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April 21 - June 14, 2019
The text states that Jesus pleaded with him who had the power to save him from death and that, on account of his godly fear (cf. 5:7), his prayer was granted.
But was it granted? He still died on the Cross!
Rather, we must attempt to understand this mysterious form of “granting” so as to come closer to grasping the mystery of our own salvation.
the Resurrection is not just Jesus’ personal rescue from death. He did not die for himself alone. His was a dying “for others”; it was the conquest of death itself.
“Father, glorify your name!” a voice from heaven replies: “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.” The Cross itself has become God’s glorification, the glory of God made manifest in the love of the Son. This glory extends beyond the moment into the whole sweep of history. This glory is life. It is on the Cross that we see it, hidden yet powerful: the glory of God, the transformation of death into life.
The granting of Jesus’ prayer concerns all mankind:
his obedience becomes life for all.
“He became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him, being designated by God a high priest according to the order of Melchizedek” (Heb 5:9-10; cf. Ps 110:4).
...so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone. Heb. 2:—
All through history, people look upon the disfigured face of Jesus, and there they recognize the glory of God.
If Jesus bases his concept of kingship and kingdom on truth as the fundamental category, then it is entirely understandable that the pragmatic Pilate asks him: “What is truth?” (18:38).
The classic definition from scholastic philosophy designates truth as “adaequatio intellectus et rei” (conformity between the intellect and reality; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 21, a. 2c).
“Bearing witness to the truth” means giving priority to God and to his will over against the interests of the world and its powers.
The functional truth about man has been discovered. But the truth about man himself—who he is, where he comes from, what he should do, what is right, what is wrong—this unfortunately cannot be read in the same way. Hand in hand with growing knowledge of functional truth there seems to be an increasing blindness toward “truth” itself—toward the question of our real identity and purpose.
“Ecce homo”—
The hidden God remains present within him.
Is it not on account of our knowledge that we are incapable of recognizing Truth itself, which tries to reach us through what we know?
Ignorance diminishes guilt, and it leaves open the path to conversion.
All the more, then, it remains a source of comfort for all times and for all people that both in the case of those who genuinely did not know (his executioners) and in the case of those who did know (the people who condemned him), the Lord makes their ignorance the motive for his plea for forgiveness: he sees it as a door that can open us to conversion.
The members of the Sanhedrin, taking their cue from these words, now say of Jesus, the Crucified One: “He is the King of Israel; let him come down now from the cross, and we will believe in him. He trusts in God; let God deliver him now, if he desires him; for he said, ‘I am the Son of God’ ” (Mt 27:42-43; cf. Wis 2:18). Without realizing it, the mockers thereby acknowledge that Jesus is truly the one of whom the Book of Wisdom speaks. His situation of outward helplessness proves him to be the true Son of God.
We may add that the author of the Book of Wisdom could have been familiar with Plato’s speculations from his work on statecraft, in which he asks what would become of a perfectly just person in this world, and he comes to the conclusion that such a person would be crucified (The Republic II, 361e—362a).
the charge that is placed above the Cross: “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews” (Jn 19:19). Up to this point, Jesus had avoided the title Messiah or king, or else he had immediately linked it with his suffering (cf. Mk 8:27-31) in order to prevent false interpretations. Now the title “king” can appear quite openly. In the three great languages of that time, Jesus is publicly proclaimed king.
the good thief has become an image of hope—an image of the consoling certainty that God’s mercy can reach us even in our final moments, that even after a misspent life, the plea for his gracious favor is not made in vain. So, for example, the Dies Irae prays: “Qui . . . latronem exaudisti, mihi quoque spem dedisti” (just as you answered the prayer of the thief, so you have given me hope).
an act of faith: the Roman centurion—the commander of the execution squad—in his consternation over all that he sees taking place, acknowledges Jesus as God’s Son: “Truly, this man was the Son of God” (Mk 15:39). At the foot of the Cross, the Church of the Gentiles comes into being.
