"Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the Gospel,
and not with the wisdom of human eloquence,
so that the cross of Christ might not be emptied of its meaning." -1 Cor. 1:17
08/29/2014 Memorial of the Passion of St. John the Baptist
Have you ever tried to explain what Jesus means to you on a purely intellectual level? As St. Paul points out here in his letter to the Corinthians, it can very quickly drain the message of all it's meaning. Some people will use this as an excuse to say that they don't believe or that it is silly to believe in God and Jesus. They act like we are the simpletons or the unwise. Quite frankly, they sometimes act as if we're lunatics.
Well, let me start off by pointing out that we are in good company. Today we celebrate the Memorial of the Passion of St. John the Baptist. Surely, there were many people who thought John was nuts. He was living out in the wilderness, eating locusts and honey and proclaiming that he was making straight the paths for the messiah. (Keep in mind, by the way, how often we may have walked uncomfortably by people like this in the streets and quickened our step a little bit.) Think too of all the martyrs who were killed simply because they would not deny the unbelievable notion that Jesus Christ had risen from the dead after he was crucified.
So how then do we explain our relationship to Christ with others without ending up in a padded room wearing a tailored coat with the sleeves in the back? The only way left is not to try to explain who Christ is, but who he is to you. And no, I don't mean to say that Jesus Christ can be different things to every individual. First off, he is not a thing, he is a real being and we are not to make him in our image, we were made in his and must strive to conform to that as closely as we can. But in explaining what our relationship with God is like and by witnessing to how we have seen the Holy Spirit move in our lives, we explain God with a passion and a sincerity that people can truly feel.
God transcends intellectual understanding and as much as we try to contemplate Him using only our minds, we will always fall short. True faith cannot be cultivated on a solely intellectual level. Which is not to say that there aren't intellectual reasons for God's existence. But it's like trying to explain how I know my wife was meant to be my wife. Sure, I could make a list on a piece of paper, maybe even one side of pros and another side of cons, but that's just a laundry list. A list like that isn't going to verify for me that my wife is meant to be my wife. It is the relationship that my wife and I share every day that shows we were meant to join our lives together and raise our family. Come to think of it, in a world where 6 in 10 marriages end in divorce, who knows, maybe a lot of people think that's crazy too.
In the end, like most people who heard St. John the Baptist, they might ignore us as they look for 'signs' or some other intellectual verification and some might come to believe with their heads. Remember though, Jesus tells us that we need to believe like little children so let's try to get back to that. Let us express our belief in a loving, living God and a loving, living savior with the wide-eyed amazement and unbridled joy that children have. Knowing how merciful God is while still so powerful certainly does merit a large measure of joy and amazement and that kind of enthusiasm is hard to deny or to resist.
God bless,
P.D.O.
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