We celebrate the Sunday liturgies accompanied especially by the Gospel of Mark this year and in this too, we can find great solace. Mark’s Gospel has been called the Gospel of “Discipleship”. He shows clearly how the followers of Jesus struggled with uncertainty in recognizing Him as the Son of God as well as with their call to be Evangelizers in a culture very different from the Gospel ways. Mark records the words of the disciples after Jesus calmed the sea when they said: “Who then, is this?” This is at the very heart of Mark’s Gospel and Jesus affirms this when he says to them: “But who do you say that I am?” It is Peter who responds by saying: “You are the Christ, the son of the living God.” Mark shares with us that it is not enough to intellectually understand our faith; we are to have a personal encounter and relationship with Jesus, above all.
So I realize that last sentence is what you might call pastoral boilerplate. The bishop is just reciting a common cliché: Intellectual understanding is not enough (as if intellectual understanding were something obvious that we can pretty much take for granted); what we need is to go beyond intellectual understanding (as if that's where people tend to get stuck: they clearly understand Jesus and the whole Catholic faith, but...!); what we need is the much more essential and ambitious thing: to have a personal encounter and relationship with Jesus. Allegedly that's what Mark shares with us.
But think about what Mark's gospel actually says. It seems all the disciples (and crowds and pharisees, scribes and lawyers, priests and bishops, etc.) had personally encountered Jesus. They all had their own 'personal relationship' with him. And that's what wasn't enough. What they were precisely missing was an intellectual understanding of who he was, which Peter by the grace of God manages to grasp: "You are the Christ, the son of the living God." He doesn't just encounter Jesus and have a relationship with him, like all the rest. Moved by grace Peter's intellect is enlightened to understand God's revelation to him of who Jesus Christ is.
So the bishop has it backwards. What "Mark shares with us" is that it is not enough "to have a personal encounter and relationship with Jesus"; what we need is "to intellectually understand our faith." The bishop's backwards claim is solidly grounded in the authority of the commonplace, the oft-heard and thoughtlessly repeated cliché. But perhaps we, including even bishops, should not rest content with repeating tired clichés; in truth what we first of all need is to take care to think about what our words really mean, so as, indeed, moved by grace like Peter, to intellectually understand "our faith."
And indeed, "our faith" isn't even "ours," or rather it isn't even "yours," unless and until you have made the intellectual effort and done the intellectual work to appropriate and understand it. Resting content with the extrinsically accomplished "personal relationship" with God is the way of the hard-hearted Jews of John 8. When Jesus tells them that the truth - i.e., the proper object of intellectual understanding - will set them free, they take umbrage: "We are Abraham's descendants!" In other words, we're good! We are the chosen people! We already have our 'personal relationship' with God! Why are you telling us we need to be disciples of the truth?
Why? Well if you really need a reason, here's one (and there certainly are others): Because Jesus, the divine logos incarnate, says so, and his word is truth.
And an aside: You might well wonder about evangelizers, teachers, religious leaders who claim that it's really about personal relationships. As they say: "It's not what you know, it's who you know" -- also known as cronyism. And isn't cronyism a deep rot at the heart of much of the present corruption that plagues the Church? There's no reason why a commonplace religious cliché can't double as a tool of the devil, in this case by subtly insinuating the rightness of cronyism. In John 8 Jesus tells the above-mentioned 'personal relationship' Jews, "You belong to your father, the devil" and "it is because I speak the truth that you don't believe me." Some things to ponder.
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