Following Jesus Today: The Church
The concrete reality of the Catholic Church as the continuation of the presence and action of Jesus in the world is a particularly crucial point to which we Catholics must bear witness in the world today. In the midst of a culture of loneliness and absence of meaning, people have begun to rediscover the beautiful and compelling life of Jesus of Nazareth and the claim he made about himself and the relationship of every man to himself. "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me." More and more people experience the exhilarating conviction that this Jesus of Nazareth possesses the key to the mystery of human existence and that they must therefore follow him without reservation. There is a great desire among those who rediscover Jesus to entrust themselves to him completely, to "do whatever he tells you."
This desire, however, gives rise to a puzzling and often agonizing question for the person of today — "How do I follow him?"
In Palestine in 30 A.D. the answer to this question had a certain direct circumstantial simplicity to it. One could go up to the Master and simply say, "I want to be your disciple." The original disciples followed Jesus by actually, physically following him around, listening to him, doing what he asked them to do, spending time with him and watching him, making him the model of their lives, receiving his healing power, his grace, his forgiveness. Then, Jesus ascended into heaven; his humanity took its definitive place at the center of all creation from which he would rule as Lord of all the universe and Lord of all history.
So now he's in heaven. But I'm still on earth. How do I follow him now? If I were living in the time immediately after the Ascension, the question would still have been relatively uncomplicated from a sociological point of view. There were these 12 men who had spent a lot of time with him, who knew him intimately — I would go stay with them, watch them, do what they told me to do. In fact, Jesus pointed these men out explicitly: he said to them, "He who hears you, hears me." They were the men that Jesus has directly "sent" to continue his work. If I spoke Greek I would refer to this "sending" by calling them "apostles." The apostles are the emissaries of Jesus; they are the direct "link" with the humanity of Jesus.
But now two thousand years separate us from Jesus and his apostles. How can I be in vital contact with Jesus now? If Jesus says, "no one comes to the Father except through me. . . no one attains to the goal and the fulfillment of his existence except through me"; if he means that I am obligated to believe in him and follow him now, in the 21st century, then he must have established some means whereby I can be in contact with him. What does it mean to belong to Christ today? When I look around, I see a lot of people who call themselves Christians, "followers of Christ" (which is what I want to be). And yet everybody says different things. There are all these different, competing claims about "the true way to follow Christ." How do I judge between them? How can I determine which way is the true way? Remember, if Jesus really made the claim to be the salvation of men in all times, then there must be some concrete possibility to follow him now.
Classical Catholic apologetics has various ways of arguing that the Catholic Church is the Church founded by Christ, that is, the way that he intended people to follow him and attain salvation. These arguments from Sacred Scripture and history are quite persuasive in themselves, but they are often misunderstood or undervalued by someone who is seeking what is commonly referred to as a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Therefore, in our current situation, it is crucial for Catholics to present not only the classical apologetical proofs for the Church, but also to bear witness to the uniquely intimate way in which the Catholic Church enables us to have a total, personal, life-changing relationship with Jesus. This witness depends upon a full and uncompromising presentation of what the mystery of the Incarnation really means.
This of course implies, first and foremost, the concrete reality of God incarnate. There can be no real personal relationship with a merely theoretical Jesus, or a Jesus constructed out of our imagination who is merely an image that corresponds to some kind of felt need for meaning in life. Jesus is true God and true man, consubstantial with the Father in his Divinity and united with us in his humanity according to every proper aspect of human nature (body and soul, senses, human intellect, human will, "human heart" — the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus is a human heart in every respect) — we say with St. Paul that he "became like us in all things but sin." It is essential to genuine Christianity to recognize that the Incarnation is a real event that took place. God the Son took on a human nature in the womb of a 14 year old Jewish girl named Miriam of Nazareth, he was born, he lived, he worked, he preached and healed, he gathered followers around him, he suffered on the Cross, he rose from the dead — he, the Creator of the universe. The Incarnation has to do with events of history, with particularity, with a human concreteness that you can point to. The Incarnation is not an abstract "mythical" symbol that "didn't really happen" but that supposedly illustrates some universal, cosmic truth about "God's closeness to man." The Incarnation is the historical event in which God draws close to man. Without such an event, God remains a transcendent Mystery whose existence can be known but whose saving power and love seem shrouded in obscurity before our dim human vision and behind the awful experiences of human weakness and human cruelty, and the seemingly implacable force of suffering and death. If the life of Jesus is nothing more than a story invented by us, which people use to try to reassure other people that the Mysterious God somehow loves them, then the terrible obscurity remains; the world and the circumstances of our real lives still seem dominated by the absence of God and the reign of death, and the story — no matter how loudly we tell it — will not conjure up for us the Divine saving presence.
