Faithfulness to Christ

To Pilar Timpane, for her birthday

What does it mean to obey, to be faithful to Christ? Our obedience depends on our certainty of God’s faithfulness. This is what the great words “Thy will be done” really mean. They are a reminder of our original dependence and most of all, His faithfulness which is His affection, for us. How do we know that He is faithful? How do we know that He cares about us? Was Christ serious when he said, “What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world, and then lose his heart? Or what can a man give in exchange for himself?” (Matt. 16:26). Does Almighty God really value us in this way? We read in the Scriptures that Christ did not regard himself equal to God but emptied himself and became obedient to God even unto death (Phil. 2). The Incarnation, then, is the confirmation, the verification that God is truly obedient to His love for us, faithful enough to go into the depths of our hearts, of our solitude, and of our loneliness. This is the condition of our obedience: God’s obedience to Himself, His faithfulness to His love.

Everything depends on His faithfulness, in His freedom to keep looking at us with that same merciful look He gazed at Peter, the blind man, Judas, and the widow with. He revealed His absolute freedom, absolute love, when He allowed Himself to be naked, allowed Himself to be a corpse that hung on a tree. He preferred to die than live without us. And when he rose again, this confirms to us that He who loves us tells us, “You cannot die.” He who loves does not want the other to die. He who loves dies when that love is unreciprocated.

How do we experience this great event of love? We can list many examples from the Scriptures but two is enough. The first is when God saved the Israelites from slavery. Experience of God is an experience, an expansion, of our freedom. But when we keep reading this salvific event, we read that the Israelites had become impatient. They kept telling each other, “Let us go back to Egypt!” “God has left us hungry here in the desert. Let us go back to Egypt!” The problem with the Israelites is their forgetfulness. They had forgotten how miserable their lives were in Egypt. They had forgotten the mighty Pharaoh’s oppression and their terrible condition of slavery. They had forgotten their allegiance to an unarticulated man named Moses who had led them out of Egypt. They had forgotten the miracles God had done. How many more miracles did He have to do? How many more miracles does God have to do for us to believe? I am reminded of a person who was going to convert to Christianity and she asked a great philosopher, “But what if this whole thing is wrong?” Dietrich von Hildebrand answered, “But think of the miracles!” Think of the “coincidences,” the people, the experiences you had!

In contrast, think of the annunciation. A young faithful virgin was in love with a man. But God wanted something else. He sent an angel to Mary and told her that she would become the mother of God, of Christ. She allowed God’s love to penetrate her and infuse her with His Spirit. The angel left. This had many implications. It meant, first of all, that she had to explain to Joseph what happened, why she was pregnant. It also meant that she would be looked at with disgust by people. What she had was a promise from an angel that her son would be the Son of God, the Messiah. Her existence depended on that promise, under the context of her experience with God. It was with great joy that she experienced God and she never forgot this event. It was her constant remembering of this event that made her endure the questioning and hateful looks that others gave her, that made her endure Joseph’s heartbreaking face when she told him she was pregnant. And when she had to endure the great suffering of seeing her beloved son suffer on the cross, she must have remembered the time when she held him in her arms when he was born: “she kept all these things in her heart.” She must have remembered the time when she was in distress looking for her twelve year old boy and joyfully found him in the temple. Finding him in the temple was a promise that in every great distress, there will be joy; in every crucifixion, there will be a resurrection. And so, “she kept all of these things in her heart.” That is why she could endure the crucifixion. She remembered; she relived the experiences she had in the past. Unlike the Israelites, Mary kept her experiences of Christ in her heart. She did not forget but grew in her certainty of God’s tenderness to humanity. Obedience to God’s will, which is always His faithfulness to us, can only be done when we relive and remember the experiences we’ve had of Him.

Whenever you experience a great love, you never forget it. Hopefully, all of us can remember our first encounters with Christ, or that experience with Christ that allowed us to convert, change, and made us fall in love with him. We saw a glimpse of our destiny, a moment when our lives made sense. We look back; we remember. What was our judgment, the judgment we made on our experience? This is not just an intellectual exercise, but the way we understand Christ. We understand Christ when we look into our lives and see how we have changed, see how he worked through the people he put in our lives, see the trials we have endured. We do not understand Christ apart from our hearts because it is in our restless hearts that he starts his work in us. It is also the place he ends, for it is in our hearts where his Father and his Spirit will dwell forever.

When we experienced Christ at those points in our lives, what did our hearts say? Did not our hearts burn within us like the two disciples in Emmaus? Did we not experience a reason for living, an experience of exceptionality? To put it in another way, when we experienced that thrilling, quivering, and jolting love of Christ, did we not understand that this is the One whom we have been looking for all along? To experience Christ is to understand our destiny, the meaning of life; the meaning of life is love and love is Christ. For Christ to be the meaning of our life means that all that we do – whether it is school, work, parties, heartbreak, friendships – everything has a meaning, everything has a face. We can look at an awful situation and see that it is part of something greater. We can be with each other with joy and know that this event is a promise that there is more to come. The good news about Christianity is really that our life longs for more and the message is: there is more.

