CONNIKA: THE FINAL WAY

Thus, the final way he gladly chose to reveal himself is in his own Son, existing before the stars, who would become a limited human being with a body like me, an emotional life like mine, a thinking loving spirit, and a developing identity - consciousness like mine. So Jesus begins life as an infant and grows up in a backwater town, takes up the carpentry trade, is called at the Jordan ford and teaches and heals and forms a small group of followers, dies and rises. And precisely through this short life of carpenter and teacher, God the Father is revealed to the world in stunning clarity. Jesus then is the great sacrament, symbol, revelation of the very depths of the incomprehensible God. What Jesus reveals is the Father's love for us humans: a self-giving love unto death, an unconditional love accepting our flawed condition, forgiving endlessly our weakness and malice.

Yes, all this is revealed, perhaps best in the Gospel of John, chapters 13 - 17. God's crowning revelation is not, however, through Jesus' strength, his miraculous power, his awesome qualities, but precisely and paradoxically through his very weakness, his anguish and tears, through his cry of desperation on the cross. We see a peasant trapped by religious authorities, pushed and shoved from one tribunal to another through a sham trial, beaten like a dog, crowned with insults, led like a bleeding animal to the Calvay rock, nailed to beams, stretched out against the sky naked, and dying like an animal. This he would do for me. In his agony he reveals to me who God is and how much God cares, this in a way I can never forget. "Whoever sees me, sees my Father."...

Exerpt from A Traveler Toward the Dawn (The Spiritual Journal of John Eagan, S.J.)