There is a significant difference between knowing about God, and knowing God. Knowing about God means knowing data: facts, mannerisms, characteristics, qualities. For example, we know that God created, that God is merciful, that God became man, that God’s love is seen in the sacrifice of His Son, and that God wants us to live with Him. These are important things to know, but knowing these things does not yet mean we know God. It’s like knowing your spouse’s or friend’s or sibling’s characteristics, but not yet knowing what makes them tick or who they really are.
To know God is much more than knowing about God. To know God is much more profound, much more intimate.
The Hebrew word for “know” is a word that describes an intimate relationship. To “know” someone involves communion with another, a relationship that dives below the surface. To know someone means not merely to be aware of likes and dislikes, but also to share and participate in their hopes, their fears, their joys, their struggles. It is to empathize, more than sympathize.
The word “know” describes the sharing of intimacy and vulnerability, of trust and confidence between husband and wife. To know another is to reveal who you truly are, to uncover for another your darkest fears and greatest hopes. It means to be unprotected, unhidden and laid bare to another. And to know another means to let them not only see, but also to let them live with you through your hardest moments, as well as your most profound joys.
The Mass is where we learn to know God. On the face of it, this might seem to be an overstatement. For the Church quite clearly teaches that Christ Jesus is God’s self-revelation, His self-disclosure; and He is the clearest, most vibrant and surest way in which we see the Father. Yet, the Mass is an essential part of God’s self-revelation. In fact, I suggest the Mass is theessential means of God’s self-revelation. For in the Mass—and most chiefly in the Mass—God reveals Himself, and we come to know Him in a way that supersedes all other ways in which He shows us Himself. In the Mass, He lays Himself bare to us.
For what happens? First, He speaks Himself into us: into our hearts as well as into our minds. That is what we hear—and are reminded of—at the end of every Mass when we hear that the Word who is God, came to His own. He comes to us so that we might know Him.
But knowing God sinks deeper down than simply in our heads and hearts. That Word, who is God, became flesh so that He might enter into our flesh. Not just into flesh like ours, so that He might know what it’s like to be us. But more intensely, God-in-the-flesh enters into the flesh of everyone who opens His mouth to receive His crucified and risen flesh and blood. And in this way, Our Lord God enters not just into our souls, but even into our bones, and courses through our veins.
Entering into our flesh by the Eucharist, Christ then makes Himself vulnerable to us. We can disregard Him, or we can be enlivened by Him. We can abuse Him by giving into our passions, or we can embrace Him by letting Him transform us. We can see Him as one of many experiences, or we can desire Him more than anything else. We can take His sacrifice as right, or we can receive Him with the grateful joy of getting much more than we ever hoped possible.
Our Lord grants us this intimacy—an intimacy that supersedes, by far, the passionate intimacy in Holy Matrimony; an intimacy that exceeds our polluted imagination. For all our other relationships are ultimately about knowing the Lord. They are preludes and starters for this relationship which exceeds all others, because it both includes all our relationships while also taking them to a much higher (and therefore, less fleshly) level.
So Our Lord grants us the privilege, the grace of intimacy with Him in the Eucharist, so that we might begin to truly know Him. So that He might share, participate, and become one with our hopes, fears, joys, and struggles. And so that we might, in that Eucharist, discover and know that He protects us in our darkest fears, that He answers our greatest hopes, that He is our profoundest joy. He lays Himself bare for us, so that we might begin to trust that we can truly be vulnerable to Him, since He has become vulnerable for us.
And all of this is not just data that enters our mind or even our hearts. All of this He plants deeply within us, with His flesh in our flesh, penetrating us to the core, so that we might know Him as we know no one else. And this knowing God, which both begins and reaches its zenith in the Mass—this is why we assemble as Church.