Our Christmas season leaves us with a clear message about who Jesus is: son of Mary, God with us, savior of the world. Now we immediately move to a related but perhaps more difficult question – who are we? What does this recognition of Jesus mean for our understanding of ourselves?
In our readings today we hear from three people who had a very clear understanding of what it meant, for them individually, and for the world. They all understood deeply how God was working in the world and it changed them totally. But just because they seem so clear and assured in their understanding, that shouldn’t make us imagine they didn’t struggle to get to that point.
Isaiah, like many of the prophets, didn’t want to go there at all: “Woe is me, I am doomed! For I am a man of unclean lips, living among a people of unclean lips” (Isa 6:7) But he went on to proclaim how this would all change. In today’s reading (Is 49:3, 5-6): “I will make you [Israel and, by extension, Jesus] a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth”.
Paul was only too aware of how he’d started off in totally the wrong direction as he tried to stamp out the early Christian believers. He now introduces himself to the Christians in Corinth (1 Cor 1:1-3): “Paul, called to be an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God“.
And John the Baptist (Jn 1:29-34): ‘A man is coming after me who ranks ahead of me because he existed before me’… ‘I did not know him’… ‘Now I have seen and testified that he is the Son of God.’ We don’t know anything of John before he started his prophesy of baptism, but the way he tells this sounds like it took him some effort to reach this conclusion.
But regardless of how they got there, in retrospect it’s clear that they arrived at a point of understanding, of who Jesus was, who they were, and what they were supposed to do about it. We may feel completely overwhelmed by the idea that we are in any way like them. We probably don’t feel that certainty, and we certainly don’t feel their confidence that we know what we should do about whatever we do feel. Paul however addresses his little church in Corinth as “you who have been sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be holy”. He was called, they were called, and we have been called.
But to what!, you might ask, probably feeling by turns both frustrated and annoyed.
John Henry Newman, a great English theologian, recently canonized, who himself went through a maybe similar tortuous process to Paul in his conversion to Catholicism, is similarly clear: “God has created me to do Him some definite service. He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. I have my mission”. No ambiguity there.
But what I love is what follows on: “I may never know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next”.
God does not ask us to be certain, to know and understand everything, he asks us to have faith. Newman reflects on this:
Therefore, I will trust Him, whatever I am, I can never be thrown away. If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him, in perplexity, my perplexity may serve Him. If I am in sorrow, my sorrow may serve Him. He does nothing in vain. He knows what He is about. He may take away my friends. He may throw me among strangers. He may make me feel desolate, make my spirits sink, hide my future from me. Still, He knows what He is about.”
from Meditations and Devotions, “Meditations on Christian Doctrine,” “Hope in God—Creator”, March 7, 1848