01-05-2008 - Traces, n. 5

INSIDE america

Who Is This Man?
Faith starts with this question, awakened by the encounter with an extraordinary person. Pursuit of the answer to it is the path to faith in Jesus.

“Who is this man?” This question dominates much of the New Testament. Constantly, both the followers and opponents of Jesus ask themselves this question. The path from encountering Jesus to faith in Him depends on the way we seek to answer this question provoked by the encounter with Him. If we are not spurred on by this question, we will never arrive at the faith that permits a full knowledge of reality.
Note well that the question is “Who” is Jesus. It is not “What” is Jesus, but “Who” is He. The interrogative “What” indicates a theoretical question. It implies that I am looking for an intellectual understanding of a reality being perceived. Actually, this reality need not exist! Think of the question: What is a unicorn? It can be satisfactorily answered in a way that doesn’t tell me whether such a reality exists or not. Such an answer would be a reasonable answer as long as I can separate reason from existence; more precisely, as long as I can separate reason from experience.
The problem is that such a view of reason can never allow me to know a person. I might understand the concept of “person,” but that doesn’t mean persons exist.
Such a view of reason will never lead me to faith in the way proposed by Christianity. If knowledge is limited only to what can be understood intellectually, the Christian faith is not a form of knowledge. It would have nothing to do with the way my reason knows reality. It would confirm the dualism that separates faith from life. It would prevent faith from having a cultural impact.
The separation of reason from experience by limiting it to what can be grasped by my mind–that is, the separation of reason from the experience of mystery–is the block standing in the way of true faith in Christ, a faith that is a form of knowledge of reality at its deepest level, a faith that leads to a certainty that moves me to risk losing everything to hold on to Christ.
What is Jesus Christ? The Church’s reply to this question can be found in her creedal statements and doctrinal declarations, and these, of course, are essential to faith. But unless they are linked to the experience of a personal encounter with Him, they cannot have any impact on life.
The view of faith as a form of knowledge is made impossible or difficult not only because of ignorance about what faith is, but because of a flawed, limited view of what knowledge is. This limited view of knowledge is the most powerful way in which the culture of modernity affects us all and makes difficult certainty in faith.
The question that corresponds to the knowledge of faith is not, “What is Jesus?” but, “Who is Jesus?” Faith is the only access that I have to the question provoked by the experience of an encounter with a person, with a “who” and not a “what.” A person will always remain a mystery to me unless he or she opens his or her heart to me. Knowledge of the person comes from my free response to this invitation to a relationship. If, at this moment, I reduce the “who” to the “what,” I will never “know” the other person. The knowledge that faith makes possible comes precisely from this mutual relationship.
When I say, “I believe in you” (recognition of a person), it means that I share my life with you, I see reality with your eyes, I am in communion with you, I think like you. Faith thus leaves the terrain of suspicion and enters into the mysterious realm of the personal, of the “I” and the “you” and the “us,” the realm of “life-giving” transformations. Such a faith becomes the supreme form of knowledge.
Pursuit of the biblical question about Jesus–“Who is this man?”–is thus the path to the faith in Him that truly opens for us a new world.