FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Thirty-Fifth Helping
“You are Christ.”
-St. Pope John Paul II
The Gospel is ultimately about God and about God’s desire and plan for the salvation of each person He adopted in His love when by His Word he drew him or her out of nothingness. Everything that Jesus calls His disciples to do in thought, word and deed, He sees in the Father. His followers were to put up their swords, love their enemies, do good to those who hate them, pray for those who persecute them, forgive 70×7 times and bless those who curse them. Why; So that you may be children of your heavenly Father (Mt 5: 45). Jesus’ teaching of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies, His Sermon on the Mount, His Sermon from the Cross are first and foremost an infallible portrait of God—the only God there is, was or ever will be, the God in whose image and likeness each human being is created (Gn 1:26-27).
What Jesus, the Word of God, is, lives and teaches is what every human being at the root of his or her being desires to be and to become, that is, he or she desires to be and to become what he or she is at the point where the root of his or her existence intersects with the very Ground of Bing from which the unique being of each arises and is nourished. St. Augustine when instructing Christians in what is the proper consciousness or disposition for receiving Holy Communion writes, “Consume what you are. Become what you consume.”
If Jesus is “the image of the invisible God” (Co1: 15) and each human being is “made in the image and likeness of God” (Gn1: 26-28) by the “Word of God through whom all things were made,” then when Jesus, the “Word of God made flesh” says, ‘I give you a new commandment, love one another as I have loved you,’ He is saying, “Become what you are—Me. Act from what you are—Me. Put off the culturally nurtured old an, old woman, old image you have of yourself in your mind and be transfigured by seeing and living from the image of yourself that has been at your essence from the beginning—Me. This is the image that I, Jesus—the ‘Word of God made flesh… through whom all things were made”—molded you from and into. Believe in Me and believe Me. Live, indeed embrace passionately, the ‘new commandment” I gifted you with by my life, teaching, death and resurrection and become what you are, Me. Live in what you are, Me. Choose according to what you are, Me. Die into what you are, Me. Rise in what you are, Me.
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
