"We Shall See Him As He Is"

I know my own, and my own know me.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

Who does not read this sentence and hear its companion from the opening lines of this same Gospel?

He was in the world, and the world was made by Him, and the world
knew Him not. He came unto His own, and His own received him not. (Jn 1:10-11)

These are among the saddest words in the Bible especially as they point back to a long history of rejecting and denying and betraying God — from Eden to the martyrdom of St. John the Baptist. But the sadness here points mainly to ourselves, for as we read this morning in the First Letter of St. John, "We shall see Him as He Is." What mysterious and haunting words these are. They touched me deeply when first I read them many years ago, and their mystery touches me today: as He Is. This is a third-person report of the sentence "as I AM." I AM is God's own Name. God alone is the Creator; everything else is a creature. God alone is the Maker; everything else is made. Everything that is made has being. God alone is Being. I AM. We shall see Him as He Is. And this seeing Him will be decisive in our salvation. The tragic sadness we feel comes with realizing how many have missed seeing Him: "the world knew Him not."

To complete St. John's sentence,

Beloved, we are God's children now; it does not yet appear what we shall be,
but we know that when He appears we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.

And in St. John's Gospel, we read

"I know my own, and my own know me" (Jn 10:14).

Indeed, our life and safety is inextricably tied to His:

"I Am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down His life for the sheep."

There it is again, that "I AM" declaration again. Here is another appearing just before these verses:

I Am the door; [of the sheepfold] by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved,
and shall go in and out, and find pasture.

He Is the Door to our safety. He Is our Savior. To see Him as He Is turns out to be crucial, a matter of life and death, and touching our eternal salvation.

It appears to be a matter of wavelength, for most people who saw Him right before their eyes did not see Him:

He was in the world, and the world was made by Him, and the world knew Him not.

Think of it: most people failed to receive or to worship God (much less, to adore Him). Most. What can we say about our own situation today? It is not merely a matter of claiming that you see Him. It is not a matter of professing religion. By tradition the lowly animals standing around Him in a manger detected the scent of the One Who had made them all. Yet, the leading religious figures of His day did not. Indeed, they murdered Him. Murdered God. The greatest moment of their lives, indeed, of all human history. And they missed it ... and desecrated it. Astonishing! To think that their one purpose in life was to see God, — the High Priest, the Sanhedrin, the Pharisees, the Essenes, the Sadducees — Their one purpose in life was to see God, and they failed .... in the furthest extreme.

Let me change context for a moment to gain perspective on this elusive question of "Seeing Him as He Is." And let us remember that St. John also wrote in these paragraphs that "In Him was ... the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not." A holy book from a very different religion, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, treats this question of seeing the light as being all-important, the moment for which you have prepared all your life, the main point of your life. For when we die, according to these ancient monastic writings from the Himalayas, we enter a forty-nine-day period called the Bardo Thodol. People pray with us, as we are able to hear their prayers still in this state of death-but-consciousness, and this helps to orient us. And then a great light comes flashing before us. If we are able to apprehend this first light, if we are able to get on its wavelength, match our own inner clarity and orderliness to its, then we attain to salvation. If we are not able to do this, another, lesser light will follow some time later. If we are not able to get on its wavelength, then another, even lesser light will come later. Finally, we will match whatever light we are capable of seeing clearly. That is our wavelength. This will equate to the point of our re-entry into the world according to Buddhist belief. The lesser the light, the less favorable will be our place in the world and the greater our trials will be. From a Buddhist point of view, the purpose of the world is to present us with trials that refine us until we are ready to enter what Christians would call Heaven. But if we are able to see that first light with all our inner clarity, with all our uncluttered and unbesmirched purity, then we shall enter Heaven, and be with Him, we would say, for mysteriously He is Heaven. The circle of His friendship is the Kingdom of God.

Now before we take umbrage over The Tibetan Book of the Dead being read side-by-side with the Holy Gospel According to St. John, I will remind you of the Lord Jesus Christ when He said,

"And I have other sheep, that are not of this fold; I must bring them also,
and they will heed My voice. So there shall be one flock, one shepherd ...
this charge I have received from My Father."

Please let me detour to say that by the canons of Roman Catholic Natural Law, it is not so strange that people who are not in the Christian religion should receive the same revelations and the same insights that we do. For we all are made in God's Image; we are all subject to the influence of the same Holy Spirit; and we are all very likely to perceive those things that are written on the fleshly tablets of our hearts though our nominal traditions be different. Needless to say, I hold with St. Peter when he said in our reading this morning from the Book of Acts that "there is One Name under Heaven by which we may be saved, the Name of our Lord Jesus Christ."

