Knowing and Being Known
- 16 hours ago
- 5 min read
“He [man] is the only being that is distinguished from all else in creation, because he is the only one which can become a god. The phrase “in His image” describes the gifts which God gave only to man in order to complete him as an icon of God, and not to any of His other creatures. These gifts are: a logos related nous, conscience, and individual sovereignty, i.e. freedom, creativity, eros, and the yearning for the absolute and for God, personal self-awareness, and anything else which puts man above all other living beings in creation and makes him a man and an individual. That is to say, everything that makes man a person.” (Archimandrite George)
“Christ came to save us as persons, which means not just our wills or our intellects, but also our bodies and our entire natures as well. Our bodies, and purity, and gender–all of this functions as an icon with eternal significance. And they are all beautiful, deeply and permanently beautiful, as well, since their very reality is inseparable from their being symbols and disclosures of heavenly life.” (Timothy G. Patitsas)
“Have you ever noticed that Jesus never performs a general healing? How easy it would have been for Him to lift His hands over a crowd and command everyone in a general way to be healed of whatever disease they bore. How efficient. But Jesus never healed people, He healed persons. Mostly, because He was a person, limited as we all are to a single body, to two reaching hands, two eyes capable of facing only one direction at once. Jesus, as God became a single, embodied human, insistent upon the preciousness of personhood, of each particular, irreplaceable, unrepeatable person. He did not generally heal because the love He came to proclaim was not general.” (Sarah Clarkson)
“The drive of God Himself, however, is towards the small and the particular, the “insignificant” and the forgotten. In the incarnate work of Christ, God enters our world in weakness and in a constant action of self-emptying. He identifies people by name and engages them as persons. Obviously, Christ could have raised a finger and healed every ailment in Israel in a single moment. He doesn’t. That fact alone should give us pause – for it is the very thing that we would consider “important” (it is also the sort of thing that constituted the Three Temptations in the Wilderness). Everyone would be healed, but no one would be saved. Those healed would only become sick and die later. This is also the reason that we cannot speak in universal terms about salvation. For though Christ has acted on behalf of all and for all, that action can only be manifested and realized in unique and particular ways by each.” (Father Stephen Freeman)
“To know and be known by another is a deep desire of the heart. This desire is implanted in us by God. He tells Jeremiah, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you” (Jeremiah 1:5). This applies to all of us. God has intimate knowledge of us before we exist as we know existence, and then desires we know Him so we can be complete. This is why so many people who find their way to God and begin to know Him are filled with a joy and a fervor that often seems either irrational, or difficult to understand, by others who have not sought or found God. God wants us to know Him intimately and then extend this same love to others.” (Sacramental Living Ministries)
“The apostles were important in the life of the Church not because they knew a lot about Christ, but because they knew Christ. And so we read the Scriptures because through them we encounter the living Christ. This is complementary to our understanding of the purpose of theology itself: knowing God…what we see in Christ, as proclaimed by the apostles, is what it is to be God, yet other than the God whom Christ calls upon as Father and makes known through, and is himself made known by, the Holy Spirit. It could not have been otherwise, nor could it now be, for this is how the God of the Christian faith is…Jesus tells us that eternal life is to ‘know God’ (John 17: 3). The spiritual life for the Christian is to come to know God, or rather as St Paul says, to be known by God.” (Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Fr. John Behr, Fr. Ted Bobosh)
“St. Isaac the Syrian said that only the tomb is the “land of certainty”. Writing to hermits living in the desert, St. Isaac wanted to free them from the delusion that they could be certain about anything in this world. I wonder if St. Isaac was reflecting on the words of St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 8: “Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. If anyone thinks he knows anything, he knows nothing as he ought to know it. But if anyone loves God, this one is known by Him.” (Fr. Michael Gillis)
“If you spend precious quiet time with the Lord, in prayer, you will be surprised that the Lord will often come to you (rather, you will sense His presence) and He speak quietly into our hearts and say “Take heart, my son.” “Take heart, my daughter.” “Have courage, be at peace, I am with you always.” Just as the Lord knew the troubles that this man had faced in his life, He also knows each of us intimately. He knows every aspect of our lives. He understands you even when you think that no one else understands you. He knows you intimately because He created you and He dwells in you through baptism and Holy Communion.” (Fr. James Guirguis)
“A therapist lightly connected to Christianity might push back at my critique by quoting Scripture, “Know the truth, and the truth will make you free” (Jn 8:32). But truth is a person, not a collection of facts; in fact, truth is a person who cannot be known fully and meaningfully all in one moment of intellectual analysis. No real person can be known like that. The truth which makes us free in Scripture is a Person who appears to us first through theophany, as Beauty.” (Timothy G. Patitsas)
“In some manner, I profess with St. Paul that I know Christ. I do not know Him exhaustively (who could?). St. Paul longed to “know, even as I am known.” My first glimmers of Christ came from reading the gospels – what He said and what He did. It came secondly through reading those who had chosen to follow Him and were seen as exemplars (the saints). Along with these external witnesses was my own internal witness that has been unfolding for most of my life. It is what happens if we keep His commandments: “He who has My commandments and keeps them, it is he who loves Me. And he who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and manifest Myself to him.” (John 14:21) and “If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our home with him.” (John 14:23) This knowledge does not belong to the category of objects. We do not and cannot know God as an object. Knowing God is closer to knowing ourselves than it is to knowing objects outside of ourselves. We can note, over time, that our inner knowledge of Christ resembles the inner knowledge described by others and consistently confirms the truth of His commandments. It is more than mere subjectivity.” (Father Stephen Freeman)
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