The truth about
Christ
By
Fr. ROY CIMAGALA,
roycimagala@gmail.com
February 13, 2023
THE Pharisees argued with
Christ asking him for a sign from heaven to test him. So, Christ got
exasperated and said: “Why does this generation seek a sign? Amen, I
say to you, no sign will be given to this generation.” Then he left.
(cfr. Mk 8,11-13)
This gospel episode
reminds us that we should never dare to test God. We have to believe
God first if we want to know the truth about anything and
everything, especially about God, about Christ, and about us.
Human as he also was and
is, Christ could also feel exasperated when he was questioned about
something the proof and evidence of which are all over. He performed
miracles, his teaching was very sublime, he showed compassion with
everyone, mercy with sinners.
As St. Thomas Aquinas once
said, “To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one
without faith, no explanation is possible.”
It’s always a question of
faith if we want to know the truth about God, ourselves and
everything else. Without faith, we would just be inventing things.
Even if we what we think and invent can appear convincing, without
faith we will always miss the truth of anything we consider.
Let’s remember that faith
is God, who is truth himself, the creator of everything, the first
and last lawgiver, sharing what he knows with us. It’s a tremendous
gift that would set us on the right path on the many confusing ways
of the world.
We cannot deny that we
often get entangled with our worldly ways. This is the real problem
of inflation that many people today complain about, but limiting it
to its economic terms only. That’s when people complain about high
prices and cost of production, because of some increase of money of
supply that is not properly spread out and shared by the people, or
without the corresponding productivity that money supply is supposed
to generate.
Inflation in common terms
can be described as that phenomenon where there is a lot of hot air
in some persons or in some situation without the corresponding
substance that such air should come as an effect.
In terms of our spiritual
life and our relation of God, there can also be some kind of
inflation – the real and ultimate inflation, in fact – when
precisely things are done without faith and, thus, we can appear to
be making and producing a lot of things and yet miss the real goal
of our life. Christ articulated this phenomenon when he said: “What
does it a profit a man if he gains the whole world, but loses his
own soul?” (Mk 8,36)
We should take care of our
faith because that is the first means we have to establish our
relation with God and to truly get in touch with the true reality of
things, not just the reality of our own making.
Faith unites us with God
in whose image and likeness we have been made. It gives us the whole
truth about ourselves, about who we really are. It provides us with
all the means we need to face all the challenges of our life.
It is indispensable in our
life as we go through the drama of our earthly pilgrimage. With it,
we can manage to have hope even in our worst hopeless predicament,
as well as charity especially in those moments when we don’t see or
feel love around and instead hatred prevails.
What faith also does is to
enlighten our mind, enabling us to see and understand things beyond
the simply material, temporal and the natural. It lets us enter into
the spiritual and supernatural world to which we are poised.