When we were students, many of us were afraid of asking the teachers questions. Lucky for us, the apostles Philip and Thomas were not like that because thanks to their questions, we are able to learn more about Jesus. Through Philip (John 14:9), we learn that Jesus is the sacrament of God the Father, for whoever sees Him sees the Father. Next, Thomas asks Jesus about the manner or the way to get to the Father, and Jesus presents himself as this way, truth, and life.
Many times, the way – the truth – the life has been interpreted as three different realities and they can in fact be different, but in the context in which Jesus spoke, the three are only one reality. It is necessary not to forget the context in which the phrase appears, that is, the way to the Father, the way to God or to eternal life. The proof that these three words are one, that is, they can be summed up in one only – the way – is that Jesus continues by saying "no one comes to the Father except through me". Truth and life are part of the way, they are a description or explanation about the way.
Like many, we will speak about the three realities together and separately, always remembering that we are talking about only one thing that could be summarized as follows: how to live here on earth in a way that our death is a passover like that of Jesus, that is, a passage to eternal life and not to an end and eternal death. Jesus is the way that takes us to God, the truth that we must embrace in faith and concretize in works, He is the gate to eternal life, for no one goes to the Father except through him.
Way, truth and life in the singular
All roads lead to Rome...
In our pluralistic society, it is not politically correct for anyone to say that he is the way or that there is only one way. This sounds like an imposition, an autocracy. The tendency nowadays is to think that there are many ways and that they are all valid. The idea is so commonplace that even Catholics criticize us missionaries for proclaiming the good news to the peoples, in saying that these peoples already have their own religions which are as good and as valid as ours.
As much as it offends our modern ears, there is no alternative way to Christ that is equally valid. Whoever does not gather with me scatters, says Jesus in Matthew 12:30; it is not that one can gather with someone else, there is just no one else. There is no alternative model of humanity to Christ, so Christ is the only way, the only truth and the only way to live life.
Way + Truth = Life
Jesus’ phrase can be read from back to front and from front to back. We can make a reflection on each of the three premises individually, as we can make a reflection of them together. We have already seen how truth and life are meant to say way, since Jesus returns to the theme by saying, "No one comes to the Father except through me." We can also put the emphasis on life and understand it as being made up of a way and a truth.
The word "Way" suggests movement, a process, becoming, transformation, while the word "Truth" suggests the opposite, something static, immovable, and stationary, without change or movement. These two different realities remind us of the polemic of the pre-Socratic philosophy between Heraclitus, for whom everything changes and we cannot bathe twice in the waters of the same river, and Parmenides, for whom movement is illusory, nothing changes and there is nothing new under the sun.
It is important to remember that movement and change for the Greeks are not two separate concepts, but are one and the same. For Heraclitus, the universe is dynamic, everything changes, that is, things cease to be what they are in order to become something different. That is, returning to the image of bathing in the river, not only are the waters of the first bath different from the waters of the second, but the bather himself is not the same: over time, he too has changed. A reality in continuous change cannot be imprisoned, that is, it cannot be known.
For Parmenides, on the other hand, the being either is or is not; the not being cannot come to be and the being cannot not be. Movement and change are illusory. We can say that the way is the Being according to Heraclitus and the truth is the Being according to Parmenides. Being made up of the way and the truth, life is therefore composed of one element that moves and another that never moves.
For the Greeks, time is cyclical, according to the myth of eternal return, something that evokes Parmenides; for the Jews, time is rectilinear, something that evokes Heraclitus and the paradigm of Egypt – Desert – Promised Land.
Human time would be a fusion of these two concepts into one; in other words, the synthesis of a circle and a straight line. This synthesis follows a helical movement that moves in a circle around an axis that is always advancing, tracing a line in its progress. This spiral movement is what is seen as the Earth rotates around the sun; the sun moves in an orbit around the center of the galaxy dragging our planet along with it. Therefore, the movement our planet makes around the sun is helical.
As incredible as it may seem, the DNA, our genetic material, and the principle on which our life is rooted, also takes this shape. In other words, life at the macrocosmic level is helical, and so too at the microcosmic level. Life is the way we trace around the truth that does not change. Life is the process of assimilation of this truth; it is the change that this truth operates in us, changing us over time at the rate that our life assimilates it and puts it into practice. Since the truth is Jesus, our lives revolve around him, or as St. Paul says, we are to put on Christ (Romans 13:14).
WAY
Caminante, son tus huellas el camino y nada más; Caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar. (Traveler, your footprints are the road and nothing else; Traveler, there is no road, you make your own road by walking.) Antonio Machado
While the Greeks excel in art and philosophy, the Romans excel in state organization and engineering. That is why, among the ancient empires, theirs lasted the longest. Before the Romans, there were no roads. As the poet says, roads were made by walking, that is, a road is formed as the result of many people passing through the same place many times.