On the contrary, what awakens genuine interest in Jesus today is the historical truth of his claim. If Jesus is really God incarnate, then this means that the Invisible, Unapproachable God has revealed the mystery of himself through a visible, audible, tangible man. It means that we do not have to try to build a bridge — a desperately and badly constructed bridge — between ourselves and the Infinite Mystery of God. God has built a bridge to us.
Indeed, the historical concreteness of the Incarnation indicates the "method" (if you will) that God uses in order to reach us. God's invisible, spiritual, supernatural love and mercy is revealed and given by means of the visible, the materially concrete, the human reality which becomes the "vehicle" of something infinitely beyond itself. Indeed we can sum up this method — "the method of the Incarnation" — by the word sacramental. God's presence and action in history, begun in the Incarnation, perpetuates and extends itself throughout space and time sacramentally. We will explain below the crucial significance of this.
It is worth noting first of all that this method makes a lot of sense. Visible, tangible, concrete realities are the starting point of every man's knowing process — thus the "easiest" way for God to communicate with man is to make himself available to man right here, in the world of sensible realities where man's knowledge begins. This is an approach that is adapted to all men, not merely philosophers and mystics or those with the leisure to consider abstract questions. It is also an approach that is wonderfully merciful to fallen man — we poor human beings who in our disorder are always seeking our fulfillment among the limited things of the world suddenly come upon Something in the world that really does correspond to our hearts. This is what the Incarnation is all about; as St. John expresses it in his first letter: "What we have heard, what we have seen, what we have looked upon and our hands have touched — THE WORD OF LIFE"!
God became man so that he could be seen, heard, and touched, so that he could teach with a human voice, so that he could stretch forth a human hand over a person and say "your sins are forgiven," and — in the ultimate humiliation to which he was impelled in His gratuitous love — so that he could break his human body on the Cross and distribute it as "food and drink" to the whole human race, so that his death-defeating, immortal, risen human flesh could generate the resurrection of the flesh of all those who eat his body and drink his blood.
God became man so that he could be seen, heard, and touched. Now of course, there is always a sense in which Divine truth and the Mystery of God are invisible — indeed God is invisible as such, which means that he himself can never become subject to the limitations of sense objects and the judgment of sense knowledge. After all, if I merely look at Jesus my senses tell me "He's only a man." God does not reduce himself to what is visible; he does not reduce his Mystery to the limitations of earthly realities. But he does communicate his Invisible Mystery through visible realities; which means that even though my eyes don't see the invisible essence of God when they look at the humanity of Jesus, nevertheless my eyes looking at the humanity of Jesus is the starting point for faith; it is the way that my heart and soul come to know (by faith) who God is.
Jesus' living humanity is the method by which God wills to communicate his grace and revelation to man. This is the method that follows as a consequence of the Incarnation, and it is the method that is most adapted to the condition of man who walks through the world of space and time. Therefore, this same method must characterize the way that God saves me today. Why did Jesus rise from the dead? Was it to become less present, less active, less effective in his saving mission? Why did Jesus ascend into heaven — was it so that the revelation he brought might cease to present itself to our senses, might remove itself from human history, becoming once again intangible, unapproachable, distant? Was it because he didn't want to meet people one-on-one anymore, didn't want to call them personally, accompany them personally in their lives, personally forgive their sins?
