Pastor’s Corner — October 17th, 2021
Do I Need a Personal Relationship with Jesus? Absolutely, Here’s Why
One of the themes of my preaching (and that of Fr. Joe’s and Fr. Miguel’s) is that we need to respond personally to Jesus’ invitation to faith and repentance. Jesus proposes salvation to us and he invites us to respond. He won’t save us without our response, because he won’t force us to love him. One way I like to illustrate this point is to say that we cannot go to heaven by accident any more than we can fall in love by accident. While we may struggle with saying yes to his invitation to faith and repentance at times, one thing we know for certain is that our response has to be personal.
This is really good news! He freely has loved us and invites us to response by believing in him and loving him. Since faith and love is inherently personal, we speak of having a “personal relationship” with Jesus. This phrase also connotes the personal experiential knowledge of Jesus through prayer. We don’t just know Jesus in an abstract impersonal way, we can know him personally by our real experience of him. This kind of intimate personal relationship with Jesus is deeply satisfying and is very different experience from having a cold, distant, abstract and impersonal relationship with him. That God wants us to know Jesus in a personal way is an inherently biblical fact.
Since I’ve become a priest though I’ve discovered two kinds of Catholics who bristle at the language of having a personal relationship with Jesus. The first group are those who say they’ve never heard growing up any language about having a personal relationship. Some even think that it’s not Catholic. But when I explain to them what this language means, most understand easily, even if some find themselves asking whether or not they know Jesus personally in prayer. (In this case I gently remind them that God can be known personally and he wants to make himself known by the means of the Holy Spirit.) If you’re in this group and want to understand how this language is biblical and Catholic, read this article.
The second group of Catholics who bristle at this language do so because they simply don’t think their faith needs to be all that personal. When it comes down to it, such people are not as much confused as they are resistant to the idea of having a closer and personal relationship with Jesus. They don’t want Jesus too close, they are fine the way they are. When one admits that faith is a radically personal venture and that you’re called to respond in ever deeper ways to him, it can be very uncomfortable. After all, our loving God challenges us to continually trust in him, love him and our neighbor more and more. So one way out of this uncomfortable challenge is to push Jesus away from us and try to keep him at arms-length. So when some Catholics resist a personal relationship with Jesus, they might be doing so either because they don’t know what it means or because they don’t want to know him that well.
For the second group, here lies the rub: the more we push Jesus away the harder it is to believe in him, and the easier it is to compromise with sin. The more we compromise with sin the harder it is to believe in him, which means we will resist him more. And if we resist him in serious ways, we might end up rejecting the invitation to live with him forever.
For me, I am deeply thankful that Jesus loves me so personally and invites me into a relationship with him that is very personal. If you’re one who at times resists him being so close, I plead with you: continually invite him to come closer so that you might know his love more personally. It might be uncomfortable at times, but to paraphrase Pope Benedict XVI, you weren’t made for comfort, you were made for greatness.
Your servant in Christ,
Fr. Mathias