Orders of Different Magnitude:
become equal where there is totality of gift.
St. Bernard (August 20) – Breviary:
“What then of the bride's hope, her aching desire, her
passionate love, her confident assurance? Is all this to wilt just
because she cannot match stride for stride with her giant, any more
than she can vie with honey for sweetness, rival the lamb for
gentleness, show herself as white as the lily, burn as bright as the
sun, be equal in love with him who is Love? No. It is true that the
creature loves less because she is less. But if she loves with her
whole being, nothing is lacking where everything is given.”
O.L: was finite but became able to be
the Mother of the Infinite God by giving her finite self totally. The
finitude becomes irrelevant when the measure passes to totality of
self-gift.
Escriva: the same. He gave his
finitude between 1928 and 1931 and was told: “You are my son; you
are Christ.” That totality of self-gift is the meaning of the
vocation to Opus Dei.
Ratzinger understands this: “Jesus is
always infinitely more than the Church. It did not take the recent
Council to tell us that as Lord of the Church Jesus also remains her
standard.... [there is a] limitless magnanimity of spirit that blows
like a vigorous breeze from the words of the Gospels and brings all
excessive reverence for the letter of the law tumbling down like a
house of cards. We have always known that intimacy with him is as
independent of the ecclesiastical rank a person has as it is of
knowledge of juridical and historical niceties.... On the other hand,
I have never been able to forget that in many respects he requires
much more than the Church dares to require and that his radical words
call for radical decisions of the kind Anthony, the Desert Father, or
Francis of Assisi made when they took the Gospel in a fully literal
way. It we not accept the Gospel in this manner, then we have already
taken refuge in casuistry, and we remain afflicted by a gnawing
feeling of uneasiness,by the knowledge that like the rich young man
we have turned away when we should have taken the Gospel at face
value....”1
The key to understanding the above
words of St. Bernard - “nothing is lacking where everything
is given” - is
the Christology of the Council of Constantinople III (680-681).
Constantinople III wrote:
“And
we proclaim equally two
natural volitions or wills
in him and two natural principles of action which undergo no
division, no change, no partition, no confusion, in accordance with
the teaching of the holy fathers.... For just as his flesh is said to
be and is flesh of the Word of God, so too the natural
will of his flesh is said to and does belong to the Word of God,
just as he says himself [Jn.
6, 38]: I
have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of
the Father who sent me, calling
his own will that of his flesh, since his flesh too became his own.
For in the same way that his all holy and blameless animate flesh was
not destroyed in being made divine but remained in its own limit and
category, so his human will as well was not destroyed by being made
divine...
The key to understanding the unity of
the divine and human in Christ is to understand that there is one
divine Person Who has taken the humanity of the man Jesus of Nazareth
epitomized in the human will as His own. It is
critical to understand that it is not the will that wills, but the
person. That is, the divine Person wills with His own human
will. Only this can make sense of Jn. 6, 38: “For I have come
down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent
me.” The divine “I” does not do His own human will, but
that of the Father. The dynamic of self-mastery consists in the
Person subduing the human will that has been “made to be sin”
(2 Cor. 5, 21). 2
In a word, this is the radical self-gift of the Son as God-man.
Put
more clearly, the relation of the divine and the human in Christ is
not a parallelism of two natures bound together by the commonality of
a Person as substance in itself. Rather, it is the compenetration of
the divine and the human by the fact that the divine Person has taken
the human will as His own and He, the divine Person, wills with the
human will. The result is the “compenetration” of the two
“wills,” the divine and the human because it is one and the same
Person doing the willing.
2
“Made to be sin” is to enter into the loneliness of sin as the
rejection of the Triune God, and therefore of the others. This is
Benedict’s interpretation of Jesus death cry, `My God, my God,
why hast thou forsaken me?’ (Mark 15, 34) which is the first
and only time that Jesus refers to the Father as “El” and not as
“Abba.” Benedict says: “In this last prayer of Jesus , as
in the scene on the Mount of Olives, what appears as the innermost
heart of his passion is not any physical pain but radical
loneliness, complete abandonment;” “Introduction to
Christianity,” op. cit 227.
No comments:
Post a Comment