The Romans were the first people to build roads, the famous Roman paved roads. In this way, they connected the furthest parts of the empire to Rome, the capital. This is how the proverb "All roads lead to Rome" came about. Even today, the layout of many roads in Europe takes place over ancient Roman paved roads.
Roads continue to be made by walking in the rural areas and in the mountains; but most of the roads have already been made. In the existential sense, the poet would only be right if he were Adam, that is, the first man. But this is not the case: every person who lives traces a path that can be followed by those who come after him. It is in this sense that Jesus’ life is for us the way par excellence to live with meaning.
Jesus as High Priest
Since, then, we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast to our confession. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin. (…) Every high priest chosen from among mortals is put in charge of things pertaining to God on their behalf… Hebrews 4:14-15; 5:1
The Romans also invented bridge as a continuation of the road beyond the other bank of the river. Ironically, the title of the Roman Emperor was the "chief bridge engineer", "Pontifex Maximus" or the Supreme Pontiff, a title that is used today by the Pope, the successor of Peter.
The priest in all religions, not only in the Jewish religion, is the one who intercedes for the people before God and officiates the sacrifices that the people offers to God to obtain His forgiveness and His grace. As an intermediary between God and the people, the priest acts as a bridge between God and the people.
Being truly God and truly man, there is no better bridge than Jesus. Through Christ, the Supreme Pontiff, God comes to the world and the world goes to God. As St. Irenaeus said, God became man so that man may become God. God comes to us through His son, we go to God through the son of God.
Throughout his life, Jesus acted as a bridge between humanity and God, and at the end of his life, by the way he left life, he has definitively opened for us the gates to eternal life. Before Jesus came, death was a dead end alley, a final destiny; with his death and resurrection, Jesus opened for us the way to eternity; He, the firstborn of the dead, made death a passage to eternal life.
From the beginning, the Christian community interpreted the death of Christ in light of the sacrifices of the Old Law. The destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem and the end of the sacrifices of the Old Law, as well as of the ancient priesthood, in the year 70 AD confirmed this interpretation. For the letter to the Hebrews, Jesus' sacrifice is perfect because in this sacrifice, Jesus is the temple, the altar, the lamb, and the priest.
The temple is the place where God dwells and since Jesus is God himself, then he is a perfect temple; the altar is the place inside the temple where the lamb is offered and Jesus is the altar because sacrifice takes place in himself, not outside of himself; the lamb should be spotless; Jesus is like us in everything except sin, so he is the most perfect lamb; the priest of the old covenant, before offering a sacrifice for the people, had to offer a sacrifice for himself to be purified.
Jesus, as the High Priest, is pure, he does not need to offer any sacrifice for himself. Furthermore, the priest is a pontiff, a bridge between God and men, and Jesus being true God and true man, at the same time, he is the perfect bridge between God and men. Thus it is concluded that it is not possible to make Jesus’ sacrifice any better, so that it is valid for humanity of all times.
Jesus: the way by which God came to men
After leaving his family at the Church for the Midnight Mass, a Canadian farmer returned home, fleeing from the impending snowstorm. His wife's insistence to attend the Mass with the family fell on deaf ears. For him, the incarnation of God made no sense. After he fell asleep in the warmth of the fireplace, he was startled awake by the clashing sounds of geese at the door and windows. Driven away by the storm from their migratory trajectory to the South, they were left completely bewildered.
Moved with compassion, he opened the gates of the great barn and began to run, wave, whistle, yell and swarm at the geese so that they would take shelter until the storm passed. However, the geese flew in circles, without understanding what the open barn and the dramatic gestures of the desperate farmer meant, not even the bread crumbs scattered in the direction of the barn convinced them. Defeated in his attempt to save the poor creatures, he sighed, "Ah, if only I were a goose! If only I spoke their language!" Upon hearing his own lament, he recalled the question he had asked his wife: "Why would God want to become a man?" And without wanting to, he muttered the answer: "To save him!”... And it was Christmas.
"Religion" comes from the Latin "religare", which means to relate, to establish a relationship. By his nature, man has always been religious and I think he will always be. Knowing himself to be precarious and needy, the human being always sought the favors of the "divinity". Thus, in all cultures, individuals emerged who, considered to have a special sensitivity to relate with the divine, felt that they have been sent by God – for example, the prophets in the Hebrew tradition.
Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds. Hebrews 1:1-2
These prophets never truly succeeded to establish a bridge of communication between the divine and the human. This is because the Word of God, being transmitted by them (men with their own personal characteristics and inserted in a specific sociocultural context), ended up being influenced by many mediating variables (personality, prejudices, stereotypes, social patterns), thus losing the meaning of the original message.
Jesus of Nazareth is the way by which God comes to us to speak into our ears and into our hearts on equal footing, not from top to bottom, but from brother to brother, from man to man. The creator makes himself into a creature to speak from within the human nature; to speak with authority, as the men of Jesus' time noted, because he spoke and acted, because he spoke and fulfilled, because he spoke, and things happened.
