The Mystery
Gospel: Jn 8:51-59
https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/032124.cfm
As we approach Holy Week next week, the readings include passages where Jesus reveals and speaks about his divinity. As he speaks about his identity, his audience tends to be offended, rebuke him, and try to kill him.
In today’s gospel, Jesus reveals himself as the tetragrammaton. The tetragrammaton is the term given to YHWH, or the name that God gives Godself in the Old Testament. It is simply translated as “I am,” “I am that I am,” or “I am what I do.” So when Jesus uses the phrase in today’s gospel, “Before Abraham came to be, I AM,” he is directly revealing himself as God.
The gospels show Jesus’s divinity in different ways and at different moments of his mission. For people of faith, it is very difficult to break from thinking of Jesus without considering his dualistic nature, both divine and human, but for Jesus, it was not a duality, it was just who and what he was. For us to make sense of it, we have to break the two apart and create a metaphysics to explain it. How can Jesus be both the creator and the created? How can he be both infinite and finite? The mystery reveals the transcendent nature of God. We can fight to understand it. We can create a metaphysics, a Christology, a theology, but no explanation will fully hold the mystery.
Our understanding of God has continued to evolve throughout human history and God continues to reach out. Where we are in our journey allows us to see different aspects and components of God. We can put labels on it. We can explain it. We can write poems and reflect on them, but in the end, no symbolic or scientific language can encapsulate or explain the divine. Once you think you’ve grasped it, you lose it. If you hold what you have with finitude, you are limiting the infinite.
As we approach Holy Week, consider embracing the mystery more. Welcome in uncertainty and keep yourself open to divine possibility. With our relationship with God, the journey is the destination.