An experience of God’s faithfulness is not a mere sentimentality but an experience which moves the whole being of the person to be open to reality. For example, I went to a retreat once and I had a joyful moment. When everyone was leaving, I was sad because I did not want the retreat to end, an experience like Peter’s at the Transfiguration who told Jesus, “Let us stay here and build tents.” Now, there are two possibilities: either I am a sentimental person or there was an objective presence, a fact, which moved me so much that I wanted to stay with these people. If the former is true, then I cannot really know whether there is a higher power at work because I could become sentimental in any event. If the latter is true, then it means that my life changes. My life changes because I am now in search of this Presence which moved me to be joyful. I am now in a search of a Person, wanting to know who this Person is. “Who are you that moved me to so much joy?” In other words, it provokes prayer. Prayer is an expression of the heart’s desire of wanting to know who it is made for. It is begging Christ that he comes to us, to be aware of his presence in our lives. The time of prayer becomes the truest moment in our lives because it is there that we are explicitly depended on a “You,” that this relationship with this “You” is what makes us certain about our hearts, our desires, our place in this world. Nothing is worthwhile unless it is related to this “You.” Our desires have been altered, wanting to follow where this Presence takes us. We want to follow this Presence because He has put joy in our lives, a promise that there is more to come, that if we allow ourselves to be vulnerable to His freedom, we will attain this infinite joy. Faithfulness to invoking God, faithfulness to prayer, allows us to say with decisiveness and freedom, “Here I am. I am Yours.” An experience of God’s faithfulness, then, increases our affection to Him, move us to become His: “I no longer live, but Christ lives in me” (Gal. 2:20).

Following this Presence is not simply having a personal prayer time but requires following a concrete person or persons. It is in following concrete persons that we experience the carnality of the Logos. When I made the judgment that Christ was in that retreat because I experienced joy, the rational thing to do is to stay with those people. Of course I could not stay with all of them. Many of them lived far away. But there were a few that live close to me. The rational thing for me to do is to stay with them, to follow them. This does not mean that I must be with them all the time. This does not mean that we will never have any problems with each other – good friendship requires struggle. It means that we have been dominated by a Presence, realizing that there must be Someone who puts us together through our weaknesses and struggles and our joys. It is the Presence that these persons carry that I want. This Presence should dominate my life. The way I think, the way I talk to people, the way I wake up in the morning, changes. Even if I am not with them, they are with me because what is important is He who dominates us. This is what obedience really is. Obedience is following Christ in each other, in our friendship. It is following the Church. This is why even though we can see the corruption in the Church, we can see the sins of each other, we can still say the Church is good. We can say that we belong to the Church, we belong to each other. We belong to each other because we are not alone in our sinfulness. This is the essence of the Church: Christ sits at the table with sinners; Christ has truly become sin. We can say that the Church is good because we remember, we experience, that Someone has looked at us the same way. In our sinfulness, in our wickedness, Christ looks at us and still says, “You are good.” We can say to the Church, “You are good” because she too looks at us the same way. Faithfulness to God is always ecclesial.

Because we remember how God has been faithful to us, our freedom has been expanded. If there is ever a time when I am called to be at a place without the people I have grown to love, the people whom I have encountered Christ, I can tell Christ, “thy will be done.” I can leave the people I love because my friendship with them is no longer limited to how much time I spend time with them. I can leave them because I experienced joy with them, a promise that whenever I follow this Presence that moves us together, I will have the joy that I deeply need and desire.
Obedience to Christ, then, is not attempting to do anything in our own wishes, even if those wishes are good. I can say, “I will do charitable works, Lord. I will pray for an hour every day. I will be more faithful in my studies.” Notice how it is always “I will”, “I will”. It is focus on the “I.” Rather, there is one thing necessary: we are loved, the “You”. Obedience is not attempting to please the Lord by our own works. Obedience is not a mechanical following, but a simplicity of the heart. And the simpler the heart is, the more it gives itself away. The simplicity of the heart is giving itself to the people whom it has been affected by. To be simple means to be sensitive to Christ’s tenderness. It is allowing oneself to submit to the people he has given to us, those who are living their vocation and certain of Christ’s love for them and has their hearts geared towards His absolute freedom.

Finally, the story of Jesus, Mary, and Martha is a definitive guide for obedience (Luke 10:38-42). Martha heard that Christ was coming. Christ was a friend of hers and she knew that there was something exceptional in this man. Not only was he becoming a famous teacher, but he looked at her with an attentiveness that she had never experienced. Martha had never seen such a man before. She had never seen a man so serene, so generous, so attentive to one’s needs, so firm, and so loving. He had helped her in a way that no one had ever helped her before; she realized herself through him. So she heard that he was coming again. As a sign of gratitude and hospitality, she cleaned her house and wanted to have a presentable meal. Mary, on the other hand, was not the best helper. She was busy doing other work and she might have been lazy. She may have even ruined a certain kind of food Martha was making. We don’t know. But we know that Martha was trying to impress Christ and there is nothing wrong in trying to impress him. Then, unexpectedly, she heard that Christ was coming earlier than what was planned. This is a great and sweet blessing of God: He comes unexpectedly and sooner than we think. He comes and the meal is not even cooked and not even prepared. The house is not in the best shape. Mary, who was probably not as skilled as Martha in cooking and other things, saw Christ and entertained him. Martha got mad at Mary and told her to help her. Christ told Martha that she was too worried about too many things. “Only one thing is necessary” and Mary had chosen the best part. This is not to say that Martha was wrong. It pleased the Lord that she was doing all of those things. But Christ desired one thing: Martha herself.

At the end of it all, the Lord wants you. That is it. Obedience requires an awareness of what is essential: “You.” Obedience is saying with affection, “I am You who make me.”