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It Was About 4 pm
The word “ideal” is problematic for many today. It is seen as a matter of inspiration and not an ongoing personal relationship. To have an ideal is considered utopian thinking. In such a context, Christ cannot be encountered

By Lorenzo Albacete

What does it mean to “encounter Jesus Christ” today? A young man once asked Fr. Giussani this question. He was a non-believer, he said, and wanted to know what Fr. Giussani meant by “encountering” Christ.
Fr. Giussani replied, “If I tell you how it is that I have encountered Christ, and that I still encounter Him in the companionship of people that have recognized Him like I have, I really have not said anything to you because for you this is not yet an experience. But if I tell you that for me Christ is the Ideal, you will understand that for me there is a bond between my own self and that man, Jesus Christ.”
But the word “ideal” is problematic for many today. It is seen as a matter of inspiration and not an ongoing personal relationship. To have an ideal is considered utopian thinking: a naïve, uncritical approach to life. Instead, what is encouraged is an attitude of systematic doubt that avoids certainty. This a priori skepticism limits discourse to an exchange of opinions and relative truths (“That is true for you but not for me,” etc.) and refuses to make judgments about reality. In this context, nothing really new, unexpected, and surprising can happen, and even the passage of time itself is ultimately meaningless.
In such a context, Christ cannot be encountered. In the Gospel of John, the encounter with Christ of the disciples John and Andrew is remembered to have happened at “about 4 pm.” For John and Andrew it all began not as an opinion, not as an inspiration (they had absolutely no idea what Christ believed and taught), but as “something that happened” to them at a specific time, date, and place. It began as a fact, as an event, as a human encounter. So much is this the case that when asked by Jesus what they wanted, John and Andrew’s reply was simply a place to be with Him always, a place where what happened to them looking at Him would continue to happen.
Their experience is completely different from utopian thinking. In fact, John and Andrew had no idea what Jesus taught, who He was, and what following Him entailed.
What they experienced was something that did not originate with them. It was radically new, unexpected, and surprising. Moreover, the encounter with Christ unleashed something in the depths of their hearts. It unleashed a desire that they could not express in words. They only knew that it was tied to being with the man they had met, of remaining with Him, looking at Him, listening to Him. Christ’s question (“What do you want?”) can also be phrased as “What do you live for?” The “ideal” is the answer to this question. It is not that “by” which we live, but that “for” which we live. The ideal is the “satisfaction toward which the heart launches us.” It is not the product of thought. Rather than conform to our expectations, it challenges us and changes us. When Fr. Giussani says that Christ is his “Ideal,” he means that “that man, born 2,000 years ago, makes me live and exalts me, holds me captive and changes me. He changes me because He is present.”
To encounter Christ today is to experience exactly what John and Andrew experienced over 2,000 years ago. The authenticity of my experience is measured by its continuity with what has been occurring since then. Through it, I am incorporated in a history greater than the one created by my own individual behavior. The encounter with Christ today links me to John and Andrew, two historical individuals, in an objective way, joining me to a people who recognize that what has happened to each one is exactly what has happened to all, back to when John and Andrew first met that man, at almost 4 pm.