Living Like Christ

by Saint Alberto Hurtado, S.J.

As Christians, we know that we must live our lives with our eyes fixed on Christ and our ears open to his Word. Yet we do not always fully understand what this means for our lives. Saint Alberto Hurtado, a 20th-century Chilean Jesuit, explains how we can imitate Christ today.

For some, the imitation of Christ is a historical study of Jesus. Like archaeologists, they study the ‘Jesus phenomenon’; they study the Gospels, learn about the customs of the Hebrew people, and learn Aramaic, but their research is more scientific than spiritual. It leaves the heart cold and unresponsive.

For others, imitating Christ is a speculative issue rather than a mystical one – that is to say, a mystery. They see Jesus as a great lawgiver, an artist, a social worker, a philosopher to be contemplated or admired, but one who does not change the way they live. Christ speaks to their intellect and their sensibilities, but he does not touch their hearts.

For yet other groups, the Christian life is about following rules: doing what one ought to do and not doing what is forbidden. Their focus is no longer on Christ, but on sin. Their sole concern is to flee from what is evil: bad thoughts, and avoiding all danger. They forget that God intended human beings to be free.

Finally, for others, the Christian life is one of intense apostolic activism, a proliferation of efforts to steer the Church’s mission in the right direction, a constant drive to create something new. The triumph of Catholicism is then reduced to political posturing, where one must devote all one’s energy to building up charitable works, organising splendid celebrations and carrying out evangelisation missions. Paradoxically, amidst all these good intentions, Christ is sometimes pushed to one side.

Our imitation of Christ does not consist in doing what Christ did. Our civilisation and our living conditions are different. To imitate Christ, therefore, is rather to have that inner and outer attitude which is like that of Christ. It is to do what Christ would do in my place.

In prayer, we can ask Jesus to help us receive his offered heart more fully, so that our hearts may come to resemble his more and more. This is also what the sacraments bring, which the early Christians received as coming from the open heart of Jesus on the Cross.

Through Baptism, we become children of God, like Jesus, so that we may resemble him. And through each celebration of the Eucharist, we nourish our life in Christ. These are gifts that we receive.

We cannot seize hold of Jesus’ heart by our own efforts, and when we turn away from him, we can regain our closeness to his heart through the sacrament of Reconciliation.

The historical Christ was a Jew living in Palestine during the Roman Empire. But the mystical Christ is the same, and is also… us! A man or a woman of today. He is a nurse, a lawyer, an engineer or a grocer. He is every Christian who lives in God’s grace and who aspires to integrate their life with that of Christ. He always strives to do what he does, but as Jesus would have done in his place: to care for the sick as Christ would have done, to defend the accused as Christ would have done, to study and carry out complex projects as Christ would have done, to run a business as Christ would have done – but this also goes beyond work. How should we travel?

As Christ would have done? How might we pray as Christ would have done? How might we conduct ourselves in politics, in business or within our families as Christ would have done?

Receiving Christ’s burning heart leads us to make new choices, since this heart turns us ever more towards God and towards others. When we fail, when the world seems to be falling in on us, when our grand plans for God do not work out, or when we have once again fallen back into a all-too-familiar sin, we can remain confident: the heart of Jesus is always there and is always offered to us. The only defeat is to no longer be with Christ.

It is this way of being close to the heart of Jesus and transformed by him that the Christian life offers us. This is the faith of great saints such as Saint Francis of Assisi or Ignatius of Loyola, but also of so many young and not-so-young people who live their daily lives as married couples, single people, students, religious, or those involved in sport or politics. With this criterion, this choice: to be Christ. As Saint Paul says: ‘I live, yet it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.