“This is he who came by water and blood, Jesus Christ, not with the water only but with the water and the blood. And the Spirit is the witness, because the Spirit is the truth. There are three witnesses, the Spirit, the water, and the blood; and these three agree” (5:6-8). What does the author mean by this insistence that Jesus came not with water only but also with blood? We may assume that he is alluding to a tendency to place all the emphasis on Jesus’ baptism
while setting the Cross aside. And this probably also meant that only the word, the doctrine, the message was held to be important, but not “the flesh”, the living body of Christ that bled on the Cross; it probably meant an attempt to create a Christianity of thoughts and ideas, divorced from the reality of the flesh—sacrifice and sacrament.
In this double outpouring of blood and water, the Fathers saw an image of the two fundamental sacraments—Eucharist and Baptism—which spring forth from the Lord’s pierced side, from his heart. This is the new outpouring that creates the Church and renews mankind. Moreover, the opened side of the Lord asleep on the Cross prompted the Fathers to point to the creation of Eve from the side of the sleeping Adam, and so in this outpouring of the sa...
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The Temple remained a venerable place of prayer and proclamation. Its sacrifices, though, were no longer relevant for Christians. But how exactly is this to be understood? In the New Testament literature there are various attempts to explain Christ’s Cross as the new worship, the true atonement and the true purification of this corrupted world. We have spoken a number of times already of the fundamental text in Romans 3:25, where Paul, evidently drawing upon a tradition of the earliest Jewish Christian community in Jerusalem, refers to the crucified Jesus as “hilastērion”. This, as we have
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the filth of the world is truly absorbed,
wiped out, and transformed in the pain of infinite love. Because infinite good is now at hand in the man Jesus, the counterweight to all wickedness is present and active within world history, and the good is always infinitely gr...
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the psalm was reflecting a strand of Greek thought from the period immediately prior to the birth of Christ:
The version given in the Letter to the Hebrews of these verses from Psalm 40 contains the answer to this longing: the longing that God will one day be given what we cannot give him, and yet that it should still be our gift, is now fulfilled.
Ignatius of Antioch, for example, described himself as the grain of wheat of Christ, ground through martyrdom in order to become the bread of Christ (cf. Ad Rom 4:1).
Jesus’ death is of another kind: it is occasioned, not by the presumption of men, but by the humility of God. It is not the inevitable consequence of a false hubris, but the fulfillment of a love in which God himself comes down to us, so as to draw us back up to himself.
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the immense importance attached to the Sabbath in the Old Testament tradition on the basis of the Creation account and the Decalogue, then it is clear that only an event of extraordinary impact could have led to the abandonment of the Sabbath and its replacement by the first day of the week.
Mere theological speculations could not have achieved this. For me, the celebration of the Lord’s day, which was characteristic of the Christian community from the outset, is one of the most convincing proofs that something extraordinary happened that day—
“He appeared to Cephas, then to the Twelve”, it states succinctly.
it reveals the very foundation of the Church’s faith.
But in the internal contradictions characteristic of all the accounts of what the disciples experienced, in the mysterious combination of
otherness and identity, we see reflected a new form of encounter, one that from an apologetic standpoint may seem rather awkward but that is all the more credible as a record of the experience.
To conclude, all of us are constantly inclined to ask the question that Saint Jude Thaddaeus put to Jesus during the Last Supper: “Lord, how is it that you will manifest yourself to us, and not to the world?” (Jn 14:22). Why, indeed, did you not forcefully resist your enemies who brought you to the Cross?—we might well ask. Why did you not show them with incontrovertible power that you are the living one, the Lord of life and death? Why did you reveal yourself only to a small flock of disciples, upon whose testimony we must now rely? The question applies not only to the Resurrection, but to
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The questioning about times and seasons is explicitly rejected. Speculation over history, looking ahead into the unknown future—these are not fitting attitudes for a disciple. Christianity is the present: it is both gift and task, receiving the gift of God’s inner closeness and—as a consequence—bearing witness to Jesus Christ.
“Sitting at God’s right hand” means participating in this divine dominion over space.
Psalm 110,
He contrasts the idea of the Messiah as a new David ushering in a new Davidic kingdom—the very idea that we have just encountered among the disciples—with a grander vision of the one who is to come: the true Messiah is not David’s son, but David’s Lord. He sits, not on David’s throne, but on God’s throne (cf. Mt 22:41-45).
