The Ignorance of Christ

A reflection on "I never knew you"

Perhaps the most terrifying line of scripture is Matthew 7:23; “And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you evildoers.’” The weight of that line alone would be enough to plunge you to the depths of Hell. How can He, the Lord of life, not know me? What am I, that I am unknown even to the son of God?

What does it mean that Jesus does not and, moreover, never knew us? Christ is the Truth, so we know He cannot lie. Nothing is hidden from Him either, so we know He can’t be ignorant of our existence. The Word of the Lord spoke to Jeremiah that “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,” so how can He have never known the sinner?

These words of our Lord reveal to us something about the nature of sin. We know that we are fearfully and wonderfully made by God. God, like any craftsman, must have fashioned us after an idea existing in His own mind. Fundamentally we know that God looks upon us, his creation, and knows us, since our origin is with Him. Insofar as we bear resemblance to that idea in the mind of God, God looks on us and says “it is good.”

We also know that we have lost something of our resemblance to our Father. Our first parents were formed from the dust of the Earth by the finger of God. They were made after His likeness to be able to image God to all of creation, but they rejected that role. They wanted to be more than what they were, and so they reached out and attempted to grasp divinity on their own terms. The irony here is tragic. They were already the image of God, but they distorted that image in their pursuit of divinity. In their desire to glorify themselves, they forged a new mask that covered up God’s image in their own souls. The mask was necessarily much uglier and much less real than the Divine Image was.

These masks were passed on to their children and their children’s children. Indeed, all of humanity has inherited them. The beautiful image of God, inherent in our souls, is covered up by the mask of sin. This mask, importantly, was created by us. It doesn’t come from the mind of God. When I choose to embrace this mask, I choose to participate in a form that is unreal. I’m born wearing it, but I choose to keep it on every time I choose sin.

This, then, is why Christ tells the sinner “I never knew you.” The person who the sinner has chosen to be is not the person God created. The identity they have chosen is not real, since it is separate from God. Omniscience itself can’t know an unreality. To know it would be to know a lie, which is unbecoming of the Godhead. Insofar as the sinner embraces that false self, as Merton would call it, God is incapable of knowing them. Where else can they go, then, but the outer darkness? The darkness of hellfire is the only place that can hold them.

This is why Christ came to Earth. Jesus himself is the prototype after which Adam was made. If the Divine image is to be restored in us, it is necessary that He return to sit for another portrait. When we are baptized into Christ, we take off our old mask and return to the ancient beauty of God’s image. The person who has put on Christ in this way will be recognized by God as His handiwork. This is the person who will hear the Word of God say to them “Come, O blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.”