John 15:16 – You did not choose me – As they say in theology, ours is not a religion because it is not the effort that man makes to reach God, but rather a revelation, because it is God who comes first to us, and reveals himself to us. That is why Jesus can say to the Apostle Philip that whoever sees him, sees the Father.
1 John 4:10 – In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Love is paid with love, says the people; our love for God is a response to the divine love, the only response, for there is no other. Therefore, because the initiative comes from God, ours is not a religion, but a revelation.
Jesus: the way by which men go to God
"No one comes to the Father except through me.” John 14:6
If Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ, the son of God, He is the only way by which God has come to us. That is why there can be no other way by which man can go to God. It would make no sense for one to be the way by which God came to us, and another to be the way by which man goes to God. All roads are back and forth, therefore, if God came to us through Christ, then through the same Christ we will go to God.
The purpose of the incarnation of God can be read in light of Jesus entering and leaving the city of Jericho. Jericho is the oldest city in the world, about 8000 years old and interestingly, it is also the lowest city on earth, at 500 meters below the sea level. From these two characteristics, Jericho represents in the Bible a world in sin. This very idea is presented in the parable of the Good Samaritan; the man who was attacked by the robbers and evildoers, descended from Jerusalem to Jericho, that is, he fell from grace to sin.
Jesus enters Jericho, that is, he enters the sinful world and goes to stay in the house of Zacchaeus, that is, of a sinner. Jesus stays in the sinful world, called sinners to himself, lived and ate with them, and treated them with the dignity of children of God (Luke 19:1-2). When he left Jericho, a large crowd followed him on the ascending path from sin to grace in Jerusalem (Mark 10:46-52). Thus, the reason of the incarnation was fulfilled; God, through Christ, came into the world so that the world, through the same Christ, might go to God.
In many ways God spoke through the prophets - All religions fall within this scope; all religious leaders are the catalysts of God's will and designs for humanity; they are partial revelations of God's will. They are, as they say in theology, "semina verbi". All religions contain in themselves seeds of truth, for all prophets were sent from God, but they do not contain the whole truth. If this was the case, there would be no reason for God to send his own Son.
In this sense, Christianity is a qualitative leap; Jesus is no longer a prophet in the long list of prophets, nor is he the last of the prophets as Mohammed is in the Muslim religion. Jesus is God Himself, he is the son of God. He does not come to add more to what is known of God, he is God with us to show us by word, deed and behavior, what God intended in creating man.
In the parable of the wicked tenants entrusted with a vineyard (Matthew 21:33ff), the connection between the prophets and the son of God is explained. The vineyard represents Israel or the world, the servants sent to gather the fruits are the prophets that the world kills; at the end, the owner sends his own son. Jesus is the definitive word of the Father.
Extra Christum nulla salus
I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd. John 10:16
Knowing this above text, I do not understand how the Church has dared to say that outside of her there is no salvation. This ideology, for I cannot call it anything else, prevailed until the Second Vatican Council. It is true that the Church is the mystical body of Christ, but there are more tides than sailors. Christ is not exhausted in the Church, the correspondence is not absolute; so that we understand, the Church is fully contained in Christ, but Christ is greater than the Church.
Christ came into the world not to transform the world into a church, but to transform the world into the Kingdom of God. It is more important to be a member of the Kingdom of God than to be a member of the Church. The Church is, or should be, at the service of the Kingdom of God as was her founder.
All men of good will belong to the Kingdom of God, all those who, even without knowing Christ, already follow him, because they seek to be more and more human. Jesus did not come into the world to institute a new religion; fundamentally, he came into the world to teach men how to be men and it is in this sense that he is the way, the truth, and the life.
There is, therefore, salvation outside the Church, but there is no salvation outside Christ. Once again, this is what Jesus means by declaring himself as the way, the truth, and the life, and by adding that no one goes to the Father except through him. It would make no sense that Jesus, the only begotten son of God, to come into the world and have in addition to him other alternatives to salvation. For this, he did not have to come, it would not only be an extravagance but also a self-degradation.
Karl Rahner's theory of Anonymous Christian is the one that best deals with this matter. Christian and human are two synonymous adjectives; the indicator of what it is to be a Christian is the same as the indicator of what it is to be a human, and vice versa. As these two adjectives are 100% equivalent, every individual of any religion, as well as agnostics and atheists, inasmuch as they are authentic and genuinely human or strive to be, they are Christians, even without being baptized.
Other religions can also say the same thing: if I pray, fast and practice the charity of the Muslims, they can consider me as one of them; I would then be an anonymous Muslim. And if I meditate and seek spiritual perfection, I can be considered as an anonymous Buddhist.
Salvation, however, does not come by means of Buddha or Mohammed, but through Christ because only he is truly man and truly God. "There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved." (Acts 4:12)
To be saved I do not need to be a member of the Church he founded, but it is enough that I strive to be a true man like he was. When I strive to be a true and genuine man, I am imitating Christ, even without knowing it, I am accepting Him as the way, the truth, and the life.
