Meeting Jesus in Person

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ? Many Evangelical and even some Catholic Christians regularly describe their religious experience in exactly this way. Precisely what this means is likely to be mysterious to many people.

Most of us know, or think we do, what it means to have a personal relationship with another human being. For example, if someone says she has a personal relationship with the President of the United States, most of us will understand this to mean that she and the President know each other, are friends, and speak once in awhile or maybe often. Perhaps they disagree on some things, even argue now and then. Maybe the President brings his family over to her home for dinner from time to time. We might even think the President tells her about his problems, as she tells him about hers. They may request and offer favors for one another.

But how are we to understand "having a personal relationship with Jesus," a man who lived twenty centuries ago? Christians claim Jesus is a Divine Being, the Son of God, the Second Person of the Trinity, but that hardly solves the problem. How does one have a personal relationship with a divine being who is "up there" or "out there" or "in my heart"? Many Christians (including me) believe we have experienced exactly this kind of relationship with Jesus Christ:  a mystical private communion with the divine, unobservable by others, unsharable, and impossible to fully explain to anyone who has not also experienced it.

But there is another aspect to having a personal relationship with Jesus.  It is a dimension that too many Christians may have missed.  For a personal relationship with Jesus can also be objectively real and observed by others. Moreover, as we shall now see, this objective and observable dimension of a personal relationship with Jesus is at the very heart of the Christian message.

Let me invite you then to join me in exploring one of Jesus' most important and perhaps least understood parables: the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats.

Sheep and Goats

Jesus' parable of the Sheep and the Goats is one of his most famous. At the end of time, all nations are brought together to be judged on a single criterion: How did they treat Jesus when they saw him hungry, thirsty, homeless, naked, sick, or in prison? Some are condemned because they ignored Jesus in his suffering. Others are rewarded because they relieved his suffering when they saw him thus. Both will say, "But when did we see you in these circumstances?" And Jesus will answer them, "Just as you did it [or not] to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me."

The message is clear: when we see someone who is in need, we are seeing Jesus. Jesus is in that person. So however we treat that person is how we are treating Jesus. Whatever kind of relationship we have with that person is the kind of relationship we have with Jesus.

This parable has had great impact on some of Christianity's greatest saints. According to a popular legend, Saint Martin of Tours, as a Roman soldier, shared his cloak with a freezing beggar. That night in a dream, he saw Jesus wearing the cloak he had shared with the beggar. Saint Benedict, the father of Western Monasticism, wrote in his famous Rule to govern the life of monastics that visitors to the monastery should be received as Christ himself, a precept joyfully practiced by Benedictines to this day.

Persecuting Jesus

The idea that Jesus is present to us in people we encounter everyday is a theme that runs throughout the entire New Testament. This fact is dramatically evident in St Luke's account of Saul's conversion in Acts 9. The story is well known. Saul (later called Paul) was a licensed persecutor of Christians who had participated in the execution of Stephen, the first Christian martyr. He was on his way to Damascus to arrest Jewish Christians who had fled Jerusalem and bring them back to the holy city for trial and punishment when he was confronted by the resurrected Jesus, who appeared to him in a bright light. Jesus asked Saul, "Why are you persecuting me?"

Jesus' identification of himself with his followers obviously reflects the same theme begun in the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats, but the story of Saul's conversion adds something completely new. In the parable, the Goats ignored Jesus. In Saul's vision, he discovered that far from ignoring Jesus, he was actively persecuting him. Sins of omission have become sins of commission.

You are the Body

Jesus' complete identification with his followers had such a profound impact on Saul's -- now Paul's -- thinking that by the time he wrote his first letter to the Corinthians (around 55 A.D.), it had become one of his controlling themes. He told his converts,"You are the body of Christ," and from there jumped into his famous discourse on love in 1 Corinthians 13. This close connection between the two passages is no accident, because love is at the very heart of what it means to be "the body of Christ," so completely identified with Jesus that you are Jesus to me, as I am Jesus to you. When I harm you, I am hurting Jesus. When you sacrifice something of yourself for me, your are sacrificing it for Jesus as he has sacrificed himself for you. It is because you and I are the body of the Jesus, not just figuratively but in actuality, that Paul can tell us how we ought to treat one another:

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Paul has clearly added a collective dimension to Jesus' Parable of Sheep and the Goats. Not only is each individual person Jesus to each one of us, but all of us together are Jesus. We can view this way of talking as a kind of shorthand. Instead of saying "You are Jesus to me, just are I am Jesus to you", we can simply say "You and I are the body of the Christ."

