By Fr Clement Baffoe SVD
Last year I had finished a school Mass and after these Masses I always stand at the Church entrance and say goodbye to the pupils as they leave the Church. On this particular day, a prep student who was with his mother asked me an important question. The little boy looked at my face when leaving the Church and asked: “Are you Jesus?” I hastily replied: No! But Jesus is my friend. Both the mother and I had a laugh and they left.
The boy's question left me with many questions than answers. What has the little boy heard about Jesus? What did he see in me to then ask if I was Jesus? Is the boy searching for Jesus? And perhaps for the boy, who is this Jesus he’s been told about?
Reflecting on the Gospels of the five Sundays of Lent, the question of the little boy becomes once more crucial and worth reconsidering. Panoramically, each of the five Gospels of Lent tries to answer the question: who is Jesus? During his temptation in the desert i.e. in the first week of Lent, we hear of the serpent indirectly reaffirming the identity of Jesus which had been revealed earlier at his baptism, “if you’re the son of God....” In the first week of Lent, we therefore learn that Jesus is the son of God.
In the second week of Lent, we’ll hear about the Transfiguration in which Jesus’s identity will be revealed by the Father. His identity is God’s “son, the beloved”. Likewise on the third Sunday of Lent, Jesus meets the Samaritan woman at the well and Jesus tells her his identity: “The Messiah-the Christ-I am he.” On the fourth Sunday of Lent, Jesus makes known his identity to the man born blind as: “the Son of Man...you are looking at him; he is speaking to you.” Lastly on the fifth Sunday of Lent, Jesus will meet Mary, Martha and Lazarus and he’ll reveal himself to them. Jesus will say he is “the resurrection and the life,” and Martha will call him “the Christ, the son of God,” i.e. richly blending the identities of the first, second and third Sundays of Lent.
Lent gives us the opportunity to know Jesus more and more, especially through the Scriptures. This knowing is not intellectual but experiential. It emanates from personal encounter with him. Being the Son of God, Jesus is God made human. In him we see the fullness of God-the image of the unseen God (Col.1:15). He is the Messiah who redeems us from sin and its power and he’s our life here and hereafter.
Are you Jesus? If you are not? Who’s Jesus then? Taking almost the whole season of Lent to discover Jesus must tell us that the question of who Jesus is, is not easily answered. For some of us, it might take our whole lifetime to discover him. What really matters is that the search for Jesus must continue unabated.
As we journey with Jesus in these forty days of Lent, through our observances of prayer, fasting and almsgiving, may each of us come to know him intimately especially in the special readings of Lent and above all in the faces of the poor and marginalised in our community as Pope Francis says in this year’s Lenten Message. Remember, Jesus identifies with the poor, naked, hungry, prisoner, sick etc. (Mt.25) and in their faces we see his face. May this sacred time help us to know Jesus more deeply.
Fr Clement Baffoe SVD is Assistant Priest of the Ministerial Region of the Good Shepherd in Townsville, Australia.
