(begin) So maybe you say: “O.K., I guess it makes sense to join a community, but why would I want to join yours? Aren’t they all the same anyway? Does it matter what I believe?” And here, as much as I am all in favor of interfaith relations and ecumenism, I would say that it does matter. Let’s start with Christianity.
What’s the difference? Well, to begin with, unlike other world religions, Christians have a specific idea of God. We see God as a personal God. It is a God who takes an interest in what we call “salvation history.” In St. Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, a four-week retreat where we meditate on the life of Christ, Ignatius invites us to start at the beginning of Jesus’ life. The very beginning: he asks us to imagine the Trinity—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—looking down on the earth and seeing everyone’s needs. Ignatius asks us to imagine the Trinity looking at some people being born, others dying, others being sick, others well, people laughing and crying, but people, overall, in need of help. And the Trinity decides to send the Second Person, Jesus Christ, to join us.
When you visit the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, you have to enter through a rather strange opening. Originally, the entrance was huge, so large that people could ride horses into it. Then because of subsequent invasions, in order to make it more difficult to enter, the doorway was blocked off, and today it’s only about four feet high, and you have to crouch or kneel to enter. So the name of the entrance is the Door of Humility.
Now that door is usually seen as relating to our humility, but I also think of God’s humility, choosing to become human, choosing to become one of us, so much did God love us. This then, is not some apathetic, distant God.
So now we finally come to Jesus, because in the end, the Christian religion is not a series of rules and regulations, or philosophical or theological propositions, and certainly not about an argument with another religion about which one is better. No, it’s about a person: Jesus. It’s important to have rules and regulations—any human organization needs them to exist. Have any of you ever lived in a house off campus without rules? Even World Youth Day has some rules. More importantly, we need a moral code to live by. But, in the end, our faith is not about a series of laws, it’s about an encounter with a person: Jesus Christ. We are invited to come to know him, to let him know us and to follow him. Not just worship him, by the way, which he never says. More basically, to follow him.
Next, who is Jesus?
What most people say is: “Well, okay, I admire Jesus as a human being. Being so charitable and all that. But I have a hard time with him being the Son of God and all that. In other words, what does it mean for him to be fully human and fully divine? How does that work?”
The first time I was in the Holy Land, to research for a book, one of my goals was to see one special place. When I was a Jesuit novice, I had read about a place called the Bay of Parables, where Jesus got into a boat on the shoreline, pushed out into the Sea of Galilee and preached to the crowd. Then he compares the reception of the good news to different kinds of soil. Some people are like rocky soil, where things can’t take root, others like soil with thorns, where the lure of wealth chokes things off, and some are like fertile soil, where things take root.
Something about that passage used to confuse me: Why does he get into a boat? Why does he actually go farther away from the crowd? A few years after the novitiate, I was on vacation with some Jesuits, and we were at a house that was near a little harbor, and I could hear all the people talking from the boats, about a mile away from where we were staying. I remarked on this and one of my companions said, “Oh yes, well sound travels over water easily. That’s why Jesus preached those parables from the boat.” I thought that was fascinating. It reminded me that sometimes the things you don’t “get” about the Gospels often have a real-life explanation.
On our pilgrimage, after some mishaps and misadventures, we found the Bay of Parables. It was just outside Capernaum, where Jesus is described as preaching the parables. As I stood there, here’s what I saw all around me: huge rocks, thorn bushes and fertile ground. Just like in the parable. And it dawned on me that when Jesus was preaching this parable, he wasn’t speaking about rocks in general, or thorn bushes in general, but about these things right here, right in front of the people. We sometimes think of the Son of God as being divinely inspired by the Father, and he was. But he also drew on his human experience. Standing by the Bay of Parables helped me to understand him as fully human and fully divine.
Outside of Nazareth, about a 90-minute walk, is a town called Sepphoris. Now, Nazareth was tiny: 200 to 400 people. Sepphoris, by contrast, was a huge town of about 30,000 people, which at the time of Jesus’s boyhood and young adulthood was being rebuilt by King Herod. It had an amphitheater that seated 4,000 people, a royal court, banks, stores that sold mosaics. You can visit the ruins today and see all those things, and you can tell it was a wealthy town. And if you think of Jesus walking from wealthy Sepphoris to poor Nazareth, returning to Mary and Joseph, living very simply, it’s easy to imagine him wondering about income disparities, and why the poor have it so hard. And who knows if the things he saw in Sepphoris about the wealthy didn’t make it into one of his parables? Or if the woman looking for her lost coin isn’t his mother? We tend to think of Jesus as fully divine, which he is, but we forget how his fully human experiences contributed to who he was.
Who is Jesus? So many answers: He is a carpenter from Nazareth. He is the Son of God. He is a man who got tired, ate and drank and wept. He healed the sick. He raised people from the dead. He got frustrated and angry. He is the Second Person of the Trinity, our Savior and Messiah, the Risen One, but he is also our brother, friend and companion. Pedro Arrupe, the former superior general of the Society of Jesus, was once asked, “Who is Jesus for you?” And he said, “For me, Jesus is everything!” Until people start to understand his humanity, it’s hard to understand his divinity. So, usually I start with the human nature of Jesus, and as people come to know him they, in a sense, trust him. And trust in what he does and in who he says he is, which is the Son of God. In the end though, fully human and fully divine is a mystery, an F.A.Q. [frequently asked question] if there ever was one, but one well worth pondering, for a lifetime. (end)
Father Martin is a font of wisdom. Of special interest to me is his relatively short distance from Sepphoris. That likely had a huge influence on who Jesus was and became.
Here is an interesting note about the areas where Jesus walked with his followers - the Jesus Trail. The Jesus Trail is a 65 km (40 mi) hiking and pilgrimage route in the Galilee region of Israel that traces the route Jesus may have walked, connecting many sites from his life and ministry. The main part of the trail begins in Nazareth and passes through Sepphoris, Cana (Kafr Kanna), the Horns of Hattin, Mount Arbel Cliffs, the Sea of Galilee, Capernaum, Tabgha, and the Mount of Beatitudes. An alternate return route passes by Tiberias, the Jordan River, Mount Tabor, and Mount Precipice.
When we read the Gospels, in a way, we walk the Jesus Trail with him and listen to what he had to say and then do.
Deacon David Pierce
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