This collective dimension also relates to another of Paul's favorite themes: being "in Christ" as for example he says in his second letter to the Corinthians. Paul's understanding of being in Christ is collective and covenantal, reflecting his fundamentally Jewish way of thinking. Being in Christ is to be part of a community that is Christ's body, a community that is defined by a New Covenant with Christ at the head. There is much else here to be said, but it will have to wait for another time and place. For now it suffices to say this: Being in Christ is what makes you a member of the body of Jesus.

Discerning the Body of the Lord

The foregoing insight into Paul's thinking explains what would otherwise be a mysterious passage in chapter 11 of the same letter. Paul is writing about how his converts have misunderstood and are now abusing the central act of Christian worship, what we today call the Lord's Supper or Communion. They were coming together for the Lord's Supper, which was a full meal at the time. Some were coming early and eating all the food and getting drunk on the wine, leaving nothing for others who as a result were going hungry. Paul is perfectly clear about how serious this abuse is: "For this reason many of you are weak and ill, and some have died." These selfish abusers of the Christian feast are eating the bread and drinking the wine "in an unworthy manner...without discerning the body," thus bringing "judgment against themselves."

What does Paul mean by "without discerning the body"? What is this offense so horrible that it can cost you your life? If he hadn't written chapters 12 and 13 immediately after this chapter, we might never know, leaving the door open to all kinds of speculation (perhaps he was referring to the Real Presence, for example). But he did write those subsequent chapters and, consequently, we do know exactly what he meant: You have failed to recognize that you are each members of Christ's body. Whatever you do to one of the least of these who are in Christ, you do it to Jesus.

There is an important question here about whether Paul means that only Christians are "Jesus to me". There is a good case to be made that this is exactly what Paul means. But I do not think it conclusive, and I believe there are good reasons to think otherwise. For now I will make just two points, though a more extensive discussion is certainly warranted.

• First, Paul's apparent focus on the Body of Christ as narrowly limited to Christians is dictated by his context, a letter written to the Christian community at Corinth about, primarily, their relationships to each other.
• Second, there can be little doubt that Paul was familiar with Jesus' parable of the Sheep and the Goats, where Christians are as likely to be the goats as the sheep, so that there is apparently no special status associated with being a Christian. (Read the parable again, and note how the goats call Jesus "Lord.") Nowhere does the parable limit the hungry, thirsty, homeless, sick, naked, or imprisoned to Christians, and the whole tenure of Jesus' preaching would cry out against such a narrow limitation.

Suffering for You

Paul's understanding is that whatever we do to each other for ill or good, we do to Jesus. As we contemplate the logic behind this insight, we might wonder how far we can carry it. For example, if you are Jesus to me when I relieve your suffering, can I be Jesus for you by suffering in your place? In other words, is vicarious suffering something that only Jesus can do for us? Or is vicarious suffering for others a general principle of love (as perhaps 1 Corinthians 13 might suggest it is) in which any one of us can participate?

Paul seems to have thought so. This is most clear in his letter to the Colossians, where he wrote "I am now rejoicing in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body..." In other words, just as Christ suffered vicariously for us, so we too can suffer vicariously for one another. We may wonder just exactly what this means or how it can work. Catholic author Charles Williams, in his fascinating novel Descent into Hell, explores how vicarious suffering for others might work, among other themes.

In any event, it seems logical that if you really are Jesus to me, and I really am Jesus to you, then it likely follows that you and I can suffer vicariously for each other just as Jesus suffered vicariously for us. Admittedly, this is a surprising conclusion that takes Jesus' parable of the Sheep and the Goats -- and Paul's concept of the Body of Christ -- absolutely literally, but it has Saint Paul's stamp of approval based on his own example to the Collosians. (I should note that some modern scholars question whether Paul's letter to the Colossians is genuine, but I am more inclined to agree with N.T. Wright who has recently argued convincingly that it is.)

In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being

The discussion so far leads to a critical question. How is it possible that you can really be Jesus to me, and I can really be Jesus to you. What could possibly justify taking Jesus' language of the Sheep and the Goats, and Paul's shorthand of the Body of Christ literally? Oddly enough, Paul himself gives us the answer (indirectly via Luke) through his encounter with the Athenians described in Luke's Acts of the Apostles. The key is Paul's statement: "For ‘In [God] we live and move and have our being’..."

