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February 2 - August 3, 2018
It sees Jesus in light of his communion with the Father, which is the true center of his personality; without it, we cannot understand him at all, and it is from this center that he makes himself present to us still today.
it is in the Church that the words of the Bible are always in the present.
I wanted to try to portray the Jesus of the Gospels as the real, “historical” Jesus in the strict sense of the word. I am convinced, and I hope the reader will be, too, that this figure is much more logical and, historically speaking, much more intelligible than the reconstructions we have been presented with in the last decades. I believe that this Jesus—the Jesus of the Gospels—is a historically plausible and convincing figure.
It had become evident that taking possession of the land in Palestine did not constitute the chosen people’s entry into salvation; that Israel was still awaiting its real liberation; that an even more radical kind of exodus was necessary, one that called for a new Moses.
The most important thing about the figure of Moses is neither all the miraculous deeds he is reported to have done nor his many works and sufferings along the way from the “house of bondage in Egypt” through the desert to the threshold of the Promised Land. The most important thing is that he spoke with God as with a friend. This was the only possible springboard for his works; this was the only possible source of the Law that was to show Israel its path through history.
His task is not to report on the events of tomorrow or the next day in order to satisfy human curiosity or the human need for security. He shows us the face of God, and in so doing he shows us the path that we have to take.
the main point is that although Moses’ immediate relation to God makes him the great mediator of Revelation, the mediator of the Covenant, it has its limits. He does not behold God’s face, even though he is permitted to enter into the cloud of God’s presence and to speak with God as a friend.
Jesus’ teaching is not the product of human learning, of whatever kind. It originates from immediate contact with the Father, from “face-to-face” dialogue—from the vision of the one who rests close to the Father’s heart. It is the Son’s word. 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.
But the real novelty here is not the fact that Jesus comes from another geographical area, from a distant country, as it were. The real novelty is the fact that he—Jesus—wants to be baptized, that he blends into the gray mass of sinners waiting on the banks of the Jordan.
If at the extreme hour of Israel’s oppression in Egypt, the blood of the Paschal lamb had been the key to its liberation, now the Son who became a servant—the shepherd who became a sheep—no longer stands just for Israel, but for the liberation of the world—for mankind as a whole.
The story of the temptations is thus intimately connected with the story of the Baptism, for it is there that Jesus enters into solidarity with sinners.
Jesus, we read, “was with the wild beasts; and the angels ministered to him” (Mk 1:13). The desert—the opposite image of the garden—becomes the place of reconciliation and healing. Wild beasts are the most concrete threat that the rebellion of creation and the power of death posed to man. But here they become man’s friends, as they once were in paradise.
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.
Constructing a world by our own lights, without reference to God, building on our own foundation; refusing to acknowledge the reality of anything beyond the political and material, while setting God aside as an illusion—that is the temptation that threatens us in many varied forms.
And we make this same demand of God and Christ and his Church throughout the whole of history. “If you exist, God,” we say, “then you’ll just have to show yourself. You’ll have to part the clouds that conceal you and give us the clarity that we deserve. If you, Christ, are really the Son of God, and not just another one of the enlightened individuals who keep appearing in the course of history, then you’ll just have to prove it more clearly than you are doing now. And if the Church is really supposed to be yours, you’ll have to make that much more obvious than it is at present.”
"If you are truly the Son of God, ..."
Jesus is not indifferent toward men’s hunger, their bodily needs, but he places these things in the proper context and the proper order.
When God is regarded as a secondary matter that can be set aside temporarily or permanently on account of more important things, it is precisely these supposedly more important things that come to nothing.
The aid offered by the West to developing countries has been purely technically and materially based, and not only has left God out of the picture, but has driven men away from God.
And this aid, proudly claiming to “know better,” is itself what first turned the “third world” into what we mean today by that term. It has thrust aside indigenous religious, ethical, and social structures and filled the resulting vacuum with its technocratic mind-set. The idea was that we could turn stones into bread; instead, our “aid” has only given stones in place of bread.
