The Mystery We Call Jesus

We often refers to matters of faith as “mysteries.” While we are all familiar with the literary genre known as mystery writing, thinking of the mysteries of our faith in this way is really not very helpful.  The mysteries of our faith are not a matter of “who done it,” or “why did it happen.” 

Mysteries of faith are better described as realizations that gradually dawn upon us as our experience of God grows. Of course there are the things that we cannot nor ever will completely understand while living here.  These things will be revealed to us later when we experience God face to face. 

Other parts of our faith are revealed by our encounters with God, with God’s mercy, with God’s providential care, with God’s presence in our lives. Each time we encounter God in prayer, we come to a little better understanding of God’s place in our lives. Prayer changes us.  Prayer makes it possible to understand what God asks of us. 

In today’s reading from the First Letter to St. Timothy, we hear him refer to Jesus as the “mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as ransom for all.” This reference may be a little uncomfortable for us because we name Jesus as the second person of the Holy Trinity. We know Jesus as God. Intellectually we know that the Church teaches us that Jesus was both God and man. However for St. Paul and his contemporaries, Jesus was a man, the Messiah, sent by God, to ransom us. It was only after decades of prayer and reflection that the community came to know Jesus as God. The mystery of who Jesus was gradually developed in the Church and culminated with the Gospel of John which proclaimed that Jesus was God made flesh. 

If the early community gradually came to understand who Jesus was, the same is true of us.  Each time we approach the person of Jesus, each time we experience his presence in our lives, we come to know him better, to understand the mystery a little more clearly.  This is why it is so important for us to continually immerse ourselves in the mysteries of our faith so that, like a rose bud that opens and displays its beauty a little differently each day, the mysteries of faith will open and display the beauty of God.

Fr. Lawrence Jagdfeld, O.F.M., Administrator