Jesus Part 2 - The Sacrament of God
If someone asked you, ‘What is God like?’, where would you begin? The Catholic faith begins with a bold answer: look at Jesus. In the previous blog, we explored the mystery of Jesus as both human and divine. That mystery is the starting point for understanding what Catholics mean by ‘sacramentality’.
A sacrament is a visible, physical sign of a spiritual reality. But it is not simply a religious reminder or a holy object pointing to something far away. A sacrament brings God’s life close. It makes God’s grace present in a way we can encounter.
That is why Catholics can speak of Jesus as the great sacrament of God. At first, that may sound strange. We are used to thinking of the sacraments as baptism, Eucharist, reconciliation and the others. But before any of these, there is Jesus himself: the visible, human face of the invisible God.
For the first disciples, Jesus was not simply a teacher with wise ideas about God. In him, they encountered God’s compassion, authority, forgiveness and mercy in a form they could see, hear and touch. To see how Jesus welcomed sinners, healed the broken, challenged hypocrisy and gave himself completely was to see what God is like.
This matters because the Catholic faith is not built on the idea that spiritual things are distant, vague or unreal. God comes near. God speaks through bodies, gestures, water, bread, wine, oil, hands and words. The sacraments make sense because Jesus first shows us that God is willing to be known through the physical world.
So, when Catholics call Jesus the sacrament of God, they are saying something powerful: in Jesus, God is not hidden behind the world but revealed within it. The human and the divine are not incompatible. In Jesus, they meet - one person, two natures.
That leaves us with a fascinating question: if Jesus is God made visible, what happens to that visible presence after his ascension? That question will lead us to our later discussion on ‘Church’.