Another Truth of seeing who Jesus is

Another Truth of seeing who Jesus is

We can write or speak about Jesus Christ and his divinity and still ponder what all this means to a wandering mind.  No matter how often we look into the Magisterium of the Church or the Catechism of the Catholic Church there may be issues we cannot understand.  Yet, the understanding of God even though deeper than we are able to discern him, is real and everlasting.  

The one truth that must never be circumvented is the revelation of Christ which is the final revelation of him.  Throughout the ages, there have been so-called “private” revelations, some of which have been recognized by the authority of the Church.  They do not belong, however, to the deposit of faith.  It is not their role to improve or complete Christ’s definitive Revelation, but to help live more fully by it in a certain period of history.  Guided by the magisterium of the Church, the sensus fidelium knows how to discern and welcome in these revelations whatever constitutes an authentic call of Christ or his saints to the Church.  (CCC 67).

If we attempt to place a limit on the effect of what we call time,  there will be a confusing question regarding God and his eternal existence which we are not yet privy to.  Somehow many had believed that God had a beginning and therefore there is a time element to his existence.   With that in mind, we also will have a short existence, if any at all, after death.  Because of this God also will have an end.  So much for eternity and its meaning.  

Our reality of time is a human aspiration that controls much of our daily living relying on future events and recovering from past effects of life upon the struggles of human living.  God, however, is not subject to time as compared to past and future elements of humanity.  

Almost certainly God is not in Time.  His life does not consist of moments following one another.  It is really, I suggest, a timeless truth about God that human nature, and the human experience of weakness and sleep and ignorance, are somehow included in his whole divine life.  This human life in God is from our point of view a particular period in the history of our world (from the year A.D. one till the Crucifixion).  We therefore imagine it is also a period in the history of God’s own existence.  But God has no history.  He is too completely and utterly real to have one.  For. of course, to have a history means losing part of your reality (because it has already slipped away into the past) and not yet having another part (because it is still in the future):  in fact having nothing but the tiny little present, which has gone before you can speak about it.  God forbid we should think God was like that.  All the days are Now for him.  He does not remember you doing things yesterday; he simply sees you doing them, because though you have lost yesterday, he has not.  He does not foresee  you doing things tomorrow; he simply sees you doing them: because, though tomorrow is not yet there for you, it is for him.  (C.S. Lewis; Time and Beyond Time Chapter 3 (Beyond Personality - Mere Christianity).

As we examine the Incarnation and Christ assuming a human nature our focus leads us to our past sins that will now be removed for our future lives with God.  However, once we die and enter into eternity our past as humans and the hope of a better future are erased.  We too shall be like God living in the present with him.  What then about the Book of Revelation that describes Christ’s second coming through the Parousia and the New Heaven and Earth coming down out of heaven?  Our future lies somewhere in this truth which promises something we have just read about.  (Rev 21: 1 ff).  

Again, we must go back to the Incarnation that was the only way for God to receive each of us into an eternal existence with him.  When God created humanity it was not through our human weakness that he rejected any one of us.  But, it was through the weakness we inherited through free-will that God quickly put in motion the only way he could overlook our sinfulness and accept our drooping hearts to live with him forever.  One thing is that forever is a time without end.  

Ralph B. Hathaway