Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration

by Pope Benedict XVI

Without this inner grounding, his teaching would be pure presumption. That is just what the learned men of Jesus’ time judged it to be, and they did so precisely because they could not accept its inner grounding: seeing and knowing face-to-face.

This “praying” of Jesus is the Son conversing with the Father; Jesus’ human consciousness and will, his human soul, is taken up into that exchange, and in this way human “praying” is able to become a participation in this filial communion with the Father.

He who sees Jesus sees the Father (cf. Jn 14:9). The disciple who walks with Jesus is thus caught up with him into communion with God.

John Chrysostom writes: “Going down into the water and emerging again are the image of the descent into hell and the Resurrection.”

Jesus has to enter into the drama of human existence, for that belongs to the core of his mission; he has to penetrate it completely, down to its uttermost depths, in order to find the “lost sheep,” to bear it on his shoulders, and to bring it home.

At the heart of all temptations, as we see here, is the act of pushing God aside because we perceive him as secondary, if not actually superfluous and annoying, in comparison with all the apparently far more urgent matters that fill our lives.

This demand for proof is a constantly recurring theme in the story of Jesus’ life; again and again he is reproached for having failed to prove himself sufficiently, for having hitherto failed to work that great miracle that will remove all ambiguity and every contradiction,

Without heaven, earthly power is always ambiguous and fragile. Only when power submits to the measure and the judgment of heaven—of God, in other words—can it become power for good. And only when power stands under God’s blessing can it be trusted.

He draws life from being-in-relation, from receiving all as gift; he will always need the gift of goodness, of forgiveness, but in receiving it he will always learn to pass the gift on to others. The grace for which he prays does not dispense him from ethics. It is what makes him truly capable of doing good in the first place.

Ethics is not denied; it is freed from the constraints of moralism and set in the context of a relationship of love—of relationship to God.

The disciple is bound to the mystery of Christ. His life is immersed in communion with Christ: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal 2:20).

any renewal of the Church can be set in motion only through those who keep alive in themselves the same resolute humility, the same goodness that is always ready to serve.

Enmity with God is the source of all that poisons man; overcoming this enmity is the basic condition for peace in the world. Only the man who is reconciled with God can also be reconciled and in harmony with himself, and only the man who is reconciled with God and with himself can establish peace around him and throughout the world.

The Christian knows that lasting peace is connected with men abiding in God’s eudokia, his “good pleasure.” The struggle to abide in peace with God is an indispensable part of the struggle for “peace on earth”;

Those who do not harden their hearts to the pain and need of others, who do not give evil entry to their souls, but suffer under its power and so acknowledge the truth of God—they are the ones who open the windows of the world to let the light in.

God demands the opposite: that we become inwardly attentive to his quiet exhortation, which is present in us and which tears us away from what is merely habitual and puts us on the road to truth.

Love is the fire that purifies and unifies intellect, will, and emotion, thereby making man one with himself, inasmuch as it makes him one in God’s eyes. Thus, man is able to serve the uniting of those who are divided.

And love does admittedly run counter to self-seeking—it is an exodus out of oneself, and yet this is precisely the way in which man comes to himself.

For Jesus’ “I” is by no means a self-willed ego revolving around itself alone. “Whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother, and sister, and mother” (Mk 3:34f.): Jesus’ “I” incarnates the Son’s communion of will with the Father.

This is what prayer really is—being in silent inward communion with God.

Peter’s confession that Jesus is the Holy One of God is connected with encountering Jesus at prayer (cf. Lk 9:18ff.); the Transfiguration of Jesus is a prayer event (cf. Lk 9:28f.).

Prayer is a way of gradually purifying and correcting our wishes and of slowly coming to realize what we really need: God and his Spirit.

Where God is absent, nothing can be good. Where God is not seen, man and the world fall to ruin. This is what the Lord means when he says to “seek first his Kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well” (Mt 6:33).

The Kingdom of God comes by way of a listening heart. That is its path. And that is what we must pray for again and again.

The Kingdom of God is present wherever he is present. By the same token, the request for a listening heart becomes a request for communion with Jesus Christ, the petition that we increasingly become “one” with him (Gal 3:28).

The essence of heaven is oneness with God’s will, the oneness of will and truth. Earth becomes “heaven” when and insofar as God’s will is done there; and it is merely “earth,” the opposite of heaven, when and insofar as it withdraws from the will of God.

God’s will flows from his being and therefore guides us into the truth of our being, liberating us from self-destruction through falsehood.

Jesus’ whole existence is summed up in the words “Yes, I have come to do thy will.” It is only against this background that we fully understand what he means when he says, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me” (Jn 4:34).

The gravitational pull of our own will constantly draws us away from God’s will and turns us into mere “earth.” But he accepts us, he draws us up to himself, into himself, and in communion with him we too learn God’s will.

