25th Week in Ordinary Time - Friday (28 September 2018)
Ecclesiastes 3:1-11
Luke 9:18-22
“You are the Christ of God and the Son of Man.”
Jesus is a person who touches everyone, someone who causes a strong reaction, either favourable or unfavourable. You can't be indifferent to him for a long time. You may have to react or respond to him, sooner or later. Who is Jesus for you? Even if you don't give an answer, you may have to live it.
Yes, we formally believe that Jesus is both human and divine at the same time. But practically we don't seem to apply it in our lives. Jesus for all practical purposes ended up being only divine. And we ended up being only human. Please do not conclude I'm heretic, but it is formally incorrect to say "Jesus is God," as most Christians without thinking do. Jesus is the perfect union of "very God" with "very man." For Christians, the Trinity is God, and Jesus came forth to take us back with him into this eternal embrace of the Triune God, which is where we first came from (John 14:3), and this is what it means to have an eternal soul. In fact it would be a heresy to say that Jesus is only God, or he is only man. Mind you, Christ is not the last name or surname of Jesus. We use (unite) the two names almost always, but practically do we realise the meaning of them? Jesus is the union of human and divine in space and time, and the Christ is the eternal union of matter and Spirit from the beginning of time.
Unfortunately, we do often miss the major point—which was to put the two together in him—and then dare to discover the same in ourselves! We are God's image and likeness, in flesh and blood. Christian revelation was precisely that you are already spiritual ("in God"), and your difficult but necessary task is to learn how to become human. Jesus came to model the full integration for us (see 1 Corinthians 15:47-49) and, in effect, told us that Divinity looked just like him—while he looked ordinarily human to everybody. It is in our humanity that we are still so wounded, so needy, so unloving, so self-hating, and so in need of enlightenment. Down the centuries, we have only insisted from people to be spiritual and religious, whereas our record on basic humanness is rather pitiful. We have even killed in God's name! Have we forgotten to be human, humane, kind and compassionate?
We are already the children of God. But how do we live it in this world? How human, how humane are we?
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