The vocation of Jesus

A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Luke 9:18-22) shows Our Lord Jesus Christ in two different lights. In the longer part of the gospel, He enters into a dialogue with the disciples, first, asking who others say that He is, and then asking who they say He is; finally, He tells them that He will be rejected by the leaders of the Jewish people, put to death, and raised up again on the third day.

This longer part of the gospel, the dialogue with the disciples, is as it were a model of discernment. Of course, Jesus Himself does not need to discern in the same way that we do. His knowledge as God (knowing everything through His divine nature) and his knowledge as Saviour (knowing everything through His role as the voice of God's revelation to the world), puts Him thus in a unique position in human history. At the same time, there is human knowledge in Jesus, for He is an actor in the historical reality of His time, and He grew in grace and wisdom, according to Saint Luke, but He also transcends His own time because He is God Incarnate. There is an immense mystery to be contemplated here, and one which dispels the attempts that some make to reduce the complete strangeness of the Son of Man to nothing. He’s a man, he’s just a man, sings Lloyd Webber and Rice's Magdalene in Jesus Christ Superstar, but those who think so quite mistake the case. They imagine that by dragging Jesus down to their level, they are making him more approachable or bringing people closer to Him, although, in reality, by refusing to countenance such a mystery, they are unwittingly attempting to short circuit the surrender that God – the Utterly Other – invites us to make, and which is necessary for us to enter His intimacy. God is God, so close to us and yet entirely unlike us. Living with this strangeness is not the end of the question but part of the journey towards Him.

So, where is the model of discernment here? The model of discernment lies in what happens before and during this dialogue. So, before the dialogue, Jesus prays. Not only does He pray; He prays alone in the presence of his disciples. In the midst of the hurly burly of a busy ministry, having come from one place and no doubt preparing to go to another, and surrounded by the back and forth of chit chat and laughter, a figure of calm in a storm-tossed crowd, Jesus prays. And then, and only then, He begins His dialogue with the disciples. He next gathers information from different sources: what other people say and what the disciples say. In this process, He solicits from Peter his confession of faith by which Peter himself enters his own vocation. And then, Jesus contrasts these matters with what He knows most intimately: His role, we might almost say His vocation, as the suffering saviour of mankind. And thus emerges His model of discernment: first praying, then asking and listening, then reflecting and comparing, and then concluding. He does not do this for Himself; He does it for the sake of His disciples who must become both men of prayer and men of discernment.

And it is right to speak of the vocation of Jesus here in a broad sense. It is not a vocation perhaps in the same way as our own. But to have a vocation is to hear the voice of God and we know that Jesus is above all obedient to the will of the Father, i.e. He listens and He does the will of the Father, and in doing so carries He out what His Father calls Him to do. Furthermore, as with all vocations, Jesus’ vocation shows forth a dimension of the holiness of God. In His case, this dimension is a reaching out for, and a rescuing of, that which was lost. Jesus means Saviour. His vocation in in His name.

But then, if we reflect on the nature of vocation as we understand it in COLW, what Jesus does – His saving action - is only in a sense His active vocation. What about His personal vocation? Again, we must speak in a broad sense here since the Man-God is divine, the second person of the Divine Trinity; we can only speak of His receiving a call in regard to His human nature. As God He calls, while in His human nature He is called. Nevertheless, perhaps something like His personal vocation is captured in the very first clause of this gospel: one day when Jesus was praying alone in the presence of His disciples. His calling to save humanity from sin will be executed in due course, even though His least action and indeed His least word or prayer would have been enough to save us all. But just consider this praying alone in the presence of his disciples. What is going on here?

 Saint Thomas teaches along with many that Jesus possessed the beatific vision in His soul. His travels through the villages and towns of Israel remind us that He is a wayfarer in life like we are, with a day behind us that marked our birth and a day ahead of us that will mark our death. Yet He is also already a contemplator of the divine mystery of God in the beatific vision. In the cell of His soul, He is rapt in the mystery of the beauty and goodness of the living God. And just as any human soul so rapt in that mystery, He is filled to the fullness of His extraordinary being, a fullness whose light breaks forth only at the Transfiguration.

The wonder of all this is twofold: first, that Jesus is who is, the Way, the Truth, the Life, and has become Incarnate and walked among us in our human reality, knowing its very heights and its very depths; and second, that He intends with every fibre of His being and every drop of His blood to bring us a share in His divine life, to make us pleasing to the Eternal Father, adopted sons and daughters, rendered now alike to our brother. The beauty and the wonder of it all, the divine action and human response, the echo of His grace in his chosen ones, are all summed up in those lines of Gerard Manley Hopkins:

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;

As tumbled over rim in roundy wells

Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's

Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:

Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;

Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,

Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

 

I say móre: the just man justices;

Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;

Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is —

Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

To the Father through the features of men's faces.