'And all who seek you with a sincere heart' is a phrase that has survived into the most recent English translation of the Roman Missal. It is in the Fourth Eucharistic Prayer, where we pray for all who participate in any way in the Eucharist being celebrated, those present, all God's people, and all who seek God 'with a sincere heart'.
Justin the Martyr whose memory we keep today might well be taken as a patron of all who seek with a sincere heart. A pagan philosopher, his quest for truth took him round the various schools of philosophy operating in the ancient world. He found something in each and likewise something lacking in each. So he learned from the Stoics and the Aristotelians, the Pythagoreans and the Platonists.
The truth Justin sought was not just knowledge about the world, how it is put together and how it works. He sought always a moral truth, where the good is to be found and in what does a good human life consist. He also sought a truth that was practical, which enabled its adherents not just to think and to know but to put into practice the truth they had come to see.
Eventually he found his way to Christianity and to faith in Christ as the Logos or Eternal Wisdom of God. It was the promise of resurrection, the witness of Christian martyrs, and the longing for the return of Christ, that moved Justin's heart from the philosophical quest to the way of discipleship. He embraced the paradoxical wisdom of the Cross of Jesus, not easy for anybody to 'get their heads around', perhaps more difficult for the philosophically minded than for others.
But this did not lead Justin to reject or to despise what he had learned before. Instead he developed a characteristic understanding of how the Logos, the Eternal Wisdom of God, revealed in creation and in the history of God's dealings with his people, is present in all quests for truth. Sparks of the Word are found everywhere, he said, in all knowledge and science and philosophy. Its fulness, however, is found only in Christ.
For Justin it is Jesus who, in his own words, is the light of the world. But, as today's gospel reading reminds us, Jesus said the same thing of those who came to believe in him: 'you are the light of the world'. Justin is a wonderful teacher of this truth and a witness to it also in his death. Just as he had sought wisdom with a sincere heart, always anxious to profess it, to live it, and to celebrate it in the liturgies of the Church, so he was ready to die for it. He was confident that the One in whom he had placed his faith would welcome him into His kingdom of light, love, and life.
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