On the contrary. In the Resurrection and Ascension, Jesus' humanity is transfigured and perfected; it does not cease to exist or cease to be significant. His humanity becomes greater, and the human energy of his mission becomes more extensive: after the resurrection Jesus becomes more capable (not less capable!) of being present on the roads of the world. Jesus' humanity has reached its perfection, and that means a perfection of his humanity's capacity to mediate salvation to man, to be humanly present in the concrete life of man.
Therefore, today, I should be able to find a place in the world where the followers of Jesus still have access to his humanity in all of the human facets that he displayed during his earthly mission. This place where I can follow Jesus must be a place in which his mission continues to be carried out visibly, audibly, tangibly in all of the aspects that are proper to it. There must be a human reality in the world that continues the human presence of Jesus. "I am with you all days, even unto the consummation of the world."
If I were in Judea and Galilee in 30-33 A.D., I would have been able to interact immediately with Jesus. I could have listened to his teaching with the certitude that it was God's teaching, and the certitude that it had not been corrupted since it was coming directly from the mouth of God's definitive instrument. I could have listened with confidence that this one human voice was to be followed over all the other conflicting voices, including the confused voice of my own narrow subjectivity. I could have obeyed the will of this man, done the things he told me to do, and practiced his demands in my life, confident that his will was the expression of the will of God for my life. I could have gone up to this man and told him all my sins, and when he said, "your sins are forgiven" I would have known that God had forgiven my sins in that very moment when he enunciated these words with his human voice. I could have stood at the foot of the Cross in the very moment when he was dying for my sins; I could have touched his Risen flesh with my hands, and sat with him at table when he broke bread and said, "Take this and eat, this is my body."
These are the human gestures and human actions through which Jesus saved people. Therefore, even today, I want to be in touch with these saving human gestures and human actions of the God-man. Jesus says, "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life." Jesus is saying here, "Through me you learn infallibly what the truth about God is; I show you how you must live your life; and my action is what makes it possible for you to have that 'new humanity,' that supernatural life for which you were created."
Thus the place where I can follow Jesus today must be the place where his teaching continues with a single voice, his instruction continues through a single authority, and his sanctifying work continues through human gestures that communicate Divine life. Unless all of these aspects are available to me now, how can the humanity of Christ be my salvation?
Is it enough to have a book that tells me about what he did 2000 years ago, with some merely interior assurance that it applies to me now? Is it enough for me to have a book — even a book that I believe to be Divinely inspired — is it enough for me to have a book about a man who did things 2000 years ago, things the human images of which I have to reconstruct with my own imagination? Is it enough to have maybe a group of people with whom I can talk about Jesus and try to stimulate my memory and emotions with words spoken about his absent humanity? Is it enough to have God as a "spiritual presence within," as though after the Incarnation, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus, God suddenly decided to abandon the method of using human realities as his instruments, and instead to give direct, interior, spiritual subjective revelations? — revelations, moreover, about which everyone disagrees and which each interprets in his own way, so that the clear human voice of Jesus can no longer be distinguished in the cacophony of conflicting testimonies to inner experiences?
Or is there a hypothesis, which is much simpler, more consistent, more adequate, more in keeping with the kind of man Jesus was and the character and intent of his mission? The very nature of Jesus' presence in the world as God incarnate suggests that the fundamental characteristics of this presence must continue if Jesus' saving work is to continue. This means that, in some humanly real way, the same possibilities for interacting with Jesus must exist today that existed in 30 A.D. Indeed the possibility of "encountering" Jesus must be greater now, not less! "Greater works than these you shall perform, because I go to the Father."
It is certainly true that the manner of Jesus' presence is different. But as we have already indicated, this presence is a more profound and more extensive presence. Some might argue that it is "harder" to encounter Jesus in his "mystical" presence in the Church than it was to perceive him in the earthly flesh of His pre-resurrected humanity, when one could simply look at him with bodily eyes. Yet, as we indicated already, encountering Jesus, then and now, has always involved the internal grace of faith that enables one to understand what is present to one's eyes and ears.
