Who is Christ to you?

It is important that we know who Christ is to each one of us. That question Christ tossed to the apostles, "Who do the crowds say that I am?" should also be addressed to each one of us.

And it's crucial that we, with God's grace, with the faith that has been given to us in abundance, echo the right answer articulated by Peter. Otherwise, we would just be left with our own estimations, like how the crowds took Jesus to be.

"Some John the Baptist, others Elias, still others Jeremiah, or one of the prophets," the apostles said in reply. But when asked who they, the apostles themselves, considered Christ to be, it was Peter who answered.

"The Christ of God," he said. "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God," he reiterated. To which, Jesus answered, stressing the need for faith for us to enable to recognize Christ as he truly is, "Blessed are you, because flesh and blood has not revealed it to you, but my Father who is in heaven."

It is important therefore that we always exercise our faith, that we make our faith operative and functional all the time, because it is a fundamental gift of God to us. It is what would reveal to us who Christ really is.

Faith tells us much more than what our senses and our native intelligence can perceive and understand. It tells us the eternal truths, not just passing facts and data or information that are useful only in the temporal sense.

By exercising our faith, we are not inventing things, though it involves realities-what are called supernatural mysteries-that are beyond our capacity to sense and understand. We need to sharpen our innate tendency to trust and believe to cope with this necessity in our life called faith.

It is this faith that tells us that Christ is the Son of God who became man, who was born of the Blessed Virgin, who preached and performed miracles, and who ultimately offered his life on the cross for our sins, and then resurrected and ascended into heaven, and who with the Father has sent us the Holy Spirit.

It is this Holy Spirit that would make Christ present in us and in the world all the way till the end of time. He is the one that would remind us of everything that Christ did and said for our salvation, and guide us along the path of time to bring us back to God, from whom we come.

We are not just creatures of nature, because nature itself has a Creator. It is not a spontaneous, self-creation. Neither are we just children of our parents, citizens of a given country, subjects of so many conditionings, cultural, historical, social, etcetera.

We are children of God, made in his image and likeness, and whose life cannot be and should not be separated from God. We had our first creation in our first parents, the whole Triune God-Father, Son and Holy Spirit-involved in our creation, the Father willing it, the Son being the pattern, and the Holy Spirit effecting it.

With the deformity caused by our sin, God re-created us in his Son who became man. It is this Son, Jesus Christ, who showed and gave us the way to re-create ourselves through his death and resurrection. No sin, no evil is impossible for Christ's redemptive work to forgive, unless we want it unforgiven.

All this redemptive work of Christ is now made actual for each of us through the Holy Spirit. With the Holy Spirit, Christ is alive up to now, and continues his work of redemption with us. Christ and his redemptive work are not merely historical. They are always present and effective.

To help us to be with Christ, we are given the Church, his living word contained in Sacred Tradition and the Bible and interpreted and taught authoritatively by the Church magisterium. We have the sacraments and the whole gamut of charisms and Christian witness by a variety of saints.

We need to understand that Christ is very close to us. He is in us and all around us, since he is the very foundation of our existence and of the whole reality, no matter how much we deform it.

We have to overcome the natural awkwardness in dealing with this spiritual and supernatural reality presented to us by our faith. The means are always there. We have to pray and engage Christ in an ongoing conversation. Christ should always be in our mind, heart, senses, etcetera.

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