To Know Christ Jesus

Recently, I asked my students to read the Gospel of Mark (because it is the shortest) and to select a quote from each chapter to write down.  Then, they were asked to write a comment or question pertaining to each chapter.  After they had completed the assignment, I asked them to tell me about their experience.  Here are a few of the comments:

While reading the Gospel....at first I was a little bored and I kept thinking to myself, "Oh, this is silly; I don't understand any of this."  However, as I read on, I began to feel enlightened....In the end, I would definitely do this assignment 1000x over because I learned a lot about Jesus and myself.

I felt good about this assignment....I felt as if I learned more about God and Jesus, because not only was I reading Scripture, but I was also writing about it.

You are able to think about it MUCH more when YOU are the one personally reading and comprehending it...I was thinking so many things that I could not limit my comments to just one.

I enjoyed sitting and just reading.  It was very peaceful.
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The students who persevered past their initial boredom discovered something that Frank Sheed wrote in his To Know Christ Jesus (around 1940, I believe):

We read the Gospels to meet Our Lord.  We must read and reread them, if we want to come to our own personal intimacy with our Redeemer.  Intimacy of that sort cannot be handed to us by anyone else, however gifted he may be, whatever the measure of his spiritual insight.  We have to make it for ourselves, with Jesus as with any other friend, by constantly meeting him, experiencing him, meditating on the experience....it is a vast gain for any one of us to have made for ourselves this personal relation with Our Lord.

If we do not know Him as he lived among us, acted and reacted and suffered among us, we risk not knowing him at all. For we cannot see him at the right hand of the Father as we can see him in Palestine.  And we shall end either by constructing our own Christ, image of our own needs or dreams, or in having no Christ but a shadow and a name.  Either way, the light he might shed is not shed for us -- light upon himself, light upon God.

For the kind of ignoring I have in mind cuts off a vast shaft of light into the being of God....In Christ Jesus, we can see God in our nature, experiencing the things we have experienced, coping with situations we have to cope with.  Thereby we know God as the most devout pagan cannot know him....We must read intently, growing in knowledge of his words and acts, building our intimacy with himself.

 

Frank Sheed's book, long out of print, has been re-issued in a 2014 edition, a gift to anyone who would "Know Christ Jesus" for himself.  For Sheed is absolutely correct; St. Jerome said centuries ago: "Ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ."  No one can tell you "about" Christ; He must be encountered in a personal experience --- and that experience comes through the Scriptures. 

 

Think back to the first days of the church, beginning with Pentecost.  On that day, 3000 people were converted.  They returned to their homelands, speaking about the things they had heard and witnessed in Jerusalem.  Those who had been baptized and those who heard their reports had to be monumentally curious about Jesus of Nazareth.  Their one longing had to be, "Tell us about him.  What was he like?  New Christians would ask old Christians; everyone would ask those who actually saw and heard him.  Each one would describe what he had seen and heard, emphasizing the things which had impressed him or her.  New meanings and awareness would emerge as the stories were told and re-told, and people would recognize passages from the Old Testament which shed light on what they were hearing about Jesus.  Finally, the stories had to be written down and passed to the local churches to ensure accuracy and to quench false or imagined stories.

 

Jesus had promised that the Holy Spirit would "lead them into all truth" -- and the leading was gradual, as they pondered in their hearts the events of Jesus's life and ministry.  How can we be sure that when we read the Gospels, we are hearing the words of Jesus?  St. Augustine has given us the answer:  "Not words but things."  When we read with the intent to discover Him, we unite our minds with the mind of Christ, and the thoughts of His mind can become the thoughts of ours---all the more when the Holy Spirit living in Him lives in us also.

 

Those who refuse to read, learn, and pray for themselves may find themselves "locked out" on the last day as Christ says, "I never knew you" (and you never knew Me.)