In this regard, we must emphasize that when Jesus rose from the dead and ascended into heaven, he sent the Holy Spirit. Some non-Catholic Christians misunderstand the significance of this, however. They believe that the Holy Spirit replaces the humanity of Jesus; that the work of Christ's humanity is over and done, and that everything is now left to the interior, illuminating presence of the Spirit testifying in the heart of the person. But, in the Catholic understanding, Jesus sends the Holy Spirit in order to deepen and amplify the mediation of his humanity, not to lessen it. The Holy Spirit effects the interiorization of what Jesus gives me through his sacred humanity, but my personal encounter with Jesus retains its human concreteness — Jesus remains humanly objective, "in front of me and not simply "within" me (although He is also within me). Jesus became incarnate precisely so that man would not be alone in his own subjectivity, so that there would be a humanly perceivable reality in front of man to which man could lovingly surrender himself, and upon which man could depend. Jesus became incarnate so as to mediate the way, the truth, and the life to man from a "position" that is outside of his own subjectivity, a "reference point" that is objective for every man, "present" for every man. "No one has ever seen God; it is the Only Son, ever at the Father's side, who has revealed him" (John 1:18). The Protestant tendency to locate the decisive (and even exclusive) reference point of Christianity in the inner illumination of the Spirit rather than in an objective human presence (a presence to which the Spirit bears witness) has led us inexorably into the trap of subjectivism — ultimately, there is no objective authority that can ever tell me that my inner experience or personal interpretation is wrong, and there is no objective contact with the human concreteness of the Mediator who saves me. But I want (and I need) this contact! I am not pure spirit. I am not pure consciousness. I am a man of soul and body, and God became man so as to address me wholly, soul and body. "The flesh profits nothing" — but the "flesh" (sarx) is not the bodily aspect of my person, but bodiliness emphasized exclusively and in itself, bodiliness "cut off from the soul, bodiliness that is not integrated into my personal reality as a human being. Christ's words "are spirit and life," but that means that they are spiritual in a way that informs life, human life; they are spiritual in a way that communicates life also to the body, that saves the body from degenerating into dead flesh and restores it to its integral place within the human person. Human spirituality without the body is as bad (probably worse) as human carnality unruled by the soul. The human being needs the integration of both; which is why he needs the mediation of the Incarnate Word.
This understanding of the Incarnation has implications for our question about "how to follow Jesus today." In the world of today, I must look for a human voice that teaches the truth of Jesus with consistency, with unity, with infallibility. I must look for a human authority to which I can entrust myself, which I can follow with confidence because the demands of this authority communicate to me clearly and unambiguously the will of Christ, which is for the ultimate good of my person. I must look for those human gestures through which Jesus himself calls me to be his disciple, strengthens me and sends me off to bear witness to him, looks upon me compassionately and forgives my sins. I must find a way to "stand at the foot of the Cross" — to be touched directly, physically by that once-and-for-all sacrificial act that happened so long ago but that happened with direct reference tome.
If I were to find the place where all of these factors were present, I would find the place where Jesus continues to be present and where the saving mission of his sacred humanity continues to operate with all of the human immediacy suggested by "incarnation." Indeed, I would find that place, that human and divine reality, called the Catholic Church.
Thus, we can observe that if we really understand the implications of the truth of the Incarnation — the truth that Jesus is the One Mediator between God and man, that God communicates salvation through his sacred humanity — we are led to a virtual "outline" of the Catholic Church as she exists today.
What we have observed about the mission of Christ's humanity is often expressed in Catholic theology as his threefold office of Priest, Prophet, and King. This means that the task of Jesus is to sanctify (as priest), to teach (as prophet), and to rule (as king). We see, too, that Jesus "commissions" the apostles, he "sends" his apostles into all the world — "as the Father has sent me, so I send you." The implications of this "sending" are clear: the apostles receive a participation in Christ's mission, so that the presence and action of Jesus will remain a living reality in the world — indeed so that it will extend throughout the world.