Where we come from and where we are going
... I am the gate for the sheep. (...) I am the gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture. John 10:7, 9
When the transhumance herds did not return to the village, but stayed in pasture, a sheepfold was made with stones or wooden stakes and the shepherd slept or stood guard at the gate. Consequently, all sheep would pass through this one and only gate to go to pasture.
The three questions that every human being asks himself – where I come from, where I am going, and what is the meaning of life and the light of Christ as the way, the truth and the life – have easy answers. I come from God, I go to God or to eternal life which is my aim. The way and beyond the gate is Christ, He is the truth I must embrace, the truth that must configure my life to be able to attain eternal life.
We are travelers and pilgrims in this life. We are spiritually nomads because we love God above all things and all people, and that is why we do not cling to anything or anyone. "For here we have no lasting city, but we are looking for the city that is to come." (Hebrews 13:14)
In fact, the first name that the followers of Christ had was related to Christ as the Way. In Acts 9:2, it is said that Paul pursued those who belonged to the Way, after his conversion he admitted that he was a member of the followers of the Way (Acts 24:14).
Jesus is our GPS, for when we gauge ourselves to Him and his word, we know where we stand; we recognize our sins, our flaws, and we see what we are missing in order to reach Him. A GPS tells us where we are and where we want to go, it also shows us the way and how to get there.
TRUTH
God said, “You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.” But the serpent said to the woman, ‘You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. Genesis 3:3-5
"That's your truth, it’s not what I think..." We have all heard such argument; after all, just how many truths are there? Isn't it a "contradictio in terminis" to have more than one truth? If there is more than one truth, then where does the concept of lying rest?
The problem comes from far, far away. In the Bible, knowing means dominating, controlling; the sin of our parents was the equivalent to the Greek myth of stealing the fire from the gods; it was usurping from God the criterion of good and evil, a prerogative that belonged only to Him, and for everything to work well down here, it should belong only to him.
In the context of ethics or morals, Pope Benedict XVI speaks a lot about the dictatorship of relativism. If truth is plural, understanding, harmony and peace are not possible in society. Those who elevate themselves as the criterion of truth will soon fall into the temptation to impose their "truth" over the "truth" of others. As the notorious dictators have done; everything that Hitler, Stalin and others like them did was to think that they were doing a good thing.
"God is dead, long live Superman," Nietzsche said; when God stops being God, everybody wants to take his place and soon enough others emerge to impose their own arbitrary concept of truth, justice, love and goodness, and the world becomes a true pandemonium.
After man usurps from God the criterion of good and evil, all other values stop being absolute, to become relative, conventional, arbitrary, and subjective; every individual becomes the god of himself and, if possible, of as many others as he can amass, so for the first time, man feels naked and in need of protecting himself from others like him.
The Romans, on the other hand, were already wary of the arbitrariness of dictators when they said "Dura lex, sed lex"; the law is tough, but it is the law – a gauge common to all and equal for all. The arbitrariness of a dictator is much tougher than the law.
Truth, justice, love, goodness... All human values are attributes of God. He and only He is just, true, loving, and good (cf. 1 John 2:29). To be more evident and imitable, these values were incarnated in the person of Jesus, the son of God. He is the way, the truth, and the life; that is, the only way, the only truth and the only life, for as he himself says, ‘…whoever does not gather with me, scatters’ (Luke 11:23); it is not that one can gather with another because for every human being, there is no other equally valid alternative to the life that Jesus points out to us, to which he himself bears witness and embodies.
Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice (John 18:37). He is the standard of everything that is human; whoever wants to measure his degree of truth, justice, goodness and love, he must compare himself with Christ. Whoever wants to know how human or inhuman he is, he must measure himself in relation to Christ.
When all submit themselves and love God, who is the ultimate criterion of all values, the supreme good, justice, love, and goodness, it is logical that we love others as we love ourselves; all those who turn to God as Father have each other as brothers and sisters.
Truth and human nature
Times change, wills change / being changes, trust changes; / the whole world is composed of change, / always taking on new qualities. Luis de Camões
Everything is relative, we say, everything changes, everything goes out of fashion, but there is something that remains. There is one thing that has not changed over the centuries: Human Nature. It is based on the values that compose it. These values are attributes of God, and as we have said, these values do not change. The concept of love, truth, justice, fraternity, generosity, etc. are fixed values.
What was love at the time of Cleopatra, is the same as at the time of Romeo and Juliet, and is the same as at the time of Jesus. "No one has greater love than the one who gives his life for his friends" is a universal, timeless and eternal value.
If this were not so, if Human Nature were susceptible to change over time, that is, from generation to generation or over space, from culture to culture, from civilization to civilization, Christ would have to incarnate in every culture and in every generation to be the Word of life for that place and time. The Bible could not be timeless and universally valid, but would expire like any product on the market, when with the passage of time or the passage from one culture to another, human nature were to change.
