Passion Thursday

"If I glorify myself, my glory is worth nothing; but it is my Father who glorifies me, of whom you say, 'He is our God.' You do not know him, but I know him. Amen, amen, I say to you, before Abraham came to be, I AM."

-John 8:54, 58

O bone Jesu, miserere nobis, quia tu creasti nos, tu redimisti nos sanguine tuo praetiosissimo.

O good Jesus, have mercy on us; because thou didst create us, thou hast redeemed us by thy most precious Blood.

It is easy for the idea of "relationship with God" to devolve into an imprecise connection with a Being who is pure spirit, and from there to become impersonal. We do not relate to concepts but to persons, and knowing a person is a mystery; we never know a person so well that we can claim to understand them entirely and exhaust their individual essence, and what is true of created persons is true of the persons of God in an infinitely greater degree.
We know God through the person of Jesus; without his manifestation to us, we do not know the other persons of the Holy Trinity and "relationship with God" becomes intangible vagueness. Jesus revealed that he is one with the Father, and that by receiving him we receive all that God is.
Let us remember in commemorating the Passion of the Lord that his suffering was not only to spare us punishment for our offenses, but to open us to faith in him so that we might receive our eternal happiness in knowing God as he is.