This temptation to use power to secure the faith has arisen again and again in varied forms throughout the centuries, and again and again faith has risked being suffocated in the embrace of power. The struggle for the freedom of the Church, the struggle to avoid identifying Jesus’ Kingdom with any political structure, is one that has to be fought century after century. For the fusion of faith and political power always comes at a price: faith becomes the servant of power and must bend to its criteria.
Barabbas was a messianic figure. The choice of Jesus versus Barabbas is not accidental; two messiah figures, two forms of messianic belief stand in opposition. This becomes even clearer when we consider that the name Bar-Abbas means “son of the father.”
The tempter is not so crude as to suggest to us directly that we should worship the devil. He merely suggests that we opt for the reasonable decision, that we choose to give priority to a planned and thoroughly organized world, where God may have his place as a private concern but must not interfere in our essential purposes.
“What did Jesus bring, then, if he didn’t usher in a better world? How can that not be the content of messianic hope?”
No kingdom of this world is the Kingdom of God, the total condition of mankind’s salvation. Earthly kingdoms remain earthly human kingdoms, and anyone who claims to be able to establish the perfect world is the willing dupe of Satan and plays the world right into his hands.
In the vocabulary of contemporary linguistic theory, we would say that the evangelium, the Gospel, is not just informative speech, but performative speech—not just the imparting of information, but action, efficacious power that enters into the world to save and transform.
Is he just a messenger charged with representing a cause that is ultimately independent of him, or is the messenger himself the message?
There is another important linguistic observation: The underlying Hebrew word malkut “is a nomen actionis [an action word] and means—as does the Greek word basileia [kingdom]—the regal function, the active lordship of the king” (Stuhlmacher, Biblische Theologie, I, p. 67). What is meant is not an imminent or yet to be established “kingdom,” but God’s actual sovereignty over the world, which is becoming an event in history in a new way.
We can put it even more simply: When Jesus speaks of the Kingdom of God, he is quite simply proclaiming God, and proclaiming him to be the living God, who is able to act concretely in the world and in history and is even now so acting. He is telling us: “God exists” and “God is really God,” which means that he holds in his hands the threads of the world. In this sense, Jesus’ message is very simple and thoroughly God-centered.
Jesus sits down—the expression of the plenary authority of the teacher. He takes his seat on the cathedra of the mountain. Later on he will speak of the rabbis who sit in the cathedra—the chair—of Moses and so have authority (cf. Mt 23:2); for that reason their teaching must be listened to and accepted, even though their lives contradict it, even though they themselves are not authority, but receive authority from another. Jesus takes his seat on the cathedra as the teacher of Israel and as the teacher of people everywhere.
At the time of the Babylonian conquest of Judea, 90 percent of Judeans would have been counted among the poor; Persian tax policy resulted in another situation of dramatic poverty after the Exile. It was no longer possible to maintain the older vision according to which the righteous prosper and poverty is a consequence of a bad life (the so-called Tun-Ergehens-Zusammenhang, or conduct-life correspondence). Now Israel recognizes that its poverty is exactly what brings it close to God; it recognizes that the poor, in their humility, are the ones closest to God’s heart, whereas the opposite is
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Blessed are the poor.
The saints are the true interpreters of Holy Scripture. The meaning of a given passage of the Bible becomes most intelligible in those human beings who have been totally transfixed by it and have lived it out. Interpretation of Scripture can never be a purely academic affair, and it cannot be relegated to the purely historical. Scripture is full of potential for the future, a potential that can only be opened up when someone “lives through” and “suffers through” the sacred text.
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.
