Over the past several years, I’ve sometimes felt a little ambivalent about this Sunday’s solemnity of Christ the King. While I’m convinced that only the Gospel can reconstitute the morass of our modern world, I’ve often wondered how to get that world on board. What would a society governed by “King Jesus” look like?
At the turn of the last century, a sixteen-year-old seminarian in Piedmont, Italy, posed the same question. In prayer, James Alberione was seized by an exceptional insight into the words of Christ: “I am the way and the truth and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me” (Jn. 14:3). He had read Leo XIII’s encyclical for the dawn of the twentieth century, Tametsi futura prospicientibus, On Jesus Christ the Redeemer. He had absorbed the thinking of now-Blessed Giuseppe Toniolo, economist and leader of Christian social thought. All of these together had launched Alberione on a unique, lifelong quest into the Person of Christ the Master, that was both rooted in Christian tradition and responsive to society.
That response took the form of what gradually became the ten branches of the Pauline Family. Each branch, in its own way, bears witness to Christ the Master, Way, Truth, and Life. From the earliest years of the Pauline foundation, Father Alberione spelled out what he later hesitated to call “devotion” to the Divine Master. He insisted that, rather than a set of prayers, this “devotion” to the Divine Master was a synthesis of faith and life, of the Gospel itself. It would be this synthesis that would transform us and our world, “restoring everything in Christ.”
This is the principal reason that at Alberione’s beatification, John Paul II would call him “the first apostle of the new evangelization.” What exactly was this insight of his, this synthesis, this integral understanding of Jesus Master, Way, Truth and Life? What secret does it hold for us in our personal transformation in Christ? How can this dynamic relationship renew the world through the work of evangelization?
THE SYNTHESIS: Alberione’s understanding of Christ the Master, Way, Truth, and Life
The title, “Jesus Master, Way, Truth, and Life,” is derived from both the Synoptics and John. The “master” of Jn. 13:13—“you call me master and Lord and you say rightly; so I am”—is not slaveholder, but teacher (in Greek, didaskolos). This translation is borne out by the text itself. Jesus has just washed the feet of his disciples as “an example. As I have done, so you must do” (13:15). This Master is not one who pontificates from on high, but who offers himself as a model, an exemplar. He is like the medieval master craftsman who takes the apprentice under his wing, into his family, or like the Oriental master who has walked the path of enlightenment and can then enlighten his disciple.
The Jesus revealed by the evangelist Matthew is the Teacher, Instructor. In his Gospel, the Greek reads: kathi̱gi̱tés, the teacher who announces the kingdom from the cathedra of the new Sinai—the Mount of the Beatitudes, and later, the cross—“Nor shall you be called teachers, for you have one teacher, the Messiah” (Mt. 23:10). This Master-Teacher does not equivocate when revealing the secrets of the kingdom: “You have heard it said…But I say to you….” He holds crowds spellbound precisely because he teaches “as one with authority” (Mt. 7:29).
But why Way, Truth, and Life? In the New Jerusalem Bible, the Johannine text reads: “I am the Way: I am Truth and Life.” This construction is an interpretive reading of the passage. It emphasizes the Way, which is suggested by the context: “No one comes to the Father except through me,” in response to Thomas who had just asked, “Master, we do not know where you are going; how can we know the way?” According to this reading, the reason that Jesus can be Way for human beings is because he is in himself Truth (the revelation of the Father) and Life (eternal co-existence with the Father).
But is there another way of reading this trinomial without contradicting this interpretation? The original Greek construction would suggest that there is: “I am the way and the truth and the life”—almost as three aspects of the same Person. In the words of Thomas à Kempis: “I am the Way you must follow, the Truth you must believe, the Life you must hope for.”[1]
Fr. Alberione saw in Christ the perfect Master, with whom total configuration of will, mind, and heart is the only sure way to salvation, to sanctification: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You alone have words of eternal life” (Jn. 6:68). “Perfection lies in this: to establish ourselves totally in Jesus Master, Way (will), Truth (mind), and Life (sentiment). Indeed this is the way to reach the supreme height of our personality: I who think in Jesus Christ, I who live in Jesus Christ, I who will in Jesus Christ. Or: Christ who thinks in me, who loves in me, who wills in me” (UPS I 187).
