Caught Up in God

In Sunday School, when I was a child, we used to sing the spiritual, “Lord, I want to be a Christian.” If you don’t know the words, this is how it begins:

Lord, I want to be a Christian
in my heart, in my heart,
Lord, I want to be a Christian in my heart…

I enjoyed singing it through verse two (“Lord, I want to be more loving”) and verse three (“Lord I want to be more holy”). The last verse, however, was another matter:

Lord, I want to be like Jesus
in my heart, in my heart,
Lord, I want to be like Jesus in my heart…

I was not at all sure that I did want to be like Jesus. Not only did he have to wander around with no home of his own, but look at what happened to him on Good Friday.

Being an honest child, I didn’t want to sing verse 4 without meaning it, so I pondered what to do about my moral dilemma. That’s when I noticed the phrase, “in my heart.” I felt I could ruthfully avow that I wanted to be like Jesus in my heart without committing myself to being like Jesus in any other part of myself.

Little did I know that if I were really like Jesus in my heart, I would also be like Jesus in the whole of my life and the totality of my being.

The self-giving of Jesus

The three days of the Easter Triduum summon us to wonder and awe before the self-giving of Jesus for us. But how perplexing the events of those three days must have been while they were happening. The mission of Jesus appeared to have been a failure. One of his friends had betrayed him. Another had denied him. Most of the rest had deserted him. And from his pain on the cross Jesus cries out in the words of Psalm 22, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

But out of the darkness we hear another prayer as well, once again echoing a psalm (31) which Jesus must have known since childhood. This one is “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”

Commending my own spirit to God

What about our own participation in this mystery? What about the song I sang in Sunday School, not realizing the import of the words, “Lord, I want to be like Jesus in my heart”?

Karl Rahner believed that “somewhere within our lives there happens — or there may at least happen — an absolute letting go, an absolute yielding of everything.” [†] While this may happen at the time of physical death, it may be instead at the moment of what he calls “death in the theological sense, which may ultimately consist in the unconditional, quiet, yet trustful capitulation before the incomprehensibility of one’s own existence, and thus also before God’s incomprehensibility …. One gives up everything, one lets everything go.”

Though all may seem meaningless, though cruelty may seem to have won out, though the powers of darkness appear to have triumphed, we put ourselves without reserve into the hands of Love. Rahner adds, “And precisely in this seemingly dumb, dreadful and frightening emptiness there dawns the arrival of the infinite God of eternal life.”

This is perfect freedom. This is being “like Jesus in my heart.”

[†]Karl Rahner in Dialogue: Conversations and Interviews, 1965-1982, ed. by Hubert Biallowons, Harvey D. Egan, S.J., and Paul Imhof, S.J. (New York: Crossroad Publishing Co., 1986).
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Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.

And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.

Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name,
so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

(Philippians 2:5-11)