3d Sunday of Advent - A
The Scandal: There have been no visual sightings of The Lord since the Ascension. Therefore, the Theologians Gave Up On Him and Consigned Him to Heaven Beyond the Stars and the Judgment at the End of the World. However, He is Present and Visible to Those Small Enough to be Like Him.
The Gospel of today is about John the Baptist in jail who has heard of the recent miracles of the Lord. Obviously (if not strangely for one who is the last of the Old Testament prophets and the greatest born of woman), he is disbelieving. He sends messengers to Him asking: "'Are you he who is to come, or shall we look for another?' And Jesus answered saying to them, 'Go and report to John what you have heard and seen: the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead rise, the poor have the gospel preached to them. And blessed is he who is not scandalized in me" (Mt. 11, 3).
The import of the gospel is that Christ is, indeed, present; and the evidence of this are the miracles that have been performed. But John, like all of us, moves in and out of faith - and this precisely because faith is a voluntary act of the whole person, and not simply an act of the intelligence. It is an act of conversion away from the self and the empiricism of the senses (particularly sight) to a transcending of the self, as Christ is the transcendence of His Self.
Recall how Simon entered into prayer with Christ to the Father (Lk. 9, 18) and in that context was asked: "who do men say that I am?" and then, "who do you say that I am?" And the response: "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God" (Mt. 16, 16). The epistemological import is that "like is known by like," or "only God knows God." That is, one must become "Ipse Christus" to be able to know - read "re-cognize" - Christ in His miracles.
The Hidden Life and St. Joseph:
A like approach to understanding this is Pope Francis' words to the bishops of Spain in a retreat during Holy Week (year ?): "Nazareth is a permanent dimension of the apostolic man." Tellingly, he says: "We should not consider the hidden life of Jesus as a preparatory stage to the public life. Rather, it is the very synthesis of the whole life of the Lord" (Jorge Mario Bergoglio, "In Him Alone Is Our Hope - The Church According to the Heart of Pope Francis," pp. 61-67. www. magnificat.com.
What's more, it is the very core of the spirit of St. Josemaria Escriva (cf. Christ is Passing By, #22). It is also the grounding of the true eschatology, particularly of the second millennium which has become bereft of the presence of Christ and hence secularized into a non-transcendent secularism that has morphed from the ideologies of communism and capitalism into the burgeoning nihilism of the present moment. Pope Francis is exercising the parrhesia of great prophecy denouncing the virulent consumerism of capitalist possessive individualism which can be answered only by the working Christ in Nazareth.
This is the great answer for all times: Work as the action of a person who becomes ipse Christus by the pain of mastering himself to make the gift of himself in the work that is obedience to God and that itself becomes gift to others.
* * * * * * * *
Benedict XVI and St.
Josemaria Escriva
Our Scandal
Ratzinger (1964): “I believe the real temptation for someone
who is a Christian, as we experience it today, does not just consist in the
theoretical question of whether God exists; or even the question of whether he
is three or one; or even the question of whether Christ is God and man in one
person. What really torments us today, what bothers us much more is the
inefficacy of Christianity: after two thousand years of Christian history, we
can see nothing that might be a new reality in the world; rather, we find it
sunk in the same old horrors, the same despair, and the same hopes as ever. And
in our own lives, too, we inevitably experience time and again how Christian
reality is powerless against all the other forces that influence us and make
demands on us. And if, after all our labor and efforts to live on the basis of
what is Christian, we draw up the final balance sheet [and, of
course, this is on the level of empirically discernible successes], then
often enough the feeling comes over us that the reality has been taken away
from us, dissolved, and all that remains in the end is just an appeal to the
feeble light of our goodwill. And then in moments of discouragement like that,
when we look back on the path we have traveled, the question forces its way
into our minds: What is all this array of dogma and worship and Church, if at
the end of it all we are still thrown back onto our own poor resources? That in
turn brings us back again, in the end, to the question about the gospel of the
Lord: What did he actually proclaim and bring among men?”[1]
* * * * * * *
Escriva
Before the Same Scandal
“Let me tell you about an even of my own
personal life which happened many years ago. One day I was with a friend of
mine, a man with a good heart but who did not have faith. Pointing toward a
globe he said, ‘Look, from North to South, from East to West.’ ‘What do you
want me to look at?’ I asked. His answer was: ‘The failure of Christ. For
twenty centuries people have been trying to bring his doctrine to men’s lives,
and look at the result.’ I was filled with sadness. It is painful to think that
many people still don’t know our Lord, and that among those who do know him,
many live as though they did not. But that feeling lasted only a moment. It was
shortly overcome by love and thankfulness, because Jesus has wanted every man
to cooperate freely in the work of redemption. He has not failed. His doctrine
and life are effective in the world at all times. The redemption carried out by
him is sufficient, and more than sufficient.”[2]
* * * * * * *
What Did Christ Bring? The Kingdom of God
But what is
the Kingdom of God
The Kingdom of God Kingdom of God
Benedict’s
basic point is that Jesus Himself – divine Person - is the Kingdom. He says: “Jesus
is speaking in the present tense: the Kingdom of God Kingdom
of God Kingdom of God
The large point to be made here is
that the Kingdom of God and Kingdom
of Heaven Calvary
as instantiated as act of self-gift wherever there is transubstantiation of
bread and wine into His Body and Blood].[6]
And so,
Heaven is here and now, and the believer, before his development through
successive conversions, might expect that the divine power of Jesus Christ as
God would transform the society into a res publica of law and order as well
as peace and justice where the good would be rewarded and the bad punished. But
the huge point that must be made is that the action of God cannot be perceived
by our senses, nor perhaps by our understanding until we go through the
necessary conversion to become like Him to be able to so recognize Him; that
is, recognize His face.
