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February 2 - August 3, 2018
Job’s sufferings serve to justify man. By his faith, proved through suffering, he restores man’s honor. Job’s sufferings are thus by anticipation sufferings in communion with Christ, who restores the honor of us all before God and shows us the way never to lose faith in God even amid the deepest darkness.
Job foretells Jesus restoring man's honor through suffering and by rejection of temptation.
If Francis Xavier was able to pray to God, saying, “I love you, not because you have the power to give heaven or hell, but simply because you are you—my king and my God,” then surely he had needed a long path of inner purifications to reach such ultimate freedom—a path through stages of maturity, a path beset with temptation and the danger of falling, but a necessary path nonetheless.
The Our Father in general and this petition in particular are trying to tell us that it is only when you have lost God that you have lost yourself; then you are nothing more than a random product of evolution. Then the “dragon” really has won. So long as the dragon cannot wrest God from you, your deepest being remains unharmed, even in the midst of all the evils that threaten you.
The text then continues: “And he appointed [literally: “made”] twelve, whom he also called apostles, to be with him, and to be sent out to preach” (Mk 3:14). The first thing to ponder is the expression “he made twelve,” which sounds strange to us. In reality, these words of the Evangelist take up the Old Testament terminology for appointment to the priesthood (cf. 1 Kings 12:31; 13:33) and thus characterize the apostolic office as a priestly ministry.
St. Mark uses the same language as the OT when priests of Israel are being made. Jesus is "making" his disciples, who are the first in succession of the Catholic apostolic office, just as Jewish priests were "made" in the book of Kings. This language is one indication of the Church having valid apostolic succession.
Jesus appoints the Twelve with a double assignment: “to be with him, and to be sent out to preach.” They must be with him in order to get to know him; in order to attain that intimate acquaintance with him that could not be given to the “people”—who saw him only from the outside and took him for a prophet, a great figure in the history of religions, but were unable to perceive his uniqueness (cf. Mt 16:13ff.). The Twelve must be with him so as to be able to recognize his oneness with the Father and thus become witnesses to his mystery.
Jesus appoints 2 tasks to his disciples, a) To be with him, and b) to preach his message. He needs them to be around him so they can continuously affirm and know that he is the true Son of God; he is more than a prophet or great historical figure.
“To preach and have authority to cast out demons” (Mk 3:14f.). Matthew gives a somewhat more detailed description of the content of this mission: “And he gave them authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to heal every disease and every infirmity” (Mt 10:1).
As the first priests, the apostles are given the task to preach and perform exorcism.
The world is now seen as something rational: It emerges from eternal reason, and this creative reason is the only true power over the world and in the world. Faith in the one God is the only thing that truly liberates the world and makes it “rational.” When faith is absent, the world only appears to be more rational. In reality the indeterminable powers of chance now claim their due; “chaos theory” takes its place alongside insight into the rational structure of the universe, confronting man with obscurities that he cannot resolve and that set limits to the world’s rationality. To “exorcise”
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Faith in an omnipotent, Creator God is the source of rationality; it is the only thing that can be entirely rational. To deny this is to accept that chaos and random chance reign supreme over the universe - chaos is essentially irrational.
The authority to cast out demons and to free the world from their dark threat, for the sake of the one true God, is the same authority that rules out any magical understanding of healing through attempts to manipulate these mysterious powers. Magical healing is always tied to the art of turning the evil onto someone else and setting the “demons” against him. God’s dominion, God’s Kingdom, means precisely the disempowerment of these forces by the intervention of the one God, who is good, who is the Good itself.
Allegory was created by ancient Greeks to explain religious texts where the meaning was becoming lost to new generations; they had to apply philosophy to them, possibly because oral tradition was fading away.
From our study of the Sermon on the Mount, but also from our interpretation of the Our Father, we have seen that the deepest theme of Jesus’ preaching was his own mystery, the mystery of the Son in whom God is among us and keeps his word; he announces the Kingdom of God as coming and as having come in his person.
If the question had been “Is the Samaritan my neighbor, too?” the answer would have been a pretty clear-cut no given the situation at the time. But Jesus now turns the whole matter on its head: The Samaritan, the foreigner, makes himself the neighbor and shows me that I have to learn to be a neighbor deep within and that I already have the answer in myself. I have to become like someone in love, someone whose heart is open to being shaken up by another’s need. Then I find my neighbor, or—better—then I am found by him.
Karl Marx painted a graphic picture of the “alienation” of man; even though he did not arrive at the real essence of alienation, because he thought only in material terms, he did leave us with a vivid image of man fallen among robbers.
Medieval theological interpretation of "the Good Samaritan" parable.
