I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.
That’s all very well, we might want to say to St Paul, but what do you mean? In the church we have various phrases that are used regularly and which, it is assumed, are commonly understood. But sometimes those phrases can be rather like the emperor’s new clothes. They seem so important that nobody has really got the courage to admit that they are not sure what these words actually mean. It may feed our insecurities to think that other people experience the meaning of these words far more deeply than we do. But maybe the truth is that few of us have got very far towards finding something real behind them.
What does it mean to know Christ? A particular kind of conservative Christian will insist on the necessity of experiencing Jesus as a living individual presence now, like a human friend or neighbour. They want to talk about Jesus in very close personalist terms and see the life of faith as principally getting to know this person. But I realised very early on in my journey of faith that getting to know Jesus is not like getting to know any other object in the world, human or otherwise, just as loving him is not to love him in a way that can be easily measured against our love for other things.
Janet Soskice is a theologian who converted to Christianity when she was at University in Canada. But she writes that she was nervous to align herself with her fellow Christian undergraduates because of their view of faith and evangelism:
People would come to your room in pairs and say things like, “I love Johnny, and we’re going to be married, but I love Jesus even more than Johnny.” And you felt like saying, “Well, what about strawberries? Are they above Johnny and below Jesus?” Their approach just didn’t seem right.
Jesus isn’t just another object presented to us for either cognition or love. Knowing Jesus is a particular kind of knowing.
A certain kind of liberal Christian will dismiss all the conservative’s “personal relationship” language as inappropriate and want to argue that knowing Jesus is a pervasive (but rather elusive) relationship of being compelled and enabled by his memory. We are to be inspired by his stories and live our lives according to what we perceive to be his values. But that kind of relationship with Jesus is no real contemporary relationship at all. It simply to show interest in historical figure whose influence on today’s European Society seems to be reaching its exhaustion. There seems to be little energy left in that kind of Christianity. There must be more to knowing Jesus than that.
Neither of those perspectives is actually to know Jesus in the way St Paul knew him. Paul did not know Jesus, as some in the early church did, as an ordinary human friend or companion. But he did have a powerful and energising relationship with him that was far more than merely learning about him. He does very clearly form a relationship with a person, not merely with abstract ideas about God. And just over 1000 years later the Cistercian Bernard of Clairvaux would argue that this is how all human beings need to relate to God. In our mortal state we could not form any kind of relationship with the total otherness of the Creator God, and so God reached out to us in love by becoming fully present within a person whom we could love and, in some real sense, get to know.
But the person whom St Paul encounters – and whom Christians encounter today – is not a Jesus who we can be chummy with, a friend like any other. This is the resurrected Jesus, the one who has gone through crucifixion, submitted to the violence and retribution that human beings live by, and shown at the other end that God has more love yet to give. Rowan Williams has written that:
We meet Jesus as the resurrected one – the one who, after those closest to him have betrayed him and left him to die alone, returns as the source of grace and hope to those treacherous and fearful friends. What this means is that Jesus “appears” now as the agency of a completely gratuitous love, right outside the calculations, rewards and punishments of human relationships, outside the complicated negotiations for living space that dominate the ordinary human world, with its underlying assumption that we all live at each others’ expense. The resurrection of Jesus makes it impossible to take for granted that the world is nothing but a system of oppressors and victims, an endless cycle of reactive violence. We are free to understand ourselves and each other in a new way, as living in mutual gift not mutual threat. We can collaborate in the relations that the resurrection sets in motion, relations of forgiveness, equality and care. And if we recognise our habitual bondage to reactive relations, passing on or returning the wounds we have received, and feel in our lives together the solid reality of relationships that transcend this, then we “know Jesus”.
So, more than anything, knowing Jesus is about experiencing, and ourselves forming, relationships of generosity and grace. This is what St Paul’s letters to the various Christian communities are all about and his knowing Jesus, particularly as he describes it here in Philippians, is about knowing the extraordinary gift of grace that God has freely given in Jesus and realising that his life no longer needs to be one of striving for righteousness or blaming and persecuting others. God is an abundant outpouring that never ceases. God’s mercies and forgiveness never come to an end. It is knowing that that brought Saul the persecutor to the point of becoming the great apostle of the supreme victim.
So with this emphasis on relationship, we can see that knowing Jesus is not so much knowledge through learning as what centuries of Christians have called “knowledge through participation”. It is about becoming divine in communion with Christ who unites full humanity with full divinity. And here we can see how the Eucharist is so indispensable since it is the sign in which the Holy Spirit makes present the whole self-giving of God to us as the crucified and risen Lord Jesus. It is the sign that forms us into relationships of solidarity and generosity through which we encounter Jesus in others. In short, it is the sacrament that makes the church.
Knowing Jesus is to be in various kinds of relationship – yes, with this extraordinary man who we encounter in the Gospels – but equally within the human communities that were so important to St Paul and which he was bold to declare, in spite of all their disputes and divisions, did themselves make up the Body of Christ.