On the Way to Jesus Christ

by Joseph Ratzinger

naming the Person of Christ recedes or disappears. . . , then there is a shift in emphasis that consists in the fact that Christ is no longer addressed in the respectful terms reserved for royalty but that his solidarity with mankind is stressed instead.”1 The presence of the figure of Jesus itself is becoming diminished—also with regard to the non-Christian contemporaries who surround us; the figure is transformed from the “Lord” (a word that is avoided) into a man who is nothing more than the advocate of all men. The Jesus of the Gospels is quite different, demanding, bold. The Jesus who makes everything okay for everyone is a phantom, a dream, not a real figure. The Jesus of the Gospels is certainly not convenient for us.

Yes, you can see God. Whoever sees Christ sees him. This answer, which characterizes Christianity as a religion of fulfillment, as a religion of the divine presence, nevertheless immediately evokes a new question. “Already and not yet” has been called the fundamental attitude of Christian living; what this means becomes evident precisely in this passage.

Jesus’ answer transcends the moment and reaches far into the future: Indeed, the Greeks shall see me, and not only these men who have come now to Philip, but the entire world of the Greeks. They shall see me, yes, but not in my earthly, historical life, “according to the flesh” (cf. 2 Cor 5:16 [Douay Rheims]); they will see me by and through the Passion. By and through it I am coming, and I will no longer come merely in one single geographic locality, but I will come over all geographical boundaries into the farthest reaches of the world, which wants to see the Father. Jesus announces his coming from the perspective of his Resurrection, his coming in the power of the Holy Spirit, and so he proclaims a new way of seeing that occurs in faith.

Yet they are implicitly connected with a central theme of the Old Testament, concerning an essential attitude of piety that is described in a series of texts as “seeking the face of God”. Despite the difference in terminology, there is a profound continuity between the Johannine “looking on Christ” and the Old Testament “being on the way” toward looking upon the face of God. In Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians the verbal connection is also to be found, when he writes about the glory of God that appears in the face of Christ (2 Cor 4:6).

The New Testament texts about seeing God in Christ are deeply rooted in the piety of Israel; by and through it they extend through the entire breadth of the history of religion or, perhaps to put it better: They draw the obscure longing of religious history upward to Christ and thereby guide it toward his response.

God’s face is derived in some way from the worship of images. It thereby becomes evident what a great step the Old Testament has taken. The image is eliminated, while the search for the face remains. The objective form, the reification of the deity, falls by the wayside, but God retains his “face”. He is the One who cannot be represented, but as such he is still the One who has a face, who can see and be seen. The old form of worship, which made God into something material and drew him down into particularity, is replaced.

This God has a face, he is “person”. In his extremely detailed philological article on the word pãnîm, Simian-Yofre has summarized these facts as follows: “Because of its ability to express feelings and reactions, pãnîm designates the subject, inasmuch as he turns toward others. . . , that is, inasmuch as he is the subject of relationships. Pãnîm is a term that describes relationships.”5 We can say that precisely with the word pãnîm, as the worship of images is eliminated, the concept of the person is established, specifically as a term of relationship.

the word shêm, “name”. The God of the Old Testament reveals his name, and so he can be called upon. Name, too, is a term of relationship. Someone who has a name is himself capable of hearing and addressing others, and furthermore he can be called upon by name.

the God who is above all and yet still has a face. In this, man is similar to him; man is his image; from the face, man can recognize who and what and how God is. He is referred to this face; in his innermost being he is in search of it. It seems important to me that, on the one hand, a very profound spiritual insight forms the basis for both concepts, “name” and “face”, an insight that became possible only with the elimination of the external image, in the absence of images;

The face of God is encountered in the Temple; it is sought while the believer is on the way there. Nevertheless the meaning of the verse goes far beyond the merely cultic reference. In Hosea 5:14-15 this becomes even clearer. There God says about Israel: “I will rend and go away. . . , until they acknowledge their guilt and seek my face.” This seeking and keeping watch is an attitude that involves the whole man; only when he becomes “righteous” with his whole being, that is, godly, is he on the way to encountering God’s face.

The just man has in mind, not a full stomach, but a completely different sort of satisfaction. He is satisfied at the sight of his God. He knows that his seeking will be fulfilled in beholding.

Righteousness is the way of life that takes its measure from the word of God; it is abiding in this word and its teaching. We could say that righteousness means a godly life. Psalm 17 thus touches upon what we heard earlier in Psalm 24: Seeking the face of God is an attitude that embraces all of life; in order for a man to see God’s face at last, he must himself be entirely illuminated by God.