In reality, though, the parable has three protagonists. Jeremias and others have suggested that it would actually be better to call it the parable of the good father—that he is the true center of the text.
Those who understand freedom as the radically arbitrary license to do just what they want and to have their own way are living in a lie, for by his very nature man is part of a shared existence and his freedom is shared freedom. His very nature contains direction and norm, and becoming inwardly one with this direction and norm is what freedom is all about.
By the same token, neither was it hard for them to recognize in the brother who remained at home an image of the people of Israel, who could legitimately say: “Lo, these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed one of your commands.” Israel’s fidelity and image of God are clearly revealed in such fidelity to the Torah.
Now he sees that the seeming cleverness of the successful cynics is stupidity when viewed against the light. To be wise in that way is to be “stupid and ignorant…like a beast” (Ps 73:22). They remain within the perspective of animals and have lost the human perspective that transcends the material realm—toward God and toward eternal life.
Abraham’s answer—like Jesus’ answer to his contemporaries’ demand for signs in other contexts—is clear: If people do not believe the word of Scripture, then they will not believe someone coming from the next world either. The highest truths cannot be forced into the type of empirical evidence that only applies to material reality.
There is no doubt that John means to refer here to the two main sacraments of the Church—Baptism and the Eucharist—which spring forth from Jesus’ opened heart and thus give birth to the Church from his side.
Calvinist Protestantism?
Jesus also answers the questions as to how one drinks this living water, how one gets to the well and draws from it, by saying, “He who believes in me…” Faith in Jesus is the way we drink the living water, the way we drink life that is no longer threatened by death.
The final chapter of the Bible reinterprets these images and at the same time manifests their full greatness for the first time: “Then he showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb” (Rev 22:1).
The Filioque.
The saints are oases around which life sprouts up and something of the lost paradise returns.
Bread, in its simplest form prepared from water and ground wheat—though the element of fire and human work clearly have a part to play—is the basic foodstuff. It belongs to the poor and the rich alike, but especially to the poor. It represents the goodness of creation and of the Creator, even as it stands for the humble simplicity of daily life. Wine, on the other hand, represents feasting. It gives man a taste of the glory of creation. In this sense, it forms part of the rituals of the Sabbath, of Passover, of marriage feasts. And it allows us to glimpse something of the definitive feast God
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We thus begin to understand the event of Cana. The sign of God is overflowing generosity. We see it in the multiplication of the loaves; we see it again and again—most of all, though, at the center of salvation history, in the fact that he lavishly spends himself for the lowly creature, man. This abundant giving is his “glory.” The superabundance of Cana is therefore a sign that God’s feast with humanity, his self-giving for men, has begun. The framework of the event, the wedding, thus becomes an image that points beyond itself to the messianic hour: The hour of God’s marriage feast with his
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Isn’t this precisely the logic of the modern age, of our age? Let us declare that God is dead, then we ourselves will be God. At last we no longer belong to anyone else; rather, we are simply the owners of ourselves and of the world. At last we can do what we please. We get rid of God; there is no measuring rod above us; we ourselves are our only measure. The “vineyard” belongs to us. What happens to man and the world next? We are already beginning to see it….
all Jewish feasts contain three dimensions. They originate from celebrations of nature religion and thus tell of Creator and creation; they then become remembrances of God’s actions in history; finally, they go on from there to become feasts of hope, which strain forward to meet the Lord who is coming, the Lord in whom God’s saving action in history is fulfilled, thereby reconciling the whole of creation.
Once again we need to keep together in our minds the various mountains of Jesus’ life: the mountain of the temptation; the mountain of his great preaching; the mountain of his prayer; the mountain of the Transfiguration; the mountain of his agony; the mountain of the Cross; and finally, the mountain of the Risen Lord, where he declares—in total antithesis to the offer of world dominion through the devil’s power: “All power in heaven and on earth is given to me” (Mt 28:18). But in the background we also catch sight of Sinai, Horeb, Moriah—the mountains of Old Testament revelation. They are all
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When we inquire into the meaning of the mountain, the first point is of course the general background of mountain symbolism. The mountain is the place of ascent—not only outward, but also inward ascent; it is a liberation from the burden of everyday life, a breathing in of the pure air of creation; it offers a view of the broad expanse of creation and its beauty; it gives one an inner peak to stand on and an intuitive sense of the Creator.
The first title, taken by itself, made little sense outside of Semitic culture. It quickly ceased to function as a title and was joined with the name of Jesus: Jesus Christ. What began as an interpretation ended up as a name, and therein lies a deeper message: He is completely one with his office; his task and his person are totally inseparable from each other. It was thus right for his task to become a part of his name.
