Earlier this month I was in Rome to preach the annual Lenten spiritual exercises to the Pope and the bishops of the Roman Curia. While I gave the conferences, most of the time of the retreat was given to prayer. The Holy Father and the bishops who help him in Rome prayed the Liturgy of the Hours together, recited the rosary together and were together for Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament. The annual retreat and all of these “exercises of devotion” are designed to help those who use them grow in intimacy with Christ.

Last week, as one of the speakers in a Lenten series of talks, I gave a conference at an Episcopal Church on the gifts of the Holy Spirit in our lives and in the world at large. After the talk, a man raised a question about having a personal relationship with Christ. It is, of course, the Holy Spirit who helps us to recognize that Jesus is the Christ and who makes our relationship to him vital. Unless it is just a relationship to an idea of Christ, our relationship with him is always personal. Since Jesus Christ is a person and so is each of us, how could our relationship be anything but personal? The question is not whether or not our relationship to Christ is personal but how that relationship is made available. Catholics find their personal relationship to Christ through personal faith in and through the Church, which is his body and which has the Holy Spirit as her soul. The Church proclaims who Jesus is and then instructs us about him in catechesis and brings us into contact with him in the sacraments, so that our personal relationship may develop into genuine intimacy.

Growing in intimacy with Jesus means coming to know what he knows and coming to love as he loves. St. Paul tells us to “put on the mind of Christ.” Jesus himself tells us to love each other as he and the Father love one another. Getting to know others intimately includes having some insight into their sense of themselves, their self-consciousness. Questions about Jesus’ personal self-awareness have been the subject of theological speculation for many centuries; but they are asked with more frequency today, in a more self-conscious age. What did Jesus know about himself? Was he aware that he was God’s only begotten Son? Was he conscious of his divinity?

For centuries, scholastic theologians usually asserted that Jesus knew he was God. This was before the age of modern self-consciousness, which develops gradually in human beings. But ignorance of who one truly is is not proof that one is human. Jesus is still truly human, even though aware of his own divinity. Some modern biblical scholars argue that Jesus did not know he was God until his baptism or even his resurrection from the dead. Certainly, as truly human, he came to know things and events as any other human being comes to know them. But as truly divine, he must also have been aware of who he is in ways that those of us who aren’t divine can’t understand. After all, a God who doesn’t know he is God isn’t much of a God. The question is not: when did Jesus come to know he was God?

The question, for those who would argue that Jesus didn’t know he was God, has to be: when did he forget? The answer is: he didn’t. Pope John Paul II recently published a letter (Novo millennio ineunte) to move the Church from Jubilee to mission. We enter the new millennium, the Pope says, contemplating the face of Jesus Christ and, in our contemplation, coming to know and love him ever more intimately. In reflecting again on the Incarnation of the Eternal Son of God in Jesus of Nazareth, the Pope writes about the “frontier zone” of the mystery: Christ’s self-awareness. The Pope reminds us in paragraph 24: “The Church has no doubt that the Evangelists in their accounts, and inspired from on high, have correctly understood, in the words which Jesus spoke, the truth about his person and his awareness of it. Is this not what Luke wishes to tell us when he recounts Jesus’ first recorded words, spoken in the Temple in Jerusalem when he was barely 12 years old? Already at that time he shows that he is aware of a unique relationship with God, a relationship which properly belongs to a ‘son’. When his mother tells him how anxiously she and Joseph had been searching for him, Jesus replies without hesitation: ‘How is it that you sought me? Did you not know that I must be about my Father’s affairs?’

(Lk. 2:49). It is no wonder therefore that later as a grown man his language authoritatively expresses the depth of his own mystery, as is abundantly clear both in the Synoptic Gospels (cf. Mt. 11:27; Lk. 10:22) and above all in the Gospel of John. In his self-awareness, Jesus has no doubts: ‘The Father is in me and I am in the Father.’ (Jn. 10:38).

“However valid it may be to maintain that, because of the human condition which made him grow ‘in wisdom and in stature, and in favor with God and man’ (Lk. 2:52), ...there is no doubt that, already in his historical existence, Jesus was aware of his identity as the Son of God. John emphasizes this to the point of affirming that it was ultimately because of this awareness that Jesus was rejected and condemned: they sought to kill him because he not only broke the Sabbath but also called God his Father, making himself equal with God” (Jn. 5:18).

The Pope is writing in these passages as a man of faith, reading Gospels which were written by people of faith and which can be understood only through the faith. Reading the Gospels using only rules which abstract from the faith, studying the Gospels as if one were an honorary atheist, inevitably distorts their meaning by subjecting them to a world foreign to them. Unless they are presented and heard as documents of faith, even the Gospels can become obstacles to intimacy with Jesus.

Intimacy with Jesus means knowing who he truly is, matching our awareness of him with his awareness of himself. For us, as for all Jesus’ disciples and the saints of every age, that is the quest of a life time. It is a quest the Church urges on us especially during Lent, using personal prayer, reflection on the Gospels, and the teaching of the Church about Jesus to guide us. God bless you.

Sincerely yours in Christ,

Francis Cardinal George, OMI
Archbishop of Chicago