Who is Christ to you?

IT is important that we know who Christ is to each one of us. That

question Christ tossed to the apostles, “Who do the crowds say that I

am?” should also be addressed to each one of us.

And it’s crucial that we, with God’s grace, with the faith that has

been given to us in abundance, echo the right answer articulated by

Peter. Otherwise we would just be left with our own estimations, like

how the crowds took Jesus to be.

“Some John the Baptist, others Elias, still others Jeremiah, or one of

the prophets,” the apostles said in reply. But when asked who they,

the apostles themselves, considered Christ to be, it was Peter who

answered.

“The Christ of God,” he said. “You are the Christ, the Son of the

living God,” he reiterated. To which, Jesus answered, stressing the

need for faith for us to enable to recognize Christ as he truly is,

“Blessed are you, because flesh and blood has not revealed it to you,

but my Father who is in heaven.”

It is important therefore that we always exercise our faith, that we

make our faith operative and functional all the time, because it is a

fundamental gift of God to us. It is what would reveal to us who

Christ really is.

Faith tells us much more than what our senses and our native

intelligence can perceive and understand. It tells us the eternal

truths, not just passing facts and data or information that are useful

only in the temporal sense.

By exercising our faith, we are not inventing things, though it

involves realities—what are called supernatural mysteries—that are

beyond our capacity to sense and understand. We need to sharpen our

innate tendency to trust and believe to cope with this necessity in

our life called faith.

It is this faith that tells us that Christ is the Son of God who

became man, who was born of the Blessed Virgin, who preached and

performed miracles, and who ultimately offered his life on the cross

for our sins, and then resurrected and ascended into heaven, and who

with the Father has sent us the Holy Spirit.

It is this Holy Spirit that would make Christ present in us and in the

world all the way till the end of time. He is the one that would

remind us of everything that Christ did and said for our salvation,

and guide us along the path of time to bring us back to God, from whom

we come.

We are not just creatures of nature, because nature itself has a

Creator. It is not a spontaneous, self-creation. Neither are we just

children of our parents, citizens of a given country, subjects of so

many conditionings, cultural, historical, social, etc.

We are children of God, made in his image and likeness, and whose life

cannot be and should not be separated from God. We had our first

creation in our first parents, the whole Triune God—Father, Son and

Holy Spirit—involved in our creation, the Father willing it, the Son

being the pattern, and the Holy Spirit effecting it.

With the deformity caused by our sin, God re-created us in his Son who

became man. It is this Son, Jesus Christ, who showed and gave us the

way to re-create ourselves through his death and resurrection. No sin,

no evil is impossible for Christ’s redemptive work to forgive, unless

we want it unforgiven.

All this redemptive work of Christ is now made actual for each of us

through the Holy Spirit. With the Holy Spirit, Christ is alive up to

now, and continues his work of redemption with us. Christ and his

redemptive work are not merely historical. They are always present and

effective.

To help us to be with Christ, we are given the Church, his living word

contained in Sacred Tradition and the Bible and interpreted and taught

authoritatively by the Church magisterium. We have the sacraments and

the whole gamut of charisms and Christian witness by a variety of

saints.

We need to understand that Christ is very close to us. He is in us and

all around us, since he is the very foundation of our existence and of

the whole reality, no matter how much we deform it.

  

We have to overcome the natural awkwardness in dealing with this

spiritual and supernatural reality presented to us by our faith. The

means are always there. We have to pray and engage Christ in an

ongoing conversation. Christ should always be in our mind, heart,

senses, etc.