Seventh Sunday of Easter (Year A)
Acts 1.12-14;
Ps 26;
I Pet 4.13-16;
Jn 17.1-11
This is eternal life: that they know Thee the only true God,
and Jesus Christ whom Thou has sent.
Today’s gospel passage is taken from that great prayer of Our Lord which is known as His Priestly Prayer, in which He addresses His Father in a very moving dialogue in which he, as Priest, prays for Himself and his disciples, and offers to the Father the imminent sacrifice of His passion and death. In this prayer, He speaks of his glory, a glory which He has from the Father, a glory which will be revealed on the cross. The word ‘glory’ refers to the splendour, power, and honour which belong solely to God. And now in His death, and then more clearly in His resurrection and ascension, Christ’s divinity is being revealed. He has for thirty years voluntarily disguised His divinity, but now that divinity will be manifested through His humanity, when the apostles see His glorified body, a body invested with the very authority of God Himself. And through His glorification, He gives mankind the opportunity to attain eternal life, to know God the Father and Jesus Christ, His only Son. But note particularly the verb which Christ uses, the way in which man shares in eternal life: we do so by knowing God. This is eternal life: that they know thee the only true God.
In the daily readings for mass in the period after the resurrection we read about the activities of the Apostles, the ‘acts’ of the apostles; and earlier this week, we heard of Paul’s visit to Athens, where he saw an altar dedicated to ‘an unknown God’. Clearly, St Paul’s task then was to make God known to them, “This is eternal life: that they know Thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou has sent.” The God they worshipped as unknown had to be made known to them, so that they too might enjoy eternal life. And so he told the Athenians, “What you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.” His words provide us with two guidelines in thinking about our Catholic faith. In the first place, Saint Paul is prepared to work with the idea of God as unknown; and in the second place, he then asserts that this unknown God is in fact the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Our Lord Jesus Christ, who lived a human life and died a human death, yet who is also in the beginning with God, and who will come to judge the living and the dead at the end of time.
We then have two themes: one that God is unknown, and the second that he is knowable through the life of Christ. If we want to think correctly about our faith, we have to remember both these themes: we have to remember that God is larger than all our thoughts, and yet never forget that the historical life, death, and resurrection of Christ IS the definitive revelation of God.
In recent years there has been a very vocal rejection of anything that restricts or binds the human intellect in dealing with religion. Much of this rejection is wrong-headed and confused, but sometimes it is based on a genuinely religious foundation. This foundation is the Biblical notion (which is so strong in the Old Testament) that God is not our possession, that God’s ways are not our ways, that “as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts,” as God tells us through his prophet Isaiah. The Old Testament teaches us that the world and everything in it (including humanity) belongs to God and is subject to him. It is not we who ‘make God up’ or ‘project him’ out of our psychological, economic, or social needs; rather it is God who creates and sustains us.
When people protest against what they perceive as a narrow, petty or stuffy presentation of the Catholic faith, and when they do this because they sense that such a presentation is unworthy of the ‘King Of Kings and Lord of Lords, who alone has immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no man has ever seen or can see’ (to quote from Saint Paul’s Letter to Timothy), then they are voicing a side of the Catholic experience which must always remain present in our thinking. A third-century writer expressed this very powerfully: “The human mind is incapable of thinking adequately about God and his essential attributes, what he is, how great he is, and in what manner he exists. Nor can the art of human speech develop and eloquence proportional to his majesty, for he is greater than the mind itself.”
The Athenians to whom Paul addressed himself, if they were serious, displayed a real religious sense when they erected an altar to an unknown God. And yet St Paul’s proclamation consisted in the astonishing contention that Jesus Christ is this unknown God. As Paul says elsewhere, ‘He is the image of the invisible God.’ What we have to start with, then, is the unknown God as revealed in Jesus Christ, and we must try to keep both the unknowability of God and the intractable historical character of the affirmations of our faith alive in our hearts.
There are two very obvious ways of falling away from true faith in our Lord. Both of these ways are very old, and yet both are still very much with us today. One of these ways consists of seeing the historical life of Jesus as merely a vehicle to teach us philosophical truths about God and the world. The life of Christ is not important; it is only a kind of acting out of a truth that can and should be grasped by our intelligence without the help of historical accidents. This type of refusal reduces the life of Christ to an object lesson in timeless truth; it removes from the historical life of Christ any real significance either for our salvation, or for teaching us about the importance of our own worth and existence.
The other way is to ignore or deny the otherness, the hiddenness of God. Here, although full weight is given to the visible, to the particularity of Christ’s life, there is a tendency to forget that the world we live in, even and especially the world of the sacraments, receives its life and its meaning from the invisible Father. There is no Catholicism without the Incarnation and the sacraments, yet if we cling only to the visible, we leave the way open to a tendency to ignore our own supernatural vocation. We forget the great lesson of the Old Testament that the earth is the Lord’s and that it is not we who judge and use him, but he who judges and makes use of us. In the Old Testament, the glory of God hovered over the people of the covenant, and through them over the whole world. In the New Testament, this glory shows itself in God’s action in Christ, who loved His own through all the changes of this troubled life; He loved them in the shadow of death; He loved them on the cross. This love, which has no limit, and of whose existence no one had any knowledge before Christ is still at work today in the world, in our lives; but we cannot receive it unless we know it as coming from the unknown God, the Father of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ
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