When you think of Jesus, what images come to mind? A divine therapist, who has come to respond to our emotional needs? A king, reigning over the Church and the cosmos? A spiritual guru, dispensing heavenly wisdom? A revolutionary who came to upend the status quo? A judge, delivering justice and punishing sinners? A peace-loving hippie, who wants to set aside the moral rigorism of the past? A savior, who wants to offer a ticket to heaven to as many people as possible?
There’s at least a grain of truth in most of our mental images of Jesus, but each falls short in its own way, doesn’t it? No single label quite captures the depth of the person of Jesus as he is portrayed in the Gospels. He is both the savior and the judge, a servant and a king, who offers both mercy and high moral standards. It seems that you can’t quite sum up Jesus with any one word or phrase.
If I had to point to one description of Jesus that is more essential than any other, however, it would be this: Jesus is the Son of God. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (who later became Pope Benedict XVI) explained it well when he said, “Jesus is entirely ‘Son’ and is never enclosed in his own world. He is, with every fiber of his existence, relation to the Father” (Gospel, Catechesis, Catechism (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995), 43). “Son of God” is not just a fancy title given to Jesus - It is his deepest identity.
Unpacking what you may have learned about Jesus in Sunday school can get deep quickly: Jesus is God the Son, the second person of the Holy Trinity, who has existed for all of eternity in joy-filled communion with God the Father. As soon as we start talking about the Trinity, we risk reducing God to a boring mathematical equation – “There is one God in three divine persons: the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit.” Such statements are true, of course, but it’s easy to miss their beauty and significance.
In the Gospels, though, we discover that Jesus’ relationship with his Father is anything but boring. His disciples gave up everything to follow him from town to town because they could tell that he had a unique relationship with God, and they wanted to somehow be a part of it. They saw Jesus frequently retreating from the crowds to deserted places for times of deep prayer with his heavenly Father for hours or even weeks at a time. They listened to Jesus as he told them, “All things have been handed over to me by my Father. No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son wishes to reveal him” (Matthew 11:27). They heard the voice of God booming from heaven saying, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him” (Matthew 17:5).
If we want to understand Jesus, we must understand that communion with his Father is the deepest source of his joy, and the heart of his mission is to share that same joy with us by making us children of God. When his disciples want to learn to pray, he teaches them the “Our Father” (Matthew 6:9-13). After calling his disciples at the Last Supper to love as he loves, he assures them, “I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and your joy may be complete” (John 15:11). When he prays to the Father at that same Last Supper, he says that the essence of eternal life is knowing his Father (John 17:3). He tells the disciples that he is going to prepare a place for them in his Father’s house, so that where he is, we also can be (John 14:2).
We also catch a glimpse of Jesus’ deep desire to share his own divine life in the well-known story of the woman at the well. When Jesus asks the foreign woman for a drink, she responds with surprise, “How can you, a Jew, ask me, a Samaritan woman, for a drink?” (John 4:9) Jesus replies mysteriously, “If you knew the gift of God and who is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him and he would have given you living water” (John 4:10).
“If you knew the gift of God…”
I’ve often thought of these words of Jesus when I think about people who seem to think that Jesus and his Church are uninteresting or irrelevant. You can almost hear the deep longing in these words of Jesus. He seems to be saying, “If you only knew the life with the Father that I’ve experienced for all of eternity, the life that I long to share with you. If you only knew the love that God longs to pour into your own thirsting heart. If you only knew…”
When we look at the person of Jesus, then, we should never overlook that he is first and foremost the Son of God who has come to make us children of God. Other titles and mental images of Jesus have their value, but we will never properly appreciate the Gospel until we begin to see the depth of Jesus’ relationship with the Father and his thirst for us to share in that relationship.