All prayer is a reaching of heart and soul into the outpouring of God’s love. Sometimes my prayer is like sunbathing, resting on Christ before the Father in the Spirit. Other times it’s more like being enfolded, my life being hidden with Christ with God. On occasion, as I centre myself on God, it’s like a heavenly microwaving warming my coldheartedness. Other times as, eyes closed, I affirm Christ as my Lord and my God, I feel nothing for half an hour. Whatever you feel in prayer is less important than giving your attention to God for a length of time day by day. In that time God is able to engage with us, often in a way we don’t recognise, to implant his eternal perspective to the hours ahead where we find ourselves better equipped to sift the important things from the things that are merely urgent!
‘My Lord and my God!’ (John 20:28) In those words Thomas put faith as we should in Christ’s divinity. Keeping faith in Jesus Christ, true God and true Man impacts the whole of our thinking, praying and acting
The Scriptures provide at least eleven different names for Jesus which directly or indirectly affirm his divinity – God, as in Thomas’ response to Christ (John 20.28), Son of God, as in Peter’s response (Matthew 16:16), Only Begotten Son (cf Mark 12:6), the First and the Last (Rev 1:17), Alpha and Omega (Rev 1:8), The Holy One (Acts 3:14), The Lord (Acts 4:33…), Lord of All (Acts 10:36), The Lord of Glory (1 Cor 2:8), God with us (Matt 1:23), Our Great God (Titus 2:13), God Blessed Forever (Rom 9:5).
Some of these titles are used of Jesus again and again. In Christ dwells all the fullness of the Godhead in a bodily way. Our Blessed Lord Jesus is linked to our creation, preservation, the forgiveness of sin, the raising of the dead, judgement and the bestowal of everlasting life. Jesus Christ is a person to be worshipped by angels and mortals, even as God the Father is worshipped.
The Scriptures are essential to our seeing of Jesus but they’re inseparable from prayer, the Holy Spirit and the experience of his Church. And then the knowledge that Jesus is ‘Son of the living God’ is something impacting us as individuals in our thinking – the resurrection is a sort of proof – but beyond that in our praying and acting.
Fr. Ferdinand Prat of the Society of Jesus defined faith as ‘the amen of the intelligence and the will to divine revelation’. We can hear about Jesus and believe in our heads he is God incarnate – but it will make no difference to our lives or the world without the will to apply this in prayer and action.
Thomas replied ‘My Lord and my God!’ in the face of Christ’s wounds. Our thinking about Christ’s divinity is coloured by these, as indeed they decorate the Paschal Candle, for God in Christ expects nothing of us frail humans that he is not prepared to go through himself. As we think about our Christian faith – and we should do a lot more thinking about it – the credibility of God in the face of evil revealed in the suffering of Jesus is the major asset in applying ourselves to sharing with our circle the empathy of God towards our frailty. Other faiths make God aloof from suffering.
‘Jesus, my Lord and my God’ – that affirmation is central to Christian thought, prayer and action. Each day after saying Morning Prayer, offering intercession for others, including Fr Adam and St Mary’s, and, on occasion, saying Mass, I practise what’s been called ‘centering prayer’. I close my eyes, settle my mind by calling on Jesus with phrases like ‘My Lord and my God’ when distracted by thoughts of breakfast or whatever, and reach out with eager longing to the Lord for half an hour. Centering prayer builds from belief that Christ’s divinity indwells believers. ‘Abide in me as I abide in you’ Jesus says in John 15:4 and receiving Holy Communion is an effective sign of this. All prayer is an act of will, to return to Fr Ferdinand, an ‘Amen’, a reaching of heart, mind and soul into the outpouring of God’s love – and where is that more evident than in Holy Communion and our ongoing thanksgiving for this gift Sunday by Sunday? ‘Christ in us the hope of glory’ Colossians 1:27? Sometimes my prayer is like sunbathing, resting on Christ before the Father in the Spirit. Other times it’s more like being enfolded, my life being hidden with Christ in God as described later in Colossians (3:3). On occasion, as I centre myself on God, it’s like a heavenly microwaving warming my coldheartedness. Other times as, eyes closed, I affirm Christ as my Lord and my God, I feel nothing for half an hour. I describe this variety of experience in prayer to encourage you to have a go at praying longer in silence. Whatever you feel in prayer is less important than giving your attention to God for a length of time day by day. In the short time we offer, God is able to engage with us, often in a way we don’t recognise, to implant his eternal perspective in the hours ahead. When we miss saying our prayers the pressing things that day seem to eclipse the important things. When we do offer our 10 minutes, half an hour or whatever the day ahead finds us better equipped to sift the important things from things, dare I say it, that are merely urgent!
‘My Lord and my God!’ said Thomas
Keeping faith in the divinity of Christ impacts the whole of our thinking, praying and, lastly, our acting. As we engage with our neighbours near and far the divine Lord awaits us as much in them as he has been found in us during prayer. Because of his resurrection our contemplation of Christ reaches beyond the historical record of scripture, the day by day action of the Eucharist and our own prayer times to all we meet and all we see. As Our Lord taught about service to others in Matthew 25 ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me’. Few writers in the last century have shed as much light on the issues facing Christianity as did Thomas Merton who lived as a Trappist monk and died in the late 1960s. It was on a rare visit to the town near his monastery when the truth he had previously accepted of Jesus took on a new dimension, what he called a ‘second conversion’ to humankind. As he walked briefly in the crowd he felt deep in his Spirit what he called ‘the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate’. Merton spoke of his Christianity beginning ‘with the realisation of the presence of God in this present life, in the world and in myself, and that my task as Christian is to live in full and vital awareness of this ground of my being and of the world’s being.’
To live in Christ is to share immortal being in the Spirit. To Thomas Merton a dwelling upon and a facing up to death are essential as a means of deepening one’s being into Christ and His victory.
It is the octave day of Easter and we come back once again to Thomas – St Thomas who addressed Christ saying ‘My Lord and my God’.
Our basic optimism as Christians is rooted in the belief that in Jesus, God, has come to earth, lived, died and risen again for the salvation of all who wake up to the fact they are, in Merton’s words, ‘members of a race in which God Himself became incarnate’. By accepting the divinity of Christ we are granted purpose for life and reason for death.
The birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus have put this planet, and one race within it, on the map of the universe opening up to us the possibility of endless life and communion with God the Blessed Trinity! Yet for both our minds and hearts to say ‘Amen’ to Jesus we need to take his yoke which means bending ourselves down before him. For Our Lord to take a deeper grasp of our lives we must acclaim him as our Lord and our God and open up our thought, prayer and action to him, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit is one God, now and for ever. Amen.
