To live the risen life is not to “imitate Christ.” It is to be
Christ and act as Jesus himself in everything we do.
This can be daunting. But it isn’t if we let Jesus act with
us, in us and through us, keeping ourselves conscious of his
presence by saying the WIT prayer all day long: “Lord, do this with me,
do this in me, do this through me.” What makes his “burden light”
is that Jesus carries it with us. His “yoke is easy” because it joins us to
him. To shift the image, to let Jesus act with us, in us and through
us all day is to be “joined to Jesus at the hip.”
But we have to know him. We need to know this person who is our
yokemate, our partner, who co-carries our burdens and “co-operates” with us, in
us and through us in all we say and do. We don’t appreciate having Jesus as a
“friend by our side” if we don’t know him as a friend. And the key to this is
knowing how he thinks.
How can we know that? Jesus is God. The Father himself said,
speaking through Isaiah, “My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways
my ways. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher
than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” And Jesus said, “No one
knows the Father but the Son.” To know God as he is, you have to be God.
But Jesus added: “...and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal
him.” Jesus has revealed the Father to us by sharing his own divine life with
us, including his own divine act of knowing the Father (we call this the “gift
of faith,” the gift of divine enlightenmemt).
And when Philip said to him, “Lord, show us the Father,” Jesus
answered, “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not
know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the
Father’”? The Father is revealed in the words and actions of Jesus. The divine
is made visible in the human.
Jesus went on to say, “I do not call you servants any longer,
because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called
you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard
from my Father.”
That is the key. Jesus has made known to us the thoughts of
God; his own thoughts and the thoughts of his Father. We can find them written
in his words. All we have to do is read them.
And when we do, the Holy Spirit will help us understand them.
Jesus promised it. “The Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in
my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to
you.” The Trinity of God himself, Father, Son and Spirit, will work together to
let us know and understand the thoughts of God if we read his words.
Then we will know the true personality of the “friend by our
side.” We will know Jesus, not as his servants, but as his friends. If we
choose to read his words.
That is the next step into living the risen life. Do we choose to
read the words of God?
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