Every instance of trespass among men involves some kind of injury to truth and to love and is thus opposed to God, who is truth and love.

Guilt calls forth retaliation. The result is a chain of trespasses in which the evil of guilt grows ceaselessly and becomes more and more inescapable. With this petition, the Lord is telling us that guilt can be overcome only by forgiveness, not by retaliation.

God is a God who forgives, because he loves his creatures; but forgiveness can only penetrate and become effective in one who is himself forgiving.

You cannot come into God’s presence unreconciled with your brother; anticipating him in the gesture of reconciliation, going out to meet him, is the prerequisite for true worship of God.

Whatever we have to forgive one another is trivial in comparison with the goodness of God, who forgives us. And ultimately we hear Jesus’ petition from the Cross: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” (Lk 23:34).

What is forgiveness, really? What happens when forgiveness takes place? Guilt is a reality, an objective force; it has caused destruction that must be repaired. For this reason, forgiveness must be more than a matter of ignoring, of merely trying to forget. Guilt must be worked through, healed, and thus overcome. Forgiveness exacts a price—first of all from the person who forgives.

The conflict goes deeper. It is a fight against a host of opponents that never stop coming; they cannot really be pinned down and have no proper name, only collective denominations. They also start out with superior advantage over man, and that is because of their superior position, their position ‘in the heavens’ of existence. They are also superior because their position is impenetrable and unassailable—their position, after all, is the ‘atmosphere’ of existence, which they themselves tilt in their favor and propagate around themselves. These enemies are, finally, all full of essential, deadly malice” (Brief an die Epheser, p. 291).

“No one would crucify a teacher who told pleasant stories to enforce prudential morality” (The Jesus of the Parables, p. 17; cited in Jeremias, p. 21).

The cause of this joy is that the son, who was already “dead” when he departed with his share of the property, is now alive again, has risen from the dead; “he was lost, and is found” (Lk 15:32).

For the Fathers, this “first robe” is a reference to the lost robe of grace with which man had been originally clothed, but which he forfeited by sin. But now this “first robe” is given back to him—the robe of the son.

Water becomes wine. Man’s own efforts now encounter the gift of God, who gives himself and thereby creates the feast of joy that can only be instituted by the presence of God and his gift.

Jesus says: “it is the spirit that gives life, the flesh is of no avail” (Jn 6:63). This may remind us of Saint Paul’s words: “The first man Adam became a living being; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit” (1 Cor 15:45).

Herein lies the distinction between the owner, the true Shepherd, and the robber. For the robber, for the ideologues and the dictators, human beings are merely a thing that they possess. For the true Shepherd, however, they are free in relation to truth and love; the Shepherd proves that they belong to him precisely by knowing and loving them, by wishing them to be in the freedom of the truth.

Any “self-knowledge” that restricts man to the empirical and the tangible fails to engage with man’s true depth. Man knows himself only when he learns to understand himself in light of God, and he knows others only when he sees the mystery of God in them.

Jesus’ words to Peter, Blessed are you, Simon Bar Jona, “for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven” (Mt 16:17), have a remarkable parallel in the Letter to the Galatians: “But when he who had set me apart before I was born, and had called me through his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son to me, in order that I might preach him among the Gentiles, I did not confer with flesh and blood” (Gal 1:15f.; cf. 1:11f.:

Common to both the Pauline text and to Jesus’ commendation of Peter are the reference to Revelation and the declaration that this knowledge does not derive “from flesh and blood.”

There we are told that Jesus took Peter, James, and John and led them up onto a high mountain by themselves (Mk 9:2). We will come across these three again on the Mount of Olives (Mk 14:33) during Jesus’ agony in the garden, which is the counterimage of the Transfiguration, although the two scenes are inextricably linked.

“And he was transfigured before them,” Mark says quite simply, going on to add somewhat awkwardly, as if stammering before the Mystery: “And his clothes became radiant, intensely white, as no one on earth could bleach them” (Mk 9:2–3). Matthew has rather more elevated words at his command: “His face shone like the sun, and his clothes became white as light” (Mt 17:2). Luke is the only one of the Evangelists who begins his account by indicating the purpose of Jesus’ ascent: He “went up on the mountain to pray” (Lk 9:28). It is in the context of Jesus’ prayer that he now explains the event that the three disciples are to witness: “And as he was praying, the appearance of his face was altered, and hisclothing became dazzling white” (Lk 9:29).

Yes, in God himself there is an eternal dialogue between Father and Son, who are both truly one and the same God in the Holy Spirit.

Every process of coming to know something includes in one form or another a process of assimilation, a sort of inner unification of the knower with the known.

Truly to know God presupposes communion with him, it presupposes oneness of being with him.