“Dominus est.” (It is the Lord) These are the words uttered by the apostle John when he sees the resurrected Christ standing on the shore of Lake Tiberias. He and the other six disciples have spent the whole night fishing at sea without catching anything. At early dawn they return to shore and Jesus appears to them. But they do not realize it is Jesus. Why is it that only John recognizes the Lord? I can only think of two possible reasons: John’s simplicity of heart and love for Jesus.
Jesus proclaims the pure of heart blessed because they shall see God. (Mt 5:8) John is the youngest of the apostles, and hence the more innocent and perhaps the least corrupted? He is often referred to as the virgin apostle. But more than bodily continence, purity of heart here refers to the honesty of a person, his single-mindedness and lack of guile or duplicity. True, John has a hot temper and is ambitious, (Mk 3:17) but he presents himself to the Lord as he is. He is flawed but simple and sincere.
The second reason why John is able to recognize the Lord is his great love for him. I believe that among the apostles John proves to be the one who loves Jesus most. When everyone abandons Jesus during his passion, only John follows him up to the foot of the cross on Calvary.
And why such an unparalleled love? I think it is because John too feels that he is the apostle most loved by the Lord. In his gospel, he refers to himself as “the disciple whom Jesus loved” and who “leaned back close to Jesus’ chest” at the last supper. (Jn 13: 23,25)
The great secret of the Little Prince, taught him by the fox, is that “it is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
Pope Benedict XVI puts it more directly: “Only with the heart can we see Jesus. Only love purifies us and gives us the ability to see. Only love makes us recognize the God who is love itself.”
Last year, a good friend of mine, Lany Tapay, asked me to write a foreword for his book entitled, “It is the Lord.” The book is a precious collection of the author’s personal experience of God. There he recounts the many little theophanies or manifestations of God in his own life which he calls “God moments.”
Lany sees God in his moments of joy as well as in his moments of frustration. He felt God’s compassion in his elementary school teacher’s forgiving silence, and he heard the call to surrender to God when he fell victim to the malicious machinations of a new co-worker in the school.
I do not wonder why Lany can easily recognize the Lord in the ordinary happenings of his life. Those who are close to Lany know him as a man of simplicity, a humble person who is not ashamed of his humble beginnings. At the same time, they also know him as a man endowed with an extraordinarily big heart for God and for everyone who crosses his path.
Pope Benedict XVI once said that the greatest ailment of the world today is absence of God. God is present, of course, everywhere. He is the omnipresent power that holds everything in existence. The absence of God referred to by Pope Benedict lies in the mind and heart of man, in his lack of awareness and his indifference to God’s action. We live in a world so secularized that we often experience the absence of God more than his presence. Somehow we live no differently from atheists, not because we deny God’s existence, but simply because “God is absent from our ordinary consciousness and lives… God is not enough alive or important in our ordinary consciousness.” (Rolheiser) As the English poet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, keenly observed:
“Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God,
But only he who sees takes off his shoes;
The rest sit round and pluck blackberries.”
Truth (honesty) and love. I believe these are what we badly need to feel God’s presence among us. There’s so much untruth, fake news, lies, and deception that blind us from seeing God in our life and in the world. There’s so much apathy, indifference, pride and self-absorption that prevent us from feeling the loving touch of God.
We need the simplicity and love of John so we too can recognize the Jesus at every turn and say, “It is the Lord.”