Look for your ‘daily relationship with the Lord’

Christ the King
First Reading: Dn 7:13-14
Second Reading: Rv 1:5-8
Gospel Reading: Jn 18:33b-37

Jesus calls all the baptized to evangelize: to spread the Gospel. This homily is the second in a series of three following the recent “Upper Room” evangelization event.

Evangelization requires renewal in the Church, Archbishop Michael Miller CSB said at the recent “Upper Room” evangelization event in Vancouver, and all genuine renewal is rooted in our “vital, personal, authentic, and solid relationship with Christ.”

He quoted Pope Francis, who in his 2013 Evangelii Gaudium (“The Joy of the Gospel”) invited all Christians “to a renewed personal encounter with Jesus Christ.”

That word personal needs explanation. Its original meaning is “concerned with persons” rather than things. By a “personal” God, the Church means a God Who is a Person – in fact, three Persons – not just an anonymous force.

Today, however, “personal” usually means “peculiar to me” or “according to my preferences.” For example, my computer loads my “personal settings.”

Perhaps, nowadays, “person-to-person” best expresses the Church’s meaning.

How do we encounter Jesus Person-to-person?

The apostles did it through their bodily senses: sight, hearing, touch, and (at the Last Supper) smell and taste.

Apparently, however, Jesus did not consider the senses to be crucial, for only 40 days after his resurrection he returned to heaven, telling Thomas that those who believe in him without seeing him are the ones who are blessed.

He also told Mary Magdalene not to “cling” to him, for he had “not yet ascended to the Father.” He meant – said Pope Leo the Great – “I would not have you come to me as to a human body, nor yet recognize me by bodily perceptions: I put you off for higher things; I prepare greater things for you; when I have ascended to my Father, then you shall handle me more perfectly and truly, for you shall grasp what you cannot touch and believe what you cannot see.”

Pope Leo said that at the Ascension, everything about Christ that had been perceptible by the senses “was changed into a sacramental presence.”

“Sight gave way to doctrine” so that “faith might be more excellent and stronger.” Accordingly, when we pray, we can “raise our hearts’ eyes unimpeded to those heights where Christ is”; we can raise minds and hearts not “pressed down by earthly affections.”

We encounter Jesus person-to-person, then, in prayer – which the Catechism of the Catholic Church calls our “living relationship” with God – and the sacraments – especially the Mass.

The Mass is not merely what the English “commemoration” or “remembrance” suggests. In Hebrew, it is a zikaron and, in Greek, an anamnesis of Christ’s last supper, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension. In other words, the Mass is a re-presentation, a re-actualization, a re-newal, of these unique events, so that we, today, can re-live them, participate in them, and celebrate them as truly as the apostles did.

My mother had a good image for anamnesis. The sun is always shining on the earth, she said, but every morning, the earth’s rotation re-presents the sun to us, and we participate anew in its warmth and light.

Our person-to-person encounter with Christ in prayer and the Mass is not “verified by reason or science, validated by what it produces, or authenticated by sensuality or comfort,” the Catechism says, but only by the faith of Christ’s Church.

That is what Scott Hahn realized when he became a Catholic at the 1986 Easter Vigil. “I wish I could tell you about the sublimity of my feelings as I went to Mass that night,” he said. 

“The truth is that I was so rushed, so unprepared, that I was receiving Communion almost before I knew it. But as I returned to my place, I realized that for the first time in my life, what had happened to me in church did not depend on my feelings. I had received the Body and Blood of Christ whether I felt it or not.”

We must have “a daily relationship with the Lord,” said Pope Francis.

We do it through prayer and the Mass.