The
Clericalization of the Secular Humanity of Christ
“But We Don’t See the Kingdom of God
The genius and honesty of Benedict come forth here. He
explains: “Christian theology, which was very soon confronted by this discrepancy
between expectation [of the fulfillment of the Kingdom here on earth by the
Incarnation such that we could recognize it with our senses] and fulfillment in
the course of time turned the kingdom of God into a kingdom of heaven that is
beyond this mortal life; the well-being of men became a salvation of souls,
which again comes to pass beyond this life, after death. But theology did not
thereby provide an answer. For what is sublime in this message is precisely
that the Lord was talking not just about another life, not just about men’s
souls, but was addressing the body, the whole man, in hi embodied form, with
his involvement in history and society; that he promised the kingdom o God to
the man who lives bodily with other men in this history. As marvelous as the
knowledge is that has been opened up for us by biblical scholarship in our
century (that is, that Christ was not just looking forward to another life, but
was talking about real people), it can also disappoint and unsettle us when we
look at real history, which is in truth no kingdom of God.”[7]
The
Solution: The Experience of Giftedness
The will of Jesus Christ is the “conversion” of each person
in the deep ontological sense of “metanoia” into “another Christ.” The
following are the foundational moments of Opus Dei:
- August 7, 1931: Locution: “Et si exaltatus fuero a terra,
omnia traham ad meipsum” (Ioann. 12, 32). “A voice, as always, perfect, clear:…
And the precise concept: it is not in the sense in which Scripture says it; I
say it to you in the sense that you put me at the summit of all human
activities, so that in all the places of the world, there may be
Christians with a personal and most free dedication, that they be other
Christs.”
- October 16, 1931: Locution: “You are my son, you are Christ.”
And I only knew how to repeat: Abba, Pater!, Abba, Pater! Abba!, Abba!, Abba!
The Spirit of Opus Dei: To become Christ,
the Kingdom, in the Exercise of Ordinary work
Escriva: “We are celebrating, therefore, the most
sacred and transcendent act which we, men and women, with God’s grace can carry
out in this life: receiving the Body and Blood of our Lord is, in a certain
sense, like loosening our ties with earth and time, so as to be already with
God in Heaven, where Christ himself will wipe the tears from our eyes and where
there will be no more death, nor mourning, nor cries of distress, because the
old world will have passed away.
“This profound and consoling
truth, which theologians usually call the eschatological meaning of the
Eucharist, could, however, be misunderstood. Indeed, this has happened whenever
people have tried to present the Christian way of life as something exclusively
spiritual – or better, spiritualistic – something reserved for pure,
extraordinary people who remain aloof from the contemptible things of this
world, or at most tolerate them as something that the spirit just has to live
alongside, while we are on this earth.
“When people take this
approach, churches become the setting par excellence of the Christian
way of life. And being a Christian means going to church, taking part in sacred
ceremonies, getting into an ecclesiastical mentality, in a special kind of world,
considered the ante-chamber to Heaven, while the ordinary world follows it own
separate course. In this case, Christian teaching and the life of grace would
pass by, brushing very lightly against the turbulent advance of human history
but never coming into proper contact with it.
Encounter Christ in Everyday
Life
“On
this October morning, as we prepare to enter upon the memorial of our Lord’s
Pasch, we flatly reject this deformed vision of Christianity.
Reflect for a moment on the setting of our Eucharist, of our Act of
Thanksgiving. We find ourselves in a unique temple; we