For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice. John 18:37
As there is only one human nature, there is only one way of living life, there is only one truth that fits this human nature, and as human nature does not change over the centuries, then also the truth that fits this human nature does not change. This truth is the Word of God incarnated in Jesus Christ, it is the word made flesh for all times and all places.
With his life, with his word, with his behavior and way of living, Jesus bears witness to the truth, that is, he embodies the truth in such a way that it is the gold standard of human life, the paradigm, the archetype, the way, the truth and the life.
"What is truth?" Pilate asked and he himself, without knowing it, answered by saying ecce homo, truth is a person, truth for human nature is the Word of God, it is Christ the way, it is the process of being configured to Christ. As St. Paul says, he is the way.
I have chosen the way of truth; your judgments I have laid before me. Psalm 119:30
"When the pot is made, the lid is made for it", when the human being is made, the human nature is made for him. Truth is everything that fits this human nature, it is how this human nature should be lived. Every machine is designed to work best in one specific way; it will not work well in any other way because the best operation of the machine is what best fits its nature.
The human being is like a computer, the hardware to be precise; truth, on the other hand, is the operating system that makes the computer work; life is the different programs, the different vocations or the different ways of living life, that work on the basis of this operating system.
Put on the Lord Jesus Christ, says St. Paul to the Romans (13:14); as if Christ were the garment we should wear; Christ is the garment that fits us all, best suited to our human nature. There is no other brand of clothing that we can wear that fits our human nature and brings us to life with Christ.
As someone said, God always forgives, man sometimes, nature neither forgives nor forgets. This applies both to the ecological nature of our planet and to the nature of our organism, physical, mental, spiritual. Take for example the functioning of our liver; it can break down a certain amount of alcohol with ease, but if we drink more than that amount, sooner or later we will pay the price of having gone against human nature.
The same with sugar, our body counterbalances the sugar we ingest with insulin, but if we keep abusing our sugar consumption, there will come a time when our pancreas will not be able to manufacture the insulin needed to neutralize the amount of sugar ingested.
All the functions of our organism require an individual behaviour that is appropriate to maintain the balance set out by the nature to our organism; abuses are paid dearly. Our body, like any machine, has a specific way of operating, there are no two equally valid ways for it to work.
Veritas vos liberabit, the truth will set you free
If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free. John 8:31-32
Christ's message is made up of three parts: by his preaching or doctrine, that is, by everything that he has said; by everything that he has done, his miracles and works, because as He himself said, people are known by their works as trees by their fruits (cf. Matthew 7:16); and finally, by the way he behaved in all situations of his life. All this is normative for us, all this is "the way, the truth and the life" (John 14:6), all this is human nature.
The Creator became a creature to teach men to be men. In his life, Jesus reveals human nature and the way of living it; He is the gold standard of human nature: whoever wants to be authentic and genuinely human is measured against Him. It is in this sense that we must interpret "the truth will make you free". Knowledge is power and control, knowing the truth of things means being able to control them, having the power, and exercising that power over them.
In Psychology, we say "what you know about yourself, especially about your unconscious or past life, you can control; what you don't know, controls you." The knowledge of the nature that surrounds you, of human nature itself at the physical, spiritual, and psychological level, gives you freedom, since you can master it and thus know what can happen.
Similarly, you also know the limits and within these limits, you are free because absolute freedom does not exist; you know how far you can run, what you can or cannot eat, how much alcohol you can drink, etc. Knowledge of the truth of things emancipates you from them, leaving you no longer at their mercy; you are not dominated by them, you are free, independent and autonomous.
LIFE
Teach me your way, O Lord, that I may walk in your truth; give me an undivided heart to revere your name. Psalm 86:11
•You show me the path of life. In your presence there is fullness of joy; in your right hand are pleasures for evermore. Psalm 16:11
• All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. John 1:3-5
• For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. John 3:16
• I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty. John 6:35
• I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly. John 10:10
• I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. John 11:25-26
We are not owners of the most precious good we have -- our life. We did nothing to have it, our parents didn't give it to us, they just passed it on, since the ones they had weren't theirs either. As we did nothing to get it, we can do nothing to keep it. Life comes from God and goes back to God. God breathes out and we began to live, he breathes in and we stopped living. Life in this sense is not a gift, since we never get to own it, but rather a loan; a loan that we received that should yield interest to whoever had lent it to us – that is, God (Matthew 25:14-30).
There is no life outside of God nor is there life without God; in Him is the source of life, without Him we can do nothing. He alone has the antidote against death, for He is the firstborn of all the dead, he inaugurated eternal life for us. God created us out of nothing and, without God, we return to nothing, to eternal death. Only through Christ and in Christ can our temporal life extend eternally if we accept to be His brothers and sisters, adopted children of his Father.
We are nothing more than God’s creatures and as such, we are destined for death. Like everything that God created, we are born, we grow, we reproduce and we die. We are not, in principle, children of God, for God has only one son, begotten and not made as the Creed says. By contrast, we are created, not begotten; therefore we are creatures, not children. It is one thing to create, another to beget; but Jesus offered us his sonship and gave us his Father as our adoptive Father.