Theophilus of Antioch (d. ca. 180) once put it like this in a debate with some disputants: “If you say, ‘show me your God,’ I should like to answer you, ‘show me the man who is in you.’…For God is perceived by men who are capable of seeing him, who have the eyes of their spirit open…. Man’s soul must be as pure as a shining mirror”
The saints, from Paul through Francis of Assisi down to Mother Teresa, have lived out this option and have thereby shown us the correct image of man and his happiness. In a word, the true morality of Christianity is love. 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. Compared with the tempting luster of Nietzsche’s image of man, this way seems at first wretched, and thoroughly unreasonable. But it is the real high road of life; it is only on the way of love, whose paths are described in the
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“‘David came and reduced them to eleven…. “‘Isaiah came and reduced them to six…. “‘Isaiah again came and reduced them to two…. “‘Habakkuk further came and based them on one, as it is said: “But the righteous shall live by his faith”’ (Hab 2:4).” Neusner then continues his book with the following dialogue: “‘So,’ the master says, ‘is this what the sage, Jesus, had to say?’ “I: ‘Not exactly, but close.’ “He: ‘What did he leave out?’ “I: ‘Nothing.’ “He: ‘Then what did he add?’ “I: ‘Himself’” (pp. 107–8).
God rested on the seventh day, as the creation account in Genesis tells us. Neusner rightly concludes that “on that day we…celebrate creation” (p. 74). He then adds: “Not working on the Sabbath stands for more than nitpicking ritual. It is a way of imitating God” (p. 75).
While the Torah presents a very definite social order, giving the people a juridical and social framework for war and peace, for just politics and for daily life, there is nothing like that to be found in Jesus’ teaching. Discipleship of Jesus offers no politically concrete program for structuring society.
It is our Jewish interlocutors who, quite rightly, ask again and again: So what has your “Messiah” Jesus actually brought? He has not brought world peace, and he has not conquered the world’s misery. So he can hardly be the true Messiah, who, after all, is supposed to do just that. Yes, what has Jesus brought? We have already encountered this question and we know the answer. He has brought the God of Israel to the nations, so that all the nations now pray to him and recognize Israel’s Scriptures as his word, the word of the living God. He has brought the gift of universality, which was the one
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And the fact of the matter is that social order has to be capable of development. It must address changing historical situations within the limits of the possible, but without ever losing sight of the ethical standard as such, which gives law its character as law.
In the antitheses of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus stands before us neither as a rebel nor as a liberal, but as the prophetic interpreter of the Torah. He does not abolish it, but he fulfills it, and he does so precisely by assigning reason its sphere of responsibility for acting within history. Consequently, Christianity constantly has to reshape and reformulate social structures and “Christian social teaching.” There will always be new developments to correct what has gone before. In the inner structure of the Torah, in its further development under the critique of the Prophets, and in
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This is what prayer really is—being in silent inward communion with God. It requires nourishment, and that is why we need articulated prayer in words, images, or thoughts. The more God is present in us, the more we will really be able to be present to him when we utter the words of our prayers.
But we must also keep in mind that the Our Father originates from his own praying, from the Son’s dialogue with the Father. This means that it reaches down into depths far beyond the words. It embraces the whole compass of man’s being in all ages and can therefore never be fully fathomed by a purely historical exegesis, however important this may be.
Father Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, the Superior General of the Jesuits, tells the story of a staretz, or spiritual advisor of the Eastern Church, who yearned “to begin the Our Father with the last verse, so that one might become worthy to finish the prayer with the initial words—‘Our Father.’” In this way, the staretz explained, we would be following the path to Easter. “We begin in the desert with the temptation, we return to Egypt, then we travel the path of the Exodus, through the stations of forgiveness and God’s manna, and by God’s will we attain the promised land, the kingdom of God, where he
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A final point—because the Our Father is a prayer of Jesus, it is a Trinitarian prayer: We pray with Christ through the Holy Spirit to the Father.
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.
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 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 is a process and labor, not forgetting and moving on.
Militating against this, on one side, is the trivialization of evil in which we take refuge, despite the fact that at the very same time we treat the horrors of human history, especially of the most recent human history, as an irrefutable pretext for denying the existence of a good God and slandering his creature man.
We ignore that there are two forces, God and evil, fighting each other continuously in an eternal struggle to overcome one another. Modernists attribute all things - good and evil - to God's will (rooted in Calvinism?)
Pope Francis stated this.
Because Jesus was tempted, God now understands our temptations.
