The Mystery of the (Real) Jesus

The Epiphany is the feast of the manifestation of Christ’s Mystery. I want to propose to you today something like a “statement” of our faith in this tremendous mystery, the Mystery of the Word made flesh, the mystery of God made man.

Let no one deceive you with another Jesus. Let us not buy a different Jesus. Some people make money selling a Jesus that did not exist: they “sell” Jesus as if He had been simply one more man, a great man maybe, but only that. They make money with that Jesus, and they kill the real one.

But that Jesus is dead: a great man, yes, but a man in the past. Because that Jesus is not God, he is dead as all other men who passed away and therefore has no more power than them. It is easy to sell, because he cannot tell you that you are wrong, but neither can he forgive you. He cannot punish you, but neither can he save you or protect you. He is easy to sell, because he lets you do whatever you want: he is simply dead! But that Jesus is also easy to forget, because he quickly becomes irrelevant. And he is eventually discarded as worthless, because instead of helping you, he leaves you alone with your problems and your decisions: he has nothing to do with those things. He cannot help, he cannot give advice, he cannot forgive: he is a dead man, he is not there for you, and with his beautiful stories, long hair and soft voice seems to cynically laugh at your problems. This is not the real Jesus…

The only Jesus who really existed was killed for telling the truth about Himself. He said that He was God and, for many, that was too much to say. They killed Him, and today, many others try again and again to kill the real Jesus, by saying nonsense about Jesus.

Jesus is God. God is only One, He is omnipotent, He knows everything, and He created the world out of nothing. Jesus is that God. No other man is God, no other man has ever been God, no other man will ever be God. We just can’t be what we are not. But God could become what He was not. God decided to become what He was not. He did it only once. He became man, but He remained God at the same time. When God became man, He remained what He was. “He remained what He was (i.e., God) and He became what He was not (i.e., man)” (Cf. St. Leo the Great, Christmas Sermon). That is why Jesus is at the same time true God and true man, man and God; and not two different subjects, but the very Almighty God, the Son of God, subsisting in a human nature.

Yes, it is a mystery. But that does not mean that you can make of Jesus what you want. Jesus was very clear about His identity, so clear that they killed Him. The Church has always and consistently taught the truth about Jesus. He is God. No other prophet has ever been God, and none of the real prophets would have been so crazy as to say something like that about themselves. What other wise men or founder of religion has ever claimed to be God, the Creator of the World? I have met mentally ill people saying that they are God, but none of them has founded a church with a billion followers.(1) Jesus was God, He was serious about that, and His followers understood perfectly that to follow Him meant to accept this truth, and to die for this truth, if need be. And – O my goodness! – this Jesus must have done something, to have so many people believe what He said about Himself. Nobody has ever been like Jesus, nobody has ever done the things Jesus did, nobody has ever spoken like He spoke, because nobody else has ever been God.

No other religion can be the same as the Christian religion. There is only one God, and that God became man in Jesus. God became man to bring salvation to all nations, not only to the Jewish people. The Magi were not Jewish: they came from afar, invited by a star. Today we must be those stars for so many people who may have heard about Jesus, but do not know that Jesus is uniquely different, that Jesus is God, and that God is with us because He wants to save us.

“How beautiful would the world be, if God were with us!”, some people may say. How happy these people would be, if they knew that God is actually with us. He came to suffer with us and for us, and so show us the way to a happiness that cannot be conceived of, because it is the happiness of God Himself. He came to make light our burdens with His love, with His consolations, with the hope of heaven, with His Eucharistic presence among us, with His forgiveness. He said, “In the world you will have to suffer, but take courage, I have overcome the world. And I will be with you always, until the end of time.” (Cf. John 16:33; Matthew 28:20 )

Jesus is not simply a hero, because He is not dead like our heroes of the past. He is our peace, He is risen, He is our hope. He is seated at the right hand of the Father in Heaven. He will raise our mortal bodies to be like His, in glory, if we die with Him to our sins. Life is not life if we do not know this. Death is no longer death if we know it. Jesus is the only one who can transform our lives and our deaths because He is the only true God. And God is with us!

May our faith in Him always grow. May we present Him with the incense of our faith, because He is God; with the gold of our charity, because He is Love; and with the myrrh of our hope, because after this life we will see Him as He is.

(1) Jim Jones in the Jonestown massacre actually founded something like a church and had lots of followers—the People’s Temple Agricultural Project.