Although Paul never referred to Christ as Master or described him as Way, Truth, and Life, he, more than any other figure, represented for Alberione the human being’s total response to the transforming call to apostolic discipleship: “It is no longer I who live; Christ lives in me” (Gal. 2:20). In other words, John offers us the image of the whole Christ; Paul offers us the image of the whole human person in relationship with Christ. In its totality, the Pauline mission meant bringing the whole Christ to the whole person and the whole person to the whole Christ. It still does.
THE SECRET: Transformation through our relationship with Christ the Master
We read in the Gospel that one day a scribe asked Jesus which commandment was the greatest. Jesus answered, “The first commandment is this: ‘Hear, O Israel! The Lord our God is Lord alone! You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength’” (Mk 12:29-30).
Heart, mind, strength. The powers of the soul are distinguished on the basis of their activities, and those activities on the basis of their ends, their purposes. The mind recognizes the good perceived through the senses, the heart desires it, and the will, informed by the mind and spurred on by the heart, chooses it.
I don’t mean to suggest that, holistic though it is, this is the only way to understand human nature or its integration. For instance, in its therapeutic capacity, psychology examines how a person’s story interacts with his or her sentiments, beliefs, needs, and values and even shapes them. In its formative capacity within catechesis, as well as in religious and priestly formation, psychology attempts to integrate growth in faith and congregational charism with one’s cognitive, volitional, and affective development. In either case, it is nevertheless valid to cast the aspects or powers of the human person in terms of mind, will, and heart. Let’s look at these powers of the soul to see how discipleship configures the whole person to Christ.
Healing and integrating the powers of the soul
In Tametsi futura Leo XIII wrote: “There are many who study humanity and the natural world; few who study the Son of God. The first step, then, is to substitute knowledge for ignorance, so that he may no longer be despised or rejected because he is unknown” (TF 13). Years later, in his book, The Sanctification of the Mind, Alberione repeats that it is the mind, with its convictions and power ideas, that governs the will. “The greatest battles are fought in the mind…. If you save your mind you will save yourself.” Paul, too, urges us to “have the mind of Christ” (1 Cor. 2:16), “bringing every thought captive in obedience to Christ” (2 Cor. 10:5).
As the will is conformed to Jesus, the Way to the Father, he frees it to choose what is eminently human. Everything that is of Jesus is ours, because we are grafted (to use Paul’s expression), incorporated in Christ Jesus, whom God made “our wisdom, our justice, our sanctification, and our redemption” (1 Cor. 1:30). Thus understood, faith is more than just the assent of the mind to a known truth. You and I all know people who recognize the truth without accepting it. What Paul called “the obedience of faith” (Rom. 1:5) is an act of the will, also, and life is brought into conformity with what is believed intellectually. Hence, virtue; hence acceptance, hence the sanctification of the will.
In the Bible, the heart, in its broadest sense, denotes not only the physical organ as the source of life, but the whole personal composite of emotional, intellectual, and moral powers, to which God’s grace imparts new life. Saint Paul adds that the heart is the dwelling place for the Spirit, who purifies and strengthens the person in love.[2] As the seat of desires and sentiments, the heart is the power that animates us and urges us to choose. Grafted onto Christ-Life, the heart is freed from its corruption so as to sanctify the whole person in “the life of grace,” leading him or her to “the life of glory” (TF 11).