Thus we recognize Christ's presence in the world today when we see the full continuation of his mission. In the Catholic Church alone can we recognize in its fullness this continuation of Christ's mission. In her sacramental life we see the continuation of Christ's sanctifying work, above all the perpetuation of the work he accomplished once and for all on the Cross. Thus Jesus Christ the High Priest lives and acts in the Church's sacramental life. In the Church's magisterium we see a humanly identifiable and authoritative body of teaching that preserves and develops with consistency the implications of that Divine teaching which Christ gave the world in his Prophetic ministry. Thus Jesus Christ the Prophet lives and acts in the Church's magisterium, whose single voice and unshakable fidelity to Christ's truth is guaranteed by the special office of the successor of St. Peter. Finally, in the Church's public and "structural" reality, in her "law," her worship, her spiritual and moral guidance, her authoritative formation and direction of the lives of her members, Jesus continues to speak concretely to the particulars of our lives; he continues to lead us, to rule us. Thus Jesus Christ the King lives and acts through the judgment of the Church's ministers and through the wisdom of her saints, which is discerned and fostered by the Church's "shepherds."
It is not unreasonable to conclude therefore that God's method of dealing with man — the Incarnation, God's "becoming man" — requires as its complement a fully human social reality to carry on the work of this man, a society, a "man writ large" that continues to be the objective, visible, historical, verifiable, encounterable instrument of the Divine presence and salvific will. Thus, the Church of Christ must be a social reality that perpetuates in itself all the relevant human features of Jesus' mission. Anything less amounts to a "disincarnation" of sons, a movement away from an objective, historically consistent, here-and-now-in-front-of-me reference point for Divine authority in my life; a movement away from the "method" of the incarnation and toward a subjective, historically divergent, unverifiable personal consciousness that I cannot distinguish from myself by simple objective criteria, and that leads inexorably toward the subjectivism, relativism, and human fragmentation that have produced the hollow alienation and loneliness of the modern world. Attempts to justify this subjective turn in the name of the "work of the Holy Spirit" neglect the fact that the Holy Spirit works within man's inferiority in accordance with man's nature as a subject oriented toward objective reality; that is, he leads man outward toward Christ and the Father.
Catholic apologetics is able to show from Scripture and the early history of the Church that Jesus founded a visible society to perpetuate his mission: the Catholic Church. It is important also to stress the significance of this for my personal relationship with Jesus. Jesus founded the Church to continue his presence in the world, to make sure that his saving power and love can come concretely, visibly, tangibly into my life just as it did for the first disciples. He singled out particular individuals and said to them: "Continue doing throughout the world this task that I came for — teach the truth about God, lead men to their salvation, baptize them, feed them with my body and blood, forgive their sins — extend my mission, my human presence into all the world so that through you I can touch every man and lead him to my Father in the same way that I have touched you.
Jesus of Nazareth did not found a loose fellowship of people who observed him and then gathered later to reminisce about him. He founded a visible society within which he continues to dwell not only "spiritually" but also "sacramentally" — so that even though my eyes don't see his human flesh, the "logic" of the Incarnation perdures in the world: from the moment of Mary's consent until the end of time there will always be a "place" in the world, in my concrete everyday world, where God is really present in his humanity — to nourish me, heal me, and through His sacramental ministers to teach me and guide and correct me, so that everything he began to do on the shores of the Sea of Galilee continues today and reaches me right where my weak, sinful, distracted humanity needs it! By means of this Church, Jesus personally brings his human closeness to wherever I am, in whatever time or place. He "goes into all the world. . . "
This is the real possibility for a truly personal relationship with Jesus Christ. We Catholics must rediscover this wonderful gift in our own lives, and then bear witness to our separated brethren that the Catholic Church is the fullness of what it means to accept Jesus as Lord and Savior; the Church is the arms of Jesus stretched out to embrace us, the voice of Jesus to teach us and to reassure us, the power of Jesus to forgive us and nourish us, the radiance of his face to be recognized and loved throughout the world.
Mr. John Janaro is an assistant professor of theology at Christendom College in Front Royal, Virginia. He is the author of a book entitled Fishers of Men (1986), which presents twenty short biographies of contemporary American Catholics. This is his first article in HPR.
This item 3705 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org