Righteousness, understood as godly living, by its very nature points beyond the merely material and merely temporal realm of earthly life. To that extent, the recognition of God’s rights and an eschatological orientation are intrinsically interrelated. Even if the idea of new life is not fully elaborated here and is probably just taking shape, the eschatological dimension of existence is quite clear for anyone who by his life seeks the face of God and knows that he will behold it “when he awakes”. The search for God’s face, by its very nature, includes within it the transcendence of time and eschatological hope.

Of course, when God hides himself, the sinner may experience a false sense of security: it seems that God does not exist at all. One can safely live without him, in opposition to him, turning one’s back upon him—or so it seems. Precisely this security of the godless man is his most serious trouble. In times when God is silent, in a time when his face seems to have become unrecognizable, should we not reflect with some alarm upon the significance of God’s concealment? Should we not view it as the true fate to which the world is doomed and call upon God all the louder and more urgently for him to show his countenance?

Christ, however, had in fact allowed himself to be made sin for us and had taken the curse upon himself for us (Gal 3:13). He stands henceforth as an advocate for us in the presence of the Father (1 Jn 2:1). And he is the one who remains henceforth face to face with the Father: more than a prophet, more than a friend, he is the Son. He is able to see the face of God, and in his face the glory of God becomes visible to us (2 Cor 4: 6).

The way that God is seen in this world is by following Christ; seeing is going, is being on the way for our whole life toward the living God, whereby Jesus Christ, by the entire way that he walked, especially by the Paschal Mystery of his suffering, death, Resurrection, and Ascension, presents us with the itinerary.

Now what is new about the New Testament? The novelty is really not one idea; the new thing is a face, or better: a person, Jesus Christ. Around him and because of him the manifold expressions of Old Testament piety are reordered and acquire, especially after the destruction of the Temple, a new concreteness.

in connection with late-medieval forms of piety, gave rise to a new devotion to the Holy Face, which reached its apex in Thérèse of Lisieux, when she called herself Thérèse “of the Child Jesus” and “of the Holy Face”. Both titles allude to God’s kenosis, his becoming little, his descent into the misery of the human condition. Whereas the first title presents the lovable side of this descent, the second one emphasizes the aspect of the Passion, for in this world the face of Christ is a “bleeding Head, so wounded”; precisely in this way it manifests the mystery of God’s love and the true face of God.

the face of Jesus in the poor, the helpless, and the suffering. Charity can literally see his face in them; in serving the needy, the Christian loves him, is close to him, beholds and touches him (cf. Mt 25:31-46). Yet we can recognize Jesus himself in the poor only if we have already become well acquainted with his face, and this face is very close to us especially in the mystery of the Eucharist, in which the struggle of Moses upon the mountain is continually made present among us: the Lord stands on the mountain and allows himself to be made sin for us.

Just as looking at icons always leads beyond them, so too the celebration of the Eucharist embodies this dynamic: it is an approach to the Christ who is to come, to that “awakening” in which he himself will satisfy us with the sight of him, with the vision of the triune God. And concern for one’s neighbor, social commitment, also goes beyond the present moment.

Politicized theology wanted to put this immediate aid aside for the sake of the fundamental task of creating a better world. That was and is a presumption, in which the individual becomes an instrument for utopian political dreams, which for their part remain unreal. But the proverbial grain of truth is not lacking even here: help given to an individual is part of the ongoing struggle of charity, the struggle of faith for the coming of God’s kingdom. Of course, the kingdom of God is not a political construct of our own making; rather it is the gift of God, which we cannot obtain by force.

We have seen that detachment from the image in worship, which nevertheless retained the search for the face of God, led to the knowledge of a personal God and, thus, in general to the knowledge of what a person is. At this point the paths of religious history divide. The great religious systems that do not know God as a person, like Neoplatonism and Buddhism or even fundamental forms of Hinduism, still know of deities to which one can pray, which can help or also harm. These gods can be represented in images; they have a face; they are in some sense persons. But these “gods” are not God. They are powers in the middle region, beyond which many do not go.

This genuine reality, which Plotinus calls the “One”, transcending all being and all names, and which to the Buddhist way of looking at things is absolute “Nothingness”—this reality has no name or face. The real goal of all purification and healing is to step outside of the realm of names and of faces, out of the realm of divisions and opposition, into the namelessness of the “One” or else of the “Nothing”. What was and is new about biblical religion is the fact that this primordial Being itself, the real “God”, of whom there can be no images, nevertheless has a face and a name and is a person. And salvation consists, not in being immersed in namelessness, but rather in the “satisfaction in seeing his face” that will be granted to us when we awaken. The Christian advances toward this awakening, this satisfaction, by looking upon the Pierced One, by looking upon Jesus Christ.