In Roman law, which in the case of adoption is what prevails in the world today, adopted children have the same rights as the begotten one, and in the case of inheritance, they also receive the same inheritance; so we, as adopted children of God the Father, receive as inheritance the eternal life with Him, beside His begotten son, Jesus Christ.
Life as the process of assimilation of truth
So I went to the angel and told him to give me the little scroll; and he said to me, ‘Take it, and eat; it will be bitter to your stomach, but sweet as honey in your mouth.’ So I took the little scroll from the hand of the angel and ate it; it was sweet as honey in my mouth, but when I had eaten it, my stomach was made bitter. Revelation 10:9-10
The Word of God is the unalterable truth, the bread of Heaven, the bread that leads to Heaven; whoever eats of it will live forever. This Word is sweet to the palate, because it sounds good to the ears. As the truth of life, it is logical, it has weight and measure, and it imposes by itself. There is no doubt that, even from the point of view of atheism or agnosticism, the Gospel narrative is incomparable to any other narrative of human life and outweighs any other by far.
The digestion, the assimilation of this word, the embodiment of this word and transforming it into our daily behaviour, is not an easy task. The eternal Word of God is the static element of our life. The process of assimilating it, of embodying it, is the way of our life, it is an element of change, of movement.
Our life is the way or the process of putting on Christ, as St Paul says; this is what it means to be a Christian. A task that is never finished because we are never totally there, we are always in the process, on the way to being fully there.
In the ancient world there were two conceptions of time: the cyclical Greek one based on the myth of eternal return, in the succession of the four seasons, or even in the movement of the Earth around the sun. Unlike the Greeks, the Jews had a rectilinear understanding of time; human time is a historical time formed by a past, a present and a future: the Jews based their philosophy of time on the historical archetype of the departure from Egypt and the journey through the desert toward the Promised Land.
The Christian time is the union of the circle and the line, resulting in a helical movement; time is at the same time circular because it moves in a circle and rectilinear because it advances from back to front, from past to future. In this spiral movement, truth is there from the cosmic point of view: our planet is dragged by the sun orbiting around the center of our galaxy; therefore, the movement that the earth traces is not elliptical, because the sun also moves, but helical. The helical movement also represents, at the microscopic biological level, our genetic code; the genes that make up the truth of our body are arranged in this way inside of our DNA.
One year is made up of 365 days or one rotation around the Sun – the Sun is Christ, who enlightens and gives meaning to our lives, who is the beginning and the end, both of the universe and of our individual lives. Christ is the truth, the constant throughout our lives, he is the axis around which we gravitate to obtain life, just as the Earth does with the Sun.
Each passing year we meditate on the mystery of Christ, from his Incarnation to his Death, Resurrection and Ascension to heaven. In the last analysis, to leave our personal "Egypt", configuring our lives more and more to His, in the sense that one day we will reach the Promised Land and be able to say like St. Paul: "It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me" (Galatians 2:20). Jesus is the way and the truth that leads to life.
Conclusion: Christian life is a long winding way or process of assimilating and embodying the truth that is Christ, while revolving around him, for only in him do we live and move and have our being. (Acts 17:28)
"That's your truth, it’s not what I think..." We have all heard such argument; after all, just how many truths are there? Isn't it a "contradictio in terminis" to have more than one truth? If there is more than one truth, then where does the concept of lying rest?
The problem comes from far, far away. In the Bible, knowing means dominating, controlling; the sin of our parents was the equivalent to the Greek myth of stealing the fire from the gods; it was usurping from God the criterion of good and evil, a prerogative that belonged only to Him, and for everything to work well down here, it should belong only to him.
In the context of ethics or morals, Pope Benedict XVI speaks a lot about the dictatorship of relativism. If truth is plural, understanding, harmony and peace are not possible in society. Those who elevate themselves as the criterion of truth will soon fall into the temptation to impose their "truth" over the "truth" of others. As the notorious dictators have done; everything that Hitler, Stalin and others like them did was to think that they were doing a good thing.
"God is dead, long live Superman," Nietzsche said; when God stops being God, everybody wants to take his place and soon enough others emerge to impose their own arbitrary concept of truth, justice, love and goodness, and the world becomes a true pandemonium.
After man usurps from God the criterion of good and evil, all other values stop being absolute, to become relative, conventional, arbitrary, and subjective; every individual becomes the god of himself and, if possible, of as many others as he can amass, so for the first time, man feels naked and in need of protecting himself from others like him.
The Romans, on the other hand, were already wary of the arbitrariness of dictators when they said "Dura lex, sed lex"; the law is tough, but it is the law – a gauge common to all and equal for all. The arbitrariness of a dictator is much tougher than the law.
