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August 20, 2019 - April 2, 2024
The desert—the opposite image of the garden—becomes the place of reconciliation and healing.
It is not just the negative outcome of the Marxist experiment that proves this. 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.
Neocolonialism
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.
Elijah was granted a transformed version of the Sinai experience: He experienced God passing by, not in the storm or in the fire or in the earthquake, but in the still small breeze (1 Kings 19:1–13). That transformation is completed here.
When man begins to see and to live from God’s perspective, when he is a companion on Jesus’ way, then he lives by new standards, and something of the éschaton, of the reality to come, is already present. Jesus brings joy into the midst of affliction.
The concept of obedience to God, and so of the right ordering of the earth, is an essential component of the concept of freedom and the concept of the land.
The organ for seeing God is the heart. The intellect alone is not enough.
It is precisely by letting oneself be led by God’s Spirit, moreover, that one becomes free from the Law.
The flesh—physical descent from Abraham—is no longer what matters; rather, it is the spirit: belonging to the heritage of Israel’s faith and life through communion with Jesus Christ, who “spiritualizes” the Law and in so doing makes it the path to life for all.
The Sabbath is therefore not just a negative matter of not engaging in outward activities, but a positive matter of “resting,” which must also be expressed in a spatial dimension:
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.
Communion with him is filial communion with the Father—it is a yes to the fourth commandment on a new level, the highest level.
A literal application of Israel’s social order to the people of all nations would have been tantamount to a denial of the universality of the growing community of God.
The decisive thing is the underlying communion of will with God given by Jesus.
It frees men and nations to discover what aspects of political and social order accord with this communion of will and so to work out their own juridical arrangements.
The concrete political and social order is released from the directly sacred realm, from theocratic legislation, and is transferred to the freedom of man, whom Jesus has established in God’s will and taught thereby to see the right and the good.
Freedom for universality and so for the legitimate secularity of the state has been transformed into an absolute secularism, for which forgetfulness of God and exclusive concern with success seem to have become guiding principles.
If Jesus does not speak with the full authority of the Son, if his interpretation is not the beginning of a new communion in a new, free obedience, then there is only one alternative: Jesus is enticing us to disobedience against God’s commandment.
Today’s widespread temptation to give the New Testament a purely spiritual interpretation, in isolation from any social and political relevance, tends in the same direction.
Obviously, then, these words do not formulate a social order, but they do provide social orderings with their fundamental criteria—even though these criteria can never be purely realized as such in any given social order.
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.
Death penalty?
The “we” of the praying community and the utterly personal intimacy that can be shared only with God are closely interconnected.
Jesus thereby involves us in his own prayer; he leads us into the interior dialogue of triune love; he draws our human hardships deep into God’s heart, as it were.
This means that the gift of God is God himself.
Only within the “we” of the disciples can we call God “Father,” because only through communion with Jesus Christ do we truly become “children of God.”
God’s fatherhood is more real than human fatherhood, because he is the ultimate source of our being;
The Israelites were therefore perfectly right in refusing to utter this self-designation of God, expressed in the word YHWH, so as to avoid degrading it to the level of names of pagan deities. By the same token, recent Bible translations were wrong to write out this name—which Israel always regarded as mysterious and unutterable—as if it were just any old name.
When Adam names the animals, what this means is not that he indicates their essential natures, but that he fits them into his human world, puts them within reach of his call.
What began at the burning bush in the Sinai desert comes to fulfillment at the burning bush of the Cross. God has now truly made himself accessible in his incarnate Son. He has become a part of our world; he has, as it were, put himself into our hands.
Earth becomes “heaven” when and insofar as God’s will is done there;
This coming together of cosmic powers, outside our control, stands opposed to the temptation that comes to us through our pride to give ourselves life purely through our own power.
Anyone who asks for bread for today is poor. This prayer presupposes the poverty of the disciples.
But the understanding of the great mystery of expiation is also blocked by our individualistic image of man. We can no longer grasp substitution because we think that every man is ensconced in himself alone. The fact that all individual beings are deeply interwoven and that all are encompassed in turn by the being of the One, the Incarnate Son, is something we are no longer capable of seeing.
order to mature, in order to make real progress on the path leading from a superficial piety into profound oneness with God’s will, man needs to be tried.
Evils (plural) can be necessary for our purification, but evil (singular) destroys.
This is why we pray that, in our concern for goods, we may not lose the Good itself;
You cannot make yourself a disciple—it is an event of election, a free decision of the Lord’s will, which in its turn is anchored in his communion of will with the Father.
Mark thus presents the apostolic ministry as a fusion of the priestly and prophetic missions
“You will see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man” (Jn 1:51). Jesus reveals himself here as the new Jacob.
But the preaching of God’s Kingdom is never just words, never just instruction. It is an event, just as Jesus himself is an event, God’s Word in person.
“No one would crucify a teacher who told pleasant stories to enforce prudential morality”
is thus perfectly possible to speak of an “eschatology in process of realization”: Jesus, as the One who has come, is nonetheless the One who comes throughout the whole of history, and ultimately he speaks to us of this “coming.”
Prophets fail: Their message goes too much against general opinion and the comfortable habits of life. It is only through failure that their word becomes efficacious.
But we always give too little when we just give material things.
Here we meet two groups, two “brothers”: tax collectors and sinners on one hand, Pharisees and scribes on the other.
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.
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.
“The arm of the Father is the Son.” When he lays this arm on our shoulders as “his light yoke,” then that is precisely not a burden he is loading onto us, but rather the gesture of receiving us in love. The “yoke” of this arm is not a burden that we must carry, but a gift of love that carries us and makes us sons.
the rich glutton was already an empty-hearted man in this world, and that his carousing was only an attempt to smother this interior emptiness of his.
Roderigo and Iago in Othello
it is important to note that Jesus invokes here the idea of the intermediate state between death and the resurrection, which by then had become part of the universal patrimony of Jewish faith.
