Personal Relationship With Jesus
Sacred Heart of Jesus by Michael D. O’Brien
WRITTEN ON THE MEMORIAL OF ST. FAUSTINA KOWALSKA
This writing was first published October 5th, 2006.
AS I wrote in Moutains, Foothills, and Plains, the Summit of the Church is Jesus. This Summit is the foundation of the Christian Life.
FINDING THE SUMMIT
In my early school years, we had no Catholic youth group. So my parents, who were devout Catholics in love with Jesus, sent us to a Pentecostal group. There, we made friends with other Christians who had a passion for Jesus, a love for the Word of God, and a desire to witness to others.
One thing they often spoke of was the need for a "personal relationship with Jesus".
CATHOLICISM AND THE PERSONAL JESUS
Many Evangelical or Protestant Christians reject the Catholic Church because they’ve been led to believe that we do not preach the need to have a "personal relationship" with Jesus. They look at our churches adorned with icons, candles, statues, and paintings, and misinterpret sacred symbolism for "idol worship". They see our rituals, traditions, and spiritual feasts and regard them as "dead works", devoid of faith, life, and the freedom which Christ came to bring.
On the one hand, we must admit a certain truth to this. Many Catholics do "show up" to Mass out of obligation, going through the rote prayers, rather than from a real and living relationship with God. But this does not mean that the Catholic Faith is dead or empty, though perhaps many the heart of an individual is.
In this regard, the Catholic Church in some of its particular branches of the Western world has failed; we have neglected at times to preach Jesus Christ, crucified, died, and risen, poured out as a sacrifice for our sins, so that we may know Him, and the One who sent Him, that we may have eternal life. This is our faith! It is our joy! Our reason for living… and we have failed to "shout it from the rooftops" as Pope John Paul II exhorted us to do, especially in the churches of the affluent nations. We have not succeeded in raising our voices above the noise and din of modernism, proclaiming with a clear and undiluted voice: Jesus Christ is Lord!
But this does not annul the Catholic Faith. It does not void the "oral and written" traditions which Christ and the Apostles handed down to us. Rather, it is a sign of the times.
A personal, living relationship with Jesus Christ, indeed the Holy Trinity, is at the very heart of our Catholic Faith. In fact, if it is not, the Catholic Church is not Christian. From our Catechism:
"Great is the mystery of the faith!" The Church professes this mystery in the Apostles’ Creed and celebrates it in the sacramental liturgy, so that the life of the faithful may be conformed to Christ in the Holy Spirit to the glory of God the Father. This mystery, then, requires that the faithful believe in it, that they celebrate it, and that they live from it in a vital and personal relationship with the living and true God. —Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC), 2558
POPES, AND THE PERSONAL RELATIONSHIP
Contrary to the false prophets who seek to discredit Catholicism, the need to evangelize and re-evangelize was very much the thrust of Pope John Paul II’s pontificate. It was he who brought into the Church’s contemporary vocabulary the term and urgency for a "new evangelization", and the need for a new understanding of the Church’s mission:
The task which awaits you—the new evangelization—demands that you present, with fresh enthusiasm and new methods, the eternal and unchanging content of the heritage of the Christian faith. As you well know it is not a matter of merely passing on a doctrine, but rather of a personal and profound meeting with the Saviour. —POPE JOHN PAUL II, Commissioning Families, Neo-Catechumenal Way. 1991.
This evangelization, he said, begins with ourselves.
Sometimes even Catholics have lost or never had the chance to experience Christ personally: not Christ as a mere ‘paradigm’ or ‘value’, but as the living Lord, ‘the way, and the truth, and the life’. —POPE JOHN PAUL II, L’Osservatore Romano (English Edition of the Vatican Newspaper), March 24, 1993, p.3.