Truth, justice, love, goodness... All human values are attributes of God. He and only He is just, true, loving, and good (cf. 1 John 2:29). To be more evident and imitable, these values were incarnated in the person of Jesus, the son of God. He is the way, the truth, and the life; that is, the only way, the only truth and the only life, for as he himself says, ‘…whoever does not gather with me, scatters’ (Luke 11:23); it is not that one can gather with another because for every human being, there is no other equally valid alternative to the life that Jesus points out to us, to which he himself bears witness and embodies.
Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice (John 18:37). He is the standard of everything that is human; whoever wants to measure his degree of truth, justice, goodness and love, he must compare himself with Christ. Whoever wants to know how human or inhuman he is, he must measure himself in relation to Christ.
When all submit themselves and love God, who is the ultimate criterion of all values, the supreme good, justice, love, and goodness, it is logical that we love others as we love ourselves; all those who turn to God as Father have each other as brothers and sisters.
Truth and human nature
Times change, wills change / being changes, trust changes; / the whole world is composed of change, / always taking on new qualities. Luis de Camões
Everything is relative, we say, everything changes, everything goes out of fashion, but there is something that remains. There is one thing that has not changed over the centuries: Human Nature. It is based on the values that compose it. These values are attributes of God, and as we have said, these values do not change. The concept of love, truth, justice, fraternity, generosity, etc. are fixed values.
What was love at the time of Cleopatra, is the same as at the time of Romeo and Juliet, and is the same as at the time of Jesus. "No one has greater love than the one who gives his life for his friends" is a universal, timeless and eternal value.
If this were not so, if Human Nature were susceptible to change over time, that is, from generation to generation or over space, from culture to culture, from civilization to civilization, Christ would have to incarnate in every culture and in every generation to be the Word of life for that place and time. The Bible could not be timeless and universally valid, but would expire like any product on the market, when with the passage of time or the passage from one culture to another, human nature were to change.
For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice. John 18:37
As there is only one human nature, there is only one way of living life, there is only one truth that fits this human nature, and as human nature does not change over the centuries, then also the truth that fits this human nature does not change. This truth is the Word of God incarnated in Jesus Christ, it is the word made flesh for all times and all places.
With his life, with his word, with his behavior and way of living, Jesus bears witness to the truth, that is, he embodies the truth in such a way that it is the gold standard of human life, the paradigm, the archetype, the way, the truth and the life.
"What is truth?" Pilate asked and he himself, without knowing it, answered by saying ecce homo, truth is a person, truth for human nature is the Word of God, it is Christ the way, it is the process of being configured to Christ. As St. Paul says, he is the way.
I have chosen the way of truth; your judgments I have laid before me. Psalm 119:30
"When the pot is made, the lid is made for it", when the human being is made, the human nature is made for him. Truth is everything that fits this human nature, it is how this human nature should be lived. Every machine is designed to work best in one specific way; it will not work well in any other way because the best operation of the machine is what best fits its nature.
The human being is like a computer, the hardware to be precise; truth, on the other hand, is the operating system that makes the computer work; life is the different programs, the different vocations or the different ways of living life, that work on the basis of this operating system.
Put on the Lord Jesus Christ, says St. Paul to the Romans (13:14); as if Christ were the garment we should wear; Christ is the garment that fits us all, best suited to our human nature. There is no other brand of clothing that we can wear that fits our human nature and brings us to life with Christ.
As someone said, God always forgives, man sometimes, nature neither forgives nor forgets. This applies both to the ecological nature of our planet and to the nature of our organism, physical, mental, spiritual. Take for example the functioning of our liver; it can break down a certain amount of alcohol with ease, but if we drink more than that amount, sooner or later we will pay the price of having gone against human nature.
The same with sugar, our body counterbalances the sugar we ingest with insulin, but if we keep abusing our sugar consumption, there will come a time when our pancreas will not be able to manufacture the insulin needed to neutralize the amount of sugar ingested.
All the functions of our organism require an individual behaviour that is appropriate to maintain the balance set out by the nature to our organism; abuses are paid dearly. Our body, like any machine, has a specific way of operating, there are no two equally valid ways for it to work.
Veritas vos liberabit, the truth will set you free
If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free. John 8:31-32
Christ's message is made up of three parts: by his preaching or doctrine, that is, by everything that he has said; by everything that he has done, his miracles and works, because as He himself said, people are known by their works as trees by their fruits (cf. Matthew 7:16); and finally, by the way he behaved in all situations of his life. All this is normative for us, all this is "the way, the truth and the life" (John 14:6), all this is human nature.
The Creator became a creature to teach men to be men. In his life, Jesus reveals human nature and the way of living it; He is the gold standard of human nature: whoever wants to be authentic and genuinely human is measured against Him. It is in this sense that we must interpret "the truth will make you free". Knowledge is power and control, knowing the truth of things means being able to control them, having the power, and exercising that power over them.
In Psychology, we say "what you know about yourself, especially about your unconscious or past life, you can control; what you don't know, controls you." The knowledge of the nature that surrounds you, of human nature itself at the physical, spiritual, and psychological level, gives you freedom, since you can master it and thus know what can happen.