Some New Testament scholars like Marcus Borg regard Paul's statement as implying panentheism, a conclusion I am inclined to agree with mainly because I think that is more or less how the Athenian's would likely have understood what Paul was saying. The Stoics, who were the dominant philosophical school among the elite of Paul's century, were plainly Pantheistic: the Universe was the physical manifestation of God, and the Logos was the mind of God. Paul could easily have been quoting a Stoic philosopher, and there is little doubt that the Athenians would have heard him that way. But Paul was a Jew and no pantheist, which the Athenians would probably have realized eventually if not immediately, thus leading to something like what we call panentheism.

But I hasten to add that there are varieties of panentheism, not all of which are in agreement with orthodox Christian -- particularly Catholic -- thinking, and which Paul very likely would have rejected. But if what we mean by panentheism is that God is simultaneously immanent (meaning here in the world infinitely close to us, permeating all that exists down to the tiniest sub-atomic particle, for in him we live and move and have our being) and transcendent (meaning infinitely more than and beyond the physical universe, for he is the creator and not the creation) then we are on safe theological ground.

What this means for us at this point in our discussion is this: God is present -- really and truly present -- in each of us. So that when we encounter one another, we are encountering God. Or as Paul put it in his first letter to the Corinthians, "your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you."

You may have noticed we have made a rather startling move, from saying that "we are Jesus to one another" to saying that "God is truly present within you and me." The only way this move could make sense is if we said that Jesus is God, which is exactly what Paul did say to the Colossians: "[Jesus] is the image of the invisible God...all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together." This of course is the point where Christians part company from other religious traditions, Judaism and Islam in particular.

The point here is this: Jesus told us the parable of the Sheep and the Goats, conveying the same message with which he confronted his licensed persecutor Saul, and which Paul in turn conveyed to the Corinthians when he told them they were the body of Christ:  Jesus as God really is present in each one of us. Whatever we do or not do to and for each other, we really and truly do or not do for Jesus, that is, for God. And the relationships we have with each other are the very relationships we therefore have with Jesus.

God is Love

Saint Paul has helped us to understand what Jesus really meant in the parable of the Sheep and the Goats. In turn, as we shall see now, Saint John will help us see what Paul means.

John, in his first letter as we have it in the New Testament, says something rather startling: "God is love...if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us." He doesn't say, "God is filled with love." Nor does he say merely that "God loves us." Rather, he says that God is Love.

What can this mean for us in our present discussion? First of all, we should note that Love is not something that anyone can experience by themselves alone (except perhaps in the sense of loving only yourself, which seems to miss quite a bit of what we mean by "love".) There has to be someone who is loving, and someone else who is being loved; otherwise, there is no love. Love implies a relationship between at minimum two persons.

Therefore, to say God is Love is to say that there is within God at least one relationship between two persons. Modern Christian theology often expresses this idea in this way: the one indivisible God is a relationship of three Persons in One Being (neither three Gods nor three Beings) -- Father, Son, and Holy Spirit -- such that the Holy Spirit is the Love between the Father and the Son. Moreover, because the Holy Spirit is Love, and because each of the three Persons is fully and inseparably God, God is therefore Love. Whether this formulation will survive the centuries or is merely the latest theological fad, I cannot say. But the point is clear: God is a God of relationships, and at the very heart of God's nature is a Relationship of Love, so much so that we can say God is Love.

So when we say that God is present in each of us, we are saying that there is within each of us, individually and collectively, an imperative to love. As John puts it: "Whoever does not love does not know God," and "Those who say, 'I love God,' and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars."

This imperative is so great that the failure to love one another is to utterly offend against God, for Love is what God is. The way Jesus put the fate of those who so turn their backs on Love comes at the end of the parable: "And these will go away into eternal punishment."

Conclusion

We have now seen what it means to have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. It is not limited to a mystical, unsharable, unobservable private experience of communion with Jesus, the Son of the Living God. It can be that, and for many of us it is that, a great source of joy in our spiritual lives.

But it is also much more: our objective, fully observable personal relationship with those around us.   For Jesus is in God who is Love, and this God is present in everyone we meet in every circumstance at every time in our lives together. Thus each person we meet is or can be Jesus to us, as we can be Jesus to them. We need only recognize Jesus in each person with whom we come into contact, and merely open our eyes to see the opportunities for us to be Jesus to them.

As my wife often likes to put it, whatever we do for others we do for Jesus. If we turn our backs on others who may be in need, we turn our backs on Jesus, on Love, on God. At the same time, we can be Jesus to others. By giving ourselves over to Love, we can sacrifice ourselves for others. We can even choose to suffer in their place, just as Jesus chose to suffer in ours.

Do you want to have a deep, very real personal relationship with Jesus Christ?  If so, all you need to do is look around you. The opportunities are everywhere.