This passage concerning "other sheep" poses a holy caution to us: we cannot be sure who belongs to the Master and who does not. Again, the leading religious men of first-century Judea, the religious experts who should have been first to know Him, did not know Him, nor belong to Him.

What is our inner clarity and orderliness? We begin by understanding that God knows us. He is the only one who truly knows us, much better than we shall ever know ourselves. So the answer to our riddle lies with ourselves. Why is it that most people did not see, and we fear to say, do not see, God?

In a forum convened in order to reflect on this very question, the Sanhedrin missed seeing God. For the Sanhedrin was dominated by the intellectual elite, the Sadducees, a hereditary upper class descending from Zadok and Aaron and were annoyed by supernatural questions. They ordered their world to their own minds .... to the better sort, people who "know better." They were not dissimilar from the Roman Catholic bishops of the early-to-mid twentieth century, who were keen to be rid of what they deemed "superstition" — rejecting the stigmata of Padre Pio and persecuting him and reordering the Roman Church to remove its ancient prayers and beliefs. The Sadducees could never rightly see Jesus. They could only see their own ideals. They could see only themselves, whom they had substituted for God. And is not this the whole trend of the so-called progressive Church? .... where our own ideals have come to be our "religion."

Herod Antipas, the ruler of Galilee, was not from a Jewish family and was wholly absorbed in the political view of life. His mind was filled with the clutter of political maneuvering. And the Jewish Temple leaders were also deeply absorbed in the political chess game of Roman favor and disfavor, seeing the world through Pilate's eyes and reminding him that they had only one king, which was Caesar. Did Pilate, they pointedly asked, see a different king over the Jews? They all saw what they saw.

Walking on the road to Emmaus, Jesus own disciples looked at Him and did not see who He was. He sat at table with His disciples, and they did not know Him. All of these things are told to us with the intentions of a cautionary tale. Most people, people who have stood right before Him, did not see God. Will we? Will we also fail to see God? If not, how can we escape this horrible fate?

Many of you have heard my story of a former university colleague who would ask his students on the first day of class for forty years, "Do you love God?" And these Roman Catholic students at these Roman Catholic universities would all raise their hands. But the evidence they gave for their faith was always the same: service. They had worked in soup kitchens or visited elderly nuns or recycled bottles. We at the Hermitage have met these people volunteering at our ministry in Haiti. For two generations they have heard in their pulpits that "True religion is service!" And they have believed it.

I have known celibate clergy and religious who took liberties once they had "punched out for the day" on the imaginary work clock. You see, they had fixed it in their minds that since they had given their whole lives to God, even from dawn to dusk every single day, then certainly God would not begrudge them a little romance at night. But, of course, these people had thrown their lives away, had thrown their holy vocations away. They had sought to configure themselves to be Jesus Himself and then, reaching so high, reaching for the light which is the desire of the everlasting hills, they ended up mocking Him with the clutter of their own fleshly desires. They had traded "the Blessing" for a bowl of porridge (Gen 25:34).

The image of service we must always hold to mind is that of the busy Martha. She races about from thing to thing, cooking the meal, cleaning the house, encouraging the needy, and all in the service to God, as she would have seen it. Meantime, Jesus admonishes her telling her that service will not bring her into the Kingdom of God, where He is. Martha is busily working her way down a dead end. "Only one thing is needful" (Luke 10:42), the Lord says. It is her sister Mary, who has "chosen the better part." And what is that part? What is that way that is no dead end, but will lead us to inner clarity and goodly focus, that we might see God? It is gazing upon God in an attitude of devotion. St. John would add that we cannot do this until we have uncluttered ourselves of all of our worldly desires. St. Augustine made a career out of this insight writing that whatever we set our heart upon, whether it is intellectual achievement or political power or the pleasures of the flesh ... whatever it is, then that will become our god.

We may be sure that, worshiping the things of the world and fixing our minds on worldly things and desires, as most people do, then we will miss God. He will be right before us as He always is. And we will fail to see Him dooming ourselves to an eternity of our own base desires. Even the pagan Greeks noticed this describing the afterlife as an eternity spent with our own worst excesses, a Hell that we have designed with our own sinful vision and intention. We will get in the end exactly what we want. We will attain in the end all that we desire.

Jesus said, "I Am the door." Entering this door, therefore, is a deeply personal and intimate experience. We must take hold of Him in order to open it. We must mysteriously become Him in order to pass through it. We must attain to His inner clarity and purity. We must have His heart beating in our chests. We must become His children now. And being His own flesh and blood, "we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He Is."

Reach for the clear light, and when you take hold of it, never let it go, for here is the purpose and beauty and only truth of your own life.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.