Teaching us as the voice of the Church, the successor of Peter, and the chief shepherd of the flock after Christ, the late pope said this relationship begins with a choice:
Conversion means accepting, by a personal decision, the saving sovereignty of Christ and becoming his disciple. —Ibid., Encyclical Letter: Mission of the Redeemer (1990) 46.
Pope Benedict has been no less lucid. In fact, for such a renowned theologian, the current Holy Father has a profound simplicity in words, which time and again point us toward the need to encounter Christ personally. This was the essence of his first encyclical:
Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction. —POPE BENEDICT XVI; Encyclical Letter: Deus Caritas Est, "God is Love"; 1.
Again, this Pope also addresses the true dimensions and genesis of faith.
Faith by its specific nature is an encounter with the living God. —Ibid. 28.
This faith, if it is authentic, must also be an expression of charity: works of mercy, justice, and peace. But the evangelist must first himself be evangelized.
Practical activity will always be insufficient, unless it visibly expresses a love for man, a love nourished by an encounter with Christ. —Ibid. 34.
...we can be witnesses only if we know Christ first hand, and not only through others — from our own life, from our personal encounter with Christ. Finding him really in our life of faith, we become witnesses and can contribute to the novelty of the world, to eternal life. —POPE BENEDICT XVI, Vatican City, January 20th, 2010, Zenit
PERSONAL JESUS: BOTH HEAD AND BODY
Many well-meaning Christians have abandoned the Catholic Church because they did not hear the Good News preached to them until they visited the "other" church down the street, or listened to a television evangelist, or attended a bible study… Indeed, says St. Paul,
How can they believe in him of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone to preach? (Romans 10:14)
Their hearts were set on fire, the Scriptures came alive, and their eyes were opened to see new perspectives. They experienced a profound joy which to them seemed in stark contrast to the mumbling monotone masses of their Catholic parish.
But when these revitalized believers departed, they left behind the other sheep who were so desperate to hear what they had heard! Perhaps worse, they moved away from the very Fountainhead of grace, Mother Church, who nurses her children through the Sacraments.
Didn’t Jesus command us eat to his Body and drink his Blood? What then, dear Protestant, are you eating? Doesn’t scripture tell us to confess our sins to one another? To whom are you confessing? Do you speak in tongues? So do I. Do you read your bible? So do I. But my brother, should one eat from only one side of the plate when Our Lord Himself provides a rich and full meal in the Banquet of His very Self?
My flesh is real food, and my blood is real drink. (John 6:55)
Do you have a personal relationship with Jesus? So do I. But I have more! For each day, I gaze upon Him in the humble disguise of bread and wine. Every day, I reach out and touch Him in the Holy Eucharist, who then reaches out and touches me in the depths of my body and soul. For it was not a pope, or a saint, or a doctor of the Church, but Christ Himself who declared:
I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world. (John 6:51)
But I do not hold this gift to myself. It is for you too. For the greatest personal relationship we can have, and which our Lord desires to give, is the communion of body, soul, and spirit.
"For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh." This mystery is a profound one, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. (Ephesians 5:31-32)
But this communion, this personal relationship, does not happen in isolation, for God has given us a family of fellow believers to belong to. The Church consists of many members, but it is "one body." Thus, to keep oneself separated from the "one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church " is to be like a child reared by a foster parent. The child receives the basics for his living, but not the full inheritance of his birthright. These are straight words. But they have not changed for 2000 years.
We need a personal relationship with Jesus, the Head. But we also need a relationship with His Body, the Church. For the "cornerstone" and the "foundation" are inseparable:
You are fellow citizens with the holy ones and members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the capstone. (Ephesians 2:19-20)
While hearing about Christ through the Bible or through other people can introduce a person to Christian belief [Pope Benedict said], "it must then be ourselves (who) become personally involved in an intimate and deep relationship with Jesus." —POPE BENEDICT XVI, Catholic News Service, October 4th, 2006
Man, himself created in the "image of God" [is] called to a personal relationship with God. —CCC, 299
