One of the hardest things about these days of social isolation is not being able to see those we love face to face. Sure, we can Skype and Face-time, but it’s just not the same thing as being able to see someone face to face.
In fact, have you ever been in an airport, waiting to pick up an old friend whom you love. You keep looking and looking, scanning all the faces, waiting to see he familiar eyes and smile and receding hairline of the the person who loves you, whom you have called your friend.
Indeed, if you were to ask me what the holy scriptures are really all about, I would suggest it is just one thing: Looking for the face of God. Indeed, the Hebrew word pānîm, which means “face”, is used over a hundred times in the Old Testament to speak of looking for the face of God.
Why did they keep looking for God’s face? Because only a person has a face, a living being, one who is loving and capable of being loved. And the desire to see God’s face is the desire to gaze on him with love, and to be looked upon by one who loves me. God, then, is not an abstraction or a divine mechanic who has withdrawn into the heavens and coldly looks down on us from above. No, God is love, and by dwelling in the light of his face….face-to-face with God, who enter into the deepest loving relationship of our little lives.
God then, listens to us, speaks to us, sees us and makes promises to us. He loves and he teaches us the meaning of life and of love. The history of our relationship with God, then, is the history of our gazing at his face and his face looking back on us in love.
The Book of Numbers has that wonderful old patriarchal blessing, which we still use as a blessing on New Year’s Day:
“May the Lord Bless you and keep you.
May the Lord make his face shine on you,
and be gracious to you.
May the Lord uncover his face to you and bring you peace.
Indeed, it is only by looking into God’s eyes that we can see ourselves for who we are and who were meant to be. As our beloved Pope emeritus once said, “The splendor of the divine face is the source of life, it is what makes it possible to see reality; the light of his face is guidance for life.”
Moses understood that well. Which is why we read in the Book of Exodus that “The Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend” (Exodus 33:11). But even this face to face friendship was but a show of what there was to come. For in Jesus, we see the face of God made flesh.
In Jesus, God’s face can be seen. The great English mystic, Caryll Houselander once described what the Blessed Virgin Mary must have felt like when she looked into the face of the child in her arms and saw in it the face of God.
Maybe that’s why artists down through the centuries have worked to hard to depict the face of Jesus, for in that face we see God, “the mediator and the sum total of Revelation”
AS he said to Philip, ‘whoever sees him, sees the Father’ Indeed, “in him we see and encounter the Father; in him we can call upon God with the name of “Abba, Father”; in him we are given salvation.”
But there is something more to seeing God’s face in the face of Jesus, for he tells us that he is also present in the poor, the weak and the suffering.
Caryll Houselander, once again, once wrote: “I see the face of God in everyone I pass. Sometimes it’s hard but I try.” She once described sitting on a train and looking at everyone around her. Then, all of a sudden it occurred to her:
“Quite suddenly I saw with my mind, but vividly as a wonderful picture, Christ in them all. But I saw more than that; not only was Christ in every one of them, living in them dying in them, rejoicing in them, sorrowing in them — but because He was in them, and because they were here, the whole world was here too…all those people who had lived in the past and all those yet to come.”
So, the face of Christ is not just a two dimensional icon to be gazed upon up near the altar, bur the face of the tired cashier, in which see the suffering Christ, tired and worn out from all the sufferings he endured. It is the face of the garbage collector, tired and hot and thirsty on the Cross. It is the face of the homeless man, Christ in the desert with nothing to eat or drink and nowhere to lay His head.
That's why, on this Good Friday, we meditate on the face of the suffering Christ.
It is the face once transfigured in glory,
and now crowned with a web of thorns.
It is the face weeping before the tomb of his friend Lazarus,
the face which wept over Jerusalem,
and covered with the sweat of blood on the Mount of Olives.
It is the face covered with a veil of shame
and profaned by the soldiers,
now bowed upon the Cross for our salvation.
It is the face washed and anointed by the holy women
and resplendent with glory on the day of the Resurrection.
It is the face of Jesus, hidden in the Eucharist
and worthy of all devotion.
It is the face which we will see on the day:
the face of the merciful and just judge,
terror of sinners and hope of the just.
It is the face for whom we long,
in whom we hope,
the face of love,
who will come to save us.