Similarly, you also know the limits and within these limits, you are free because absolute freedom does not exist; you know how far you can run, what you can or cannot eat, how much alcohol you can drink, etc. Knowledge of the truth of things emancipates you from them, leaving you no longer at their mercy; you are not dominated by them, you are free, independent and autonomous.
LIFE
Teach me your way, O Lord, that I may walk in your truth; give me an undivided heart to revere your name. Psalm 86:11
•You show me the path of life. In your presence there is fullness of joy; in your right hand are pleasures for evermore. Psalm 16:11
• All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. John 1:3-5
• For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. John 3:16
• I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty. John 6:35
• I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly. John 10:10
• I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. John 11:25-26
We are not owners of the most precious good we have -- our life. We did nothing to have it, our parents didn't give it to us, they just passed it on, since the ones they had weren't theirs either. As we did nothing to get it, we can do nothing to keep it. Life comes from God and goes back to God. God breathes out and we began to live, he breathes in and we stopped living. Life in this sense is not a gift, since we never get to own it, but rather a loan; a loan that we received that should yield interest to whoever had lent it to us – that is, God (Matthew 25:14-30).
There is no life outside of God nor is there life without God; in Him is the source of life, without Him we can do nothing. He alone has the antidote against death, for He is the firstborn of all the dead, he inaugurated eternal life for us. God created us out of nothing and, without God, we return to nothing, to eternal death. Only through Christ and in Christ can our temporal life extend eternally if we accept to be His brothers and sisters, adopted children of his Father.
We are nothing more than God’s creatures and as such, we are destined for death. Like everything that God created, we are born, we grow, we reproduce and we die. We are not, in principle, children of God, for God has only one son, begotten and not made as the Creed says. By contrast, we are created, not begotten; therefore we are creatures, not children. It is one thing to create, another to beget; but Jesus offered us his sonship and gave us his Father as our adoptive Father.
In Roman law, which in the case of adoption is what prevails in the world today, adopted children have the same rights as the begotten one, and in the case of inheritance, they also receive the same inheritance; so we, as adopted children of God the Father, receive as inheritance the eternal life with Him, beside His begotten son, Jesus Christ.
Life as the process of assimilation of truth
So I went to the angel and told him to give me the little scroll; and he said to me, ‘Take it, and eat; it will be bitter to your stomach, but sweet as honey in your mouth.’ So I took the little scroll from the hand of the angel and ate it; it was sweet as honey in my mouth, but when I had eaten it, my stomach was made bitter. Revelation 10:9-10
The Word of God is the unalterable truth, the bread of Heaven, the bread that leads to Heaven; whoever eats of it will live forever. This Word is sweet to the palate, because it sounds good to the ears. As the truth of life, it is logical, it has weight and measure, and it imposes by itself. There is no doubt that, even from the point of view of atheism or agnosticism, the Gospel narrative is incomparable to any other narrative of human life and outweighs any other by far.
The digestion, the assimilation of this word, the embodiment of this word and transforming it into our daily behaviour, is not an easy task. The eternal Word of God is the static element of our life. The process of assimilating it, of embodying it, is the way of our life, it is an element of change, of movement.
Our life is the way or the process of putting on Christ, as St Paul says; this is what it means to be a Christian. A task that is never finished because we are never totally there, we are always in the process, on the way to being fully there.
In the ancient world there were two conceptions of time: the cyclical Greek one based on the myth of eternal return, in the succession of the four seasons, or even in the movement of the Earth around the sun. Unlike the Greeks, the Jews had a rectilinear understanding of time; human time is a historical time formed by a past, a present and a future: the Jews based their philosophy of time on the historical archetype of the departure from Egypt and the journey through the desert toward the Promised Land.
The Christian time is the union of the circle and the line, resulting in a helical movement; time is at the same time circular because it moves in a circle and rectilinear because it advances from back to front, from past to future. In this spiral movement, truth is there from the cosmic point of view: our planet is dragged by the sun orbiting around the center of our galaxy; therefore, the movement that the earth traces is not elliptical, because the sun also moves, but helical. The helical movement also represents, at the microscopic biological level, our genetic code; the genes that make up the truth of our body are arranged in this way inside of our DNA.
One year is made up of 365 days or one rotation around the Sun – the Sun is Christ, who enlightens and gives meaning to our lives, who is the beginning and the end, both of the universe and of our individual lives. Christ is the truth, the constant throughout our lives, he is the axis around which we gravitate to obtain life, just as the Earth does with the Sun.
Each passing year we meditate on the mystery of Christ, from his Incarnation to his Death, Resurrection and Ascension to heaven. In the last analysis, to leave our personal "Egypt", configuring our lives more and more to His, in the sense that one day we will reach the Promised Land and be able to say like St. Paul: "It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me" (Galatians 2:20). Jesus is the way and the truth that leads to life.
Conclusion: Christian life is a long winding way or process of assimilating and embodying the truth that is Christ, while revolving around him, for only in him do we live and move and have our being. (Acts 17:28)
Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC
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