It is clear that the Church reads this psalm as a prophetic and poetic depiction of the spousal relationship of Christ and Church. She thus acknowledges Christ as the fairest of men; the graciousness poured upon his lips refers to the inner beauty of his words, to the glory of this message. So it is not merely the external beauty of the Redeemer’s appearance that is praised: rather, the beauty of truth appears in him, the beauty of God himself, who powerfully draws us and inflicts on us the wound of Love, as it were, a holy Eros that enables us to go forth, with and in the Church, his Bride, to meet the Love who calls us.

With regard to the paradox posed by these texts, he spoke of the contrasting sounds of “two trumpets”, which are nevertheless produced by the same breath, the same Spirit. He knew that the paradox is a contrast and not a contradiction. Both utterances come from the same Spirit who inspires all Scripture but who sounds different notes in it. Precisely in this way he sets before us the totality of true beauty, of truth itself.

Whoever believes in God, in the God who revealed himself precisely in the distorted figure of Christ crucified as Love “to the end” (Jn 13:1), knows that beauty is truth and truth beauty; but in the suffering Christ he also learns that the beauty of truth also involves wounds, pain, and even the obscure mystery of death and that this can only be found in accepting pain, not in ignoring it.

True knowledge is being struck by the arrow of beauty that wounds man: being touched by reality, “by the personal presence of Christ himself”, as he puts it. Being overcome by the beauty of Christ is a more real, more profound knowledge than mere rational deduction. Of course we must not underestimate the importance of theological reflection, of exact and careful theological thought; it is still absolutely necessary.

Falsehood, however, has another stratagem: a beauty that is deceptive and false, a dazzling beauty that does not bring human beings out of themselves into the ecstasy of starting off toward the heights but instead immures them completely within themselves. Such beauty does not awaken a longing for the ineffable, a willingness to sacrifice and to lose oneself, but instead stirs up the desire, the will for power, possession, and pleasure. It is that sort of experience of beauty that Genesis tells about in the account of the Fall. Eve sees that the fruit of the tree is “beautiful” to eat and is “delightful to the eyes”. “Beauty”, as she experiences it, arouses in her a desire for possession, making her, so to speak, turn in upon herself.

Who has not heard Dostoyevsky’s oft-quoted remark: “Beauty will save us”? Usually people forget to mention, however, that by redeeming beauty Dostoyevsky means Christ. He it is whom we must learn to see. If we cease to know him only through words but are struck by the arrow of his paradoxical beauty, then we will truly come to know him

evangelization is the announcement of a Word that is more than a word—it is a way of life, indeed, life itself. So the question initially posed by the topic is: How can the gospel cross the threshold from me to someone else? How can a communion in the gospel come about, so that it not only forms a bond between me and the other, but also unites us both to the Word of God, thereby producing a genuinely profound unity?

we ought to be glad that these Christian forms are imprinted on our common life, and, when necessary, we should dust them off and clean them up or otherwise strengthen and encourage them. Yet it has always been true, even in the Middle Ages, that this Christian culture exists side by side with non-Christian and anti-Christian elements. Ever since the Enlightenment, Western culture has been moving away from its Christian foundations with increasing rapidity. The disintegration of the family and marriage, the escalating attacks upon human life and its dignity, the confinement of faith to the realm of the subjective and the consequent secularization of public awareness, as well as the fragmentation and relativizing of ethical values demonstrate this all too clearly.

The necessary transformation cannot come from the tree itself and its fruit—an intervention of the dresser, an intervention from outside, is necessary. Applied to the pagan world, to what is characteristic of human culture, this means: The Logos itself must slit our cultures and their fruit, so that what is unusable is purified and becomes not only usable but good. When we reflect carefully on the text and what it says, we can add still another observation: Yes, ultimately only the Logos himself can guide our cultures to their true purity and maturity, but the Logos makes us his servants, the “dresser of sycamore trees”.

the way of evangelization within the realm of culture, the relations between the gospel and culture. The gospel does not stand “beside” culture. It is addressed, not merely to the individual, but to the culture itself, which leaves its mark on the spiritual growth and development of the individual, his fruitfulness or unfruitfulness with respect to God and to the world.

the gospel is a slit, a purification that becomes maturation and healing. It is a cut that demands patient involvement and understanding, so that it occurs at the right time, in the right place, and in the right way; a cut, then, that requires sympathy and understanding of the culture from within, an appreciation for its dangers and its hidden or evident potential.

The Christian faith is open to all that is great, true, and pure in world culture,

In this passage Paul is probably referring first of all to the essential elements of the Stoic morality that, in his opinion, closely resembled Christianity but also, in general, to everything that is great in the Greco-Roman culture. The remarks that he addressed to that realm are universally true.

