mystery will be deeper, like the scandal of Christ, between Christmas and Holy Week: since the boy of Bethlehem will become a sign of contradiction for a world that will refuse him, insult him, and finally kill him. But that mystery, that scandal that is Jesus Christ doesn't end with his death. The child of God continues his trip toward that part of the «world» where the world has never been: the kingdom of the dead who are waiting for his redemption. And it is here that the total sacrifice of the Son is redeemed by the father in the Resurrection of Jesus who, as Christ Resurrected, sends his Spirit so that we can all share the new life that is the fruit of his saving death. It is not just one of the many examples of religion like Jesus Christ is not just one of the many holy men. This is the truth of the world or the most insane human claim.

(GEORGE WEIGEL is a Professor at the Ethics and Public Policy Centre of Washington, D.C. His most significant works include, The Final Revolution and the Collapse and Soul of the World: Notes on the Future of Public Catholicism. At present he is working on a biography of John Paul II, that will be published in October of next year.)