What’s your Type?
Knowing your personality type can help you find the right job, or the right partner for life.
Knowing your metabolic type can help you find the best fitness or weight-loss program for you. Knowing your blood type is vitally important for obvious reasons.
Used this way, the word “type” means discovering common or characteristic – “typical” – ways of being or behaving. Very useful and important things to know.
Another use of the word “type” means a prefigurement of something that will be fully revealed later. In this sense, the entire Old Testament presents us “types” of Christ. Persons and events in the Old Testament find their fulfillment in the New Testament, in the person and saving work of Jesus Christ.
Jesus is the New Adam, the first-born of all the redeemed. Jesus is the Paschal Lamb, whose Precious Blood is poured out to free us from slavery to sin. The manna given to Israel in the desert is a type of Jesus Christ, the true Bread from heaven. “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood will have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day” (John 6:54). Vitally important knowledge – for our life on earth and for eternity.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus gives Nicodemus another type from the Old Testament. “Just as the serpent was lifted up in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up” (John 3:14).
Knowing Jesus Christ through faith shows us the true Companion for our life, and union with him is the very essence of each person’s unique vocation to holiness. By faith we recognize Jesus in the Eucharist, our nourishment and strength for daily life and for eternity. Faith is brought to perfection in love – his life living in us.
You can live without knowing your personality type, your metabolic type or your blood type. But you cannot truly live without knowing Jesus Christ, and God in his goodness has given us so many ways to know Him more deeply. Because God so loved us that he wanted us to have life to the full, eternal life through faith in Jesus Christ, our Lord.
-Fr. Tom
