“I want to know Christ and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in His sufferings, becoming like Him in His death, and so somehow to attain to the resurrection from the dead” (Philippians 3:10)
What do you live for? What would you die for? The answer for the holy apostle Paul is a name: Jesus Christ. To know Christ was the consummate passion of St. Paul’s life. It would appear to be a truism that all Christians share with him—but how many of us would dare make that affirmation? Put another way: What does it mean to know Jesus Christ? Many have been confronted in public or at our door by a brash young person, usually male, who demands a response by his question: “Do you know Jesus?” He presumes your answer is or should be: “No.” At least not like him, he believes. But the verb in the above quote from Philippians transcends the mindset of a modern raw evangelist. The term used by St. Paul is the same word for the relationship between Adam and Eve. As such it is much deeper than mere acquaintance. To know Christ is to feel what He felt and now is feeling, planning and thinking—or put better, what He with His Father and the Holy Spirit have planned and are carrying out before the cosmos came into being. “The mystery before the ages,” as the mystical apostolic theologian wrote elsewhere.
And with St. Paul we realize that to “know” the mind of Christ is impossible regardless of how long we live and how often we contemplate His life, death and resurrection; nor will it be realized even in the Kingdom. Who of us can truly say we know one another? A man and wife after more than sixty years can still be surprised by the life partner. And that’s between two humans. St. Paul set himself the task of grasping the mind of One who is both God and man. The two natures in one person will by definition never be comprehended. Possibly the human nature of the God-Man can be understood, but even that is out of reach. Nothing essential about the divine nature of Christ is open for human discernment. Remember the other apostle to us Gentiles who finally realized just as his Master was being taken for trial and execution: “I do not know the man.” (Matthew 26:74) Meaning: I thought I did, but I never really knew Him.
St. Paul aimed at learning the power of Christ’s resurrection. The source that came from the Holy Spirit and brought our Lord Jesus from death and burial to life outside the tomb. The power of Resurrection. Power, energia, exclusive to the Holy Trinity. Transcending our human ability to fathom by our limited reasoning, because logically it doesn’t make sense. The dead stay dead. That’s more than an axiom; it’s a law of nature. How long must a rational person reflect on that morbid fact? But divine energy conquers death.
The other goal of the apostle is to join in the “fellowship of His suffering.” Any normal living thing avoids suffering in all forms. Psychologists call the contrary response—masochism, the enjoyment of suffering—a perverse syndrome. But this is not the case of just anybody in agony; it is the Son of God. Fellowship is communion. St. Paul is not a masochist. Yet he feels that to bond with Jesus means to bear His cross and honor Him by it. Do we not as Christians bear our crosses of suffering, wear and even kiss Christ’s cross? Make cross signs on our bodies? By so doing are we not joining with St. Paul’s desire—starting by confirming the transcendent spiritual energy that raised our Lord to life? Then to rejoice with every opportunity to do ourselves what He did—to live as though already dead, so that the beginnings of a new spiritual life will nourish us and nurture our souls through the remaining time of our lives in this world and into the next? Is this not a bonding with the desire of St. Paul—knowing the mind of Jesus Christ and having fellowship with His sufferings, so that we may rejoice in His resurrection?