Witness!

You shall be my witnesses, even to the very ends of the earth...(Acts 1:8).

 

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched -- this we proclaim concerning the Word of life.  The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us.  We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard...(I Jn. 1-2).

 

Go home to your family and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and how he has had mercy on you.  So the man went away and began to tell in the ten cities how much Jesus had done for him.  And all the people were amazed (Mark 5: 19-20).

 

In every church sooner or later, the members will hear that they should tell 'the good news,' that they should be evangelists, or witnesses to Christ.  While the Catholic church is not really 'evangelical' in the sense of either training people to be witnesses, or even putting an emphasis of being evangelical, from time to time, I have heard that we should be witnesses.  Usually, the method of 'witnessing' is to be by the way we live, as children of God in a dark world.  Back in the 50's, when I was confirmed in the 6th grade, we were told that we would be "soldiers" of Jesus Christ.  As an 85 lb girl at the time, I was not sure what kind of 'soldier' I would be, or how bravely I could 'stand up' against Communism, the threat of the day.

 

Ever since I have truly 'met' Jesus Christ, as John the Apostle did, now that I have truly "seen with my eyes, and my hands have touched," I can witness to "what the Lord has done for me," as the man in the Gospel was told to do.  As long as our faith is just 'belief in ideas," we have nothing to witness to, nor any reason to do so.  Every religion has doctrines to believe in, and therefore, one doctrine is for the most part, as good as another in keeping people on the straight and narrow.  One church accepts divorce and re-marriage; another does not.  One church is culturally oriental and introverted, in the sense of looking within for reality; another is culturally extroverted and looking without for its reality. 

 

As children, we believe because someone in authority has outlined for us what we are supposed to believe -- and we accept it.  That's fine; that's the way the world works.  The child accepts almost everything on faith -- even mathmatics.  The adolescent begins to questions what he has been told; he typically needs to test the waters and find out for himself what is true, what is not --- that is what is meant by the "Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil," or "eating the fruit of Experience," of finding out for ourselves.  If we don't kill ourselves in the process, it is a normal and natural process.

 

Somewhere along the way of Experiencing Life for Ourselves, (and usually rejecting the wisdom of the past), some of us may encounter the Jesus of the Gospel -- the Word of Life, who was with the Father, and now is with us, as John says.  Maybe there is a "witness" who has himself come to know Jesus Christ and who can tell us about Him.  Or maybe, as in the case of C. S. Lewis, there is a specific moment of profound grace that causes us to drop to our knees in recognition of a Presence in our lives that was not there before, but now has come to us in a personal way.  (To be fair, Lewis had actually heard the 'good news' from J.R.R. Tolkein, his good friend, for some years -- but, although Lewis respected and loved Tolkein, what he said about Jesus was just another philosophy/ fantasy until that moment when the door opened and Lewis walked through it for himself.)

 

My point is this -- until God has "done something for us," we are not really witnesses; we are like the Greek philosophers, telling our ideas about God, but not really what He has done for us, what our "eyes have seen and our hands have touched."    We know--in the sense of experience-- that of which we speak; we are not speculating or philosophizing about what it must be like. 

 

At some point, we must all abandon what we "think" about God and acknowledge the TRUTH about Him -- that He has come in the flesh (Jesus Christ) and has "met us on the road to Damascus," as He did Paul.  While we are "breathing threats against the believers" who are "corrupting our religious beliefs" and wanting to put them to death, we encounter the Living Christ.  Once Paul had that encounter, his religious beliefs melted away.  He knew the Way, the Truth, and the Life -- and later, he was to say after debating with the Greeks, "I resolved to know nothing else but Jesus Christ, and Him crucified." 

 

Of course, neither Paul nor Jesus nor the early church "threw out" Judasim, but then began to study what they believed in terms of their encounter with the Risen Lord.  And that is true of all those who have met Jesus Christ; they do not throw away all they have been taught, but begin to study it in the light of what they have experienced --- and find that doctrine now becomes alive, richer and fuller and more meaningful.  Jesus said, "I have come not to abolish the Law, but to fulfill it." 

 

For those who have met Jesus Christ, they now know what that means.  The "Law," or teachings become as vessels holding living water, not just 'rules to be followed."  But only the Holy Spirit -- or the Presence of the Risen Christ -- can teach us these things.  Then we can truly be "witnesses," not of what we "believe," but of what we know to be true because we have lived it, we have tasted it, we have seen it, we have embraced it in the Person of Christ.