Prayer

by Hans Urs von Balthasar

in giving “himself as a ransom for all”, he had manifested the will of his Father who “desires all men to be saved” (see 1 Tim 2:4-6), and, through this revelation, in his life and death, he had proclaimed the very being: of God to be triune Love. The proof of this lies in the fact that, after so many centuries of official Christianity in the world, the stupendous Christian discovery, namely, the universality of God’s sovereign resolve to save the world, which Paul announces as a hitherto closely guarded secret (Eph 3:2 f; Rom 16:25), is just as unheard-of a novelty (literally “not heard”!) today. Isolated from the figure of Jesus Christ, it immediately becomes unbelievable; seen in the context of his historical uniqueness, the message produces the same wonderful results now as it did then. Only when truth is seen to have a trinitarian form does the assertion that God is love—burning, consuming, judging and redeeming love—become evident for the world as a whole. And truth can only be seen to be trinitarian when One of the Trinity becomes man and, in human form, interprets eternal Love to us. It

In submitting to being crucified, in plunging into God-forsakenness, the Son is giving an ultimate demonstration of how “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son”. There is nothing feigned here: the Father actually and in all seriousness leaves his Son lying on the ground, in order to go to the stranger, the enemy, man, and to draw him to himself. The Son’s passive, suffering love becomes at once the upright and the inverted mirror-image of the Father’s love.

Anyone who prays simply and straightforwardly in love, willing to obey the Word, can be confident that he himself will be taken up into that greater “system” of divine truth.

Mary is our model for this kind of trinitarian contemplation; she was directly addressed by God in trinitarian terms (through the angel who brought God’s word to her: Lk 1:27-38). The decisive factor is that the angel’s three salutations (the first manifesting the Father, the second the Son and the third the Holy Spirit) are each followed by a reaction on Mary’s part, not empty speculation about God but her reflection as to the best possible response and course of action in view of what God has told her. Her reaction to the revelation of the Father is alarm (as, indeed every creature must be alarmed to be in the immediate presence of God) as she wonders “what sort of greeting this might be”, i.e., what it implies in terms of her response and her willingness to be of service. Her second reaction, in the wake of the revelation of the Son whom she is to bear, who will be both God’s Son and David’s

heir, is even more concrete: she asks what practical steps she must take to render the obedience expected of her. Thirdly, in response to the revelation of the Spirit who will overshadow her, she consents to God’s perfect Word which is to take effect in her, control her and become flesh in and from her. Every stage of the trinitarian revelation is a reply from heaven to a question posed by obedient earth. The creature wonders about the meaning of the salutation, “The Lord is with you”, and this very wondering is a prelude to the sending of the Son. The question of how to prepare for the coming of the Son results in the announcement of the Holy Spirit’s role. The New Covenant’s trinitarian revelation is not only inseparably interwoven with the Son’s incarnation: it is also inseparable from the obedient response of the praying believer; it cannot be isolated as an abstract object of contemplation. Indeed, contemplation does not even need to be explicitly trinitarian to be truly incarnational, for the trinitarian dimension is something that comes down from above, whereas Mary, a truly human mother, is entirely taken up with being the God-bearer. It is through this particular vocation that she learns that her Son is God, and that the Holy Spirit will bring her the Father’s seed. Thus, in caring for her Son and in her discipleship of him, keeping and pondering all his words in her heart, she will penetrate more and more deeply into an understanding of the Trinity: of the Father...

and until the end of the world she will be giving birth to the Son, his members, his brothers. She is the woman in whom the triune life is fulfilled, the woman who, through her existence, compels the divine mystery of the three countenances to reveal itself and shine forth clearly. The obedience of Christians (and this inclu...