2 April 2020
Thursday of the Fifth Week of Lent
One of my favorite TV shows in a sci-fi series called Firefly, about a crew of smugglers in space. In one of the episodes, the smugglers are dealing with a mob boss for the first time, a man with a reputation for cruelty. At the end of the meeting, he tortures an underling in front of the smugglers and says “now, for you, my reputation is not gossip. My reputation is fact. Is solid.” Before they have an experience of the mob boss’s reputation, all they have is a theory. Theory leads to gossip. Experience leads to knowledge.
Jesus is able to say “I know [the Father]” (Jn. 8:55) because He has experienced the Father. He has seen the Father. The Father is not gossip or theory for Jesus, but fact—something solid. Without experience, God remains theory for us. This is the gift Jesus has come to bring us: an experience of God. He assures us that “before Abraham came to be, I AM” (Jn. 8:58). Jesus is God. To experience Jesus is to experience God, and to know God as a fact. We see, then, the consequence of our sins, of pushing Jesus away, in all its tragedy: it is to make God merely a theory, and to make ourselves into the people to whom Jesus says “You do not know Him.”