Yet this renunciation of the theater implies, naturally, a type of culture in its entirety, or rather, the sickness of a culture, from which anyone who wanted to become a Christian first had to detach himself in order to strive to see God’s image in man and to live accordingly.4 And so this baptismal renunciation is the epitome of the culture-critical character of Christianity and a sign of the “cut” that it involves.

Just as Paul regards the formula for his profession of faith as a gift of the Holy Spirit and not as the result of human interpretation, so too, in the parallel passage in Matthew, Jesus says in response to Peter’s profession: “Flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven” (Mt 16:17).

In Paul the ambiguous term Christ— “Messiah”—is replaced with the word Kyrios—“Lord”, which in the Greek Old Testament replaces the name of God that can no longer be pronounced, and thus the identification of Jesus with God, his true divinity, is quite clearly expressed. The Greek translation of the Old Testament, in substituting the word “Lord” for the name of God, had carried the biblical faith in God unambiguously into the pagan world and for the first time had brought the monotheistic character of this faith to light completely, in contrast to the many gods with their individual names.

Against the background of these opinions of men, which came from their own interpretation of the phenomenon of Jesus, the revealed knowledge that Peter declares on behalf of the disciples then stands out. “Men” today think no differently about Jesus than they did then, and insofar as it is merely a question of our own ideas, we are all such “men”.

We find opinions about Jesus that men develop on their own, employing scientific methods of interpretation, above all in the images of “the historical Jesus” that critical exegesis has proposed since the time of Reimarus (1694-1768).

But his criticism did not go deep enough, and so the efforts to reconstruct the historical Jesus continued after him as well, setting themselves up in the place of the living figure, which of course cannot be known in practice by historical methods alone, but only in faith—in a faith that does not set history aside but first opens its eyes so as to be able to understand it in its entirety.

a result of the confidence in science that is one of the hallmarks of our time, ever-changing images of the historical Jesus form the opinions of “men” while barring the entrance to faith with the categorical claim that reason is autonomous.

What is intended quite seriously in Moltmann’s theological writings soon degenerates into the Marxist Jesus, into Jesus the revolutionary, who dies as a freedom fighter for political and social liberation: Jesus is mistaken for Barabbas or else Bar Kochba.9 Meanwhile still other versions of Jesus have appeared, aligning Jesus with New Age ideas, a situation that is supposed to make him relevant today.

But how do these images of Jesus come about? They are made up of two components. The one component is the analysis of the Gospel texts using the methods of historical criticism. This criticism, of course, has a built-in philosophical presupposition of great consequence.

Aberrations from that, for instance, divine interventions that go beyond the constant interaction of natural and human causes, therefore cannot be historical; the historian must “explain” how such notions could come about. He must explain, from literary forms and from the mind-set [Vorstellungs-gefüge] of a period, how such views could develop and must trace them back to their reasonable causes. Thus these accounts become comprehensible after criticism and their real content comes to light. According to this assumption, it is not possible for a man really to be God and to perform deeds that require divine power—actions that would disrupt the general complex of causes.

As a result of these efforts, an increasingly complicated system of source-hypotheses and reconstructed redaction histories has arisen, which is impressive for its assiduous scholarship but also seems dubious because of its internal contradictions. Meanwhile, the conviction that “scholars” today are telling us that everything in the figure of Jesus that transcends mere humanity is historically “explicable”, and thus not really historical, has emphatically impressed itself on the public consciousness and has made major inroads into the congregations of Christian believers in all the churches.

Declarations about the authenticity or unauthenticity of Jesus’ words, the definition of the developmental processes, and the determination of the literary forms are all essentially dependent upon which features in the figure of Jesus appear capable of being made relevant. For example, when the point of departure is the idea of Jesus as a revolutionary, the Jesus of “liberation theology”, on the one hand, entire sequences of passages fall by the wayside, whereas other elements suddenly become central, indeed, appear to suggest lost sources and categorically demand the reinterpretation of the existing texts.

But the assumption that reports of the incursion of the Totally Other into the context of world history should be treated critically, although justified in general, becomes a fatal and dangerous error when it leads inevitably to the exclusion of the Totally Other—God—who transcends our usual experiences. But this is precisely the situation we are in. Our brand of scholarship forbids God access to the world.

New knowledge should be accompanied by a renewed life, which reopens our closed horizons. Therefore the ancient Church regarded conversion to the faith as a positively intellectual journey, in which man is confronted with the “doctrine of the truth” and its arguments, but in which he also acquires a new life companionship, in which new experiences and interior progress become possible for him. New forms of the catechumenate are urgently needed particularly in our time. The way of knowledge that leads to God and to Christ is a way of living. In biblical language: in order to know Christ, it is necessary to follow him.