“No disciple is above his teacher (didaskolos).…It is enough for the disciple that he become like his teacher” (Mt. 10:24, 25). As the powers of the soul, split from each other by sin, are brought into harmony with the truth, into right relationship with Jesus, the Master heals and integrates them, making them one. As Gaudium et spes phrases it, “Whoever follows Christ, the perfect man, becomes himself more of a man” (41).
“Tom” was a member of our young adult prayer group in Toronto. At a meeting one evening, we were talking about our vocation to be true human beings. Tom asked, “But how do we know what it means to be truly human?” I answered with two words: Jesus Christ. Within moments, he and the whole group were energized: the Gospel made personal sense. I learned the following week that Tom had brought a Muslim friend to the gathering. Afterward the friend told him, “Now I understand what Christianity is about.”
Jesus did not come to call a select few to some esoteric gnosis or way of life that the “great unwashed” have no access to. Jesus Christ preached the Gospel—better, as the Word of God, he is the Gospel—to show us all how to be truly human and to enable us to reach our full human potential, attaining the full stature of Christ (Eph. 4:13).
RELATIONSHIP RENEWED: The Kingdom of Christ in society
In the reading from Colossians for the solemnity of Christ the King, we read: “In him all things hold together….God wanted all fullness to be found in him and through him to reconcile all things to him[self], everything in heaven and everything on earth” (Col. 1:17, 19-20). The Constitutions of my congregation read: “Christ is the Master, the unifying center in whom every human being and the whole of history find complete fulfillment.”[3]
Our culture will never be transformed from without, but only from within, from you and me choosing to put Jesus at its center, ready to give the reason for the hope that we have (see 1 Pt 3:15). Witnessing to Christ will not mean sporting an externalized Christianity like a badge. However the kingdom takes shape in society, the dynamic for its growth is hidden in our transformation in Christ. This entails turning ourselves over to him, our highest Power, choosing his discipline, allowing ourselves to be “discipled” by the Master. Christification, configuration with Jesus Christ, not only humanizes and unifies persons; it humanizes and unifies societies and cultures.
How is this possible? In Navigating the New Evangelization, Raniero Cantalamessa, preacher of the papal household during the pontificate of Pope Francis, cites two parables of Jesus. The first is the seed sown that grows without the sower knowing how. Our job is to sow well. After that, “the sower can even go to sleep, for the life of the seed no longer depends on him. When this seed is the seed that ‘falls into the earth and dies,’ that is, Jesus Christ, nothing can prevent it from bearing much fruit.” The second parable concerns the mustard seed that grows far beyond the sower’s expectations. “Here Jesus teaches us that his Gospel and his own person are the smallest things that exist…because nothing is smaller and weaker than a life that ends in death on a cross. Yet….all creation, absolutely all, will be able to find refuge there.” He observes: “This is what we need most today: to awaken in Christians…the intimate certainty of the truth of what they proclaim…. The success of the new evangelization will depend on the degree of faith that it successfully brings forth in the Church among the evangelizers themselves.”[4]
Jesus Master teaches from the cathedra of the cross and the empty tomb. With confidence, then, we can forge ahead, taking heart from these words of Paul VI: “The road…is certainly difficult and laborious. But lift up your soul in hope, for the cause is not ours but that of Jesus Christ.”[5]
Featured Image credit: The Master from the Church of the Divine Master, Facciata, Alba, taken by Sr. Sergia, FSP
[1] Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, Book III, Chapter 56.
[2] Thomas P. McCreesh, O.P., The Collegeville Pastoral Dictionary of Biblical Theology (ed. Carroll Stuhlmueller), (Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 1996), 422, 424.
[3] Constitutions of the Daughters of St. Paul (Rome: Daughters of St. Paul, 1984), no. 7.
[4] Raniero Cantalamessa, OFM Cap., ibid., 6-10.
[5] Paul VI, Message to the General Chapters of Religious Orders and Congregations, May 23, 1964 (http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/paul_vi/speeches/1964/documents/hf_p-vi_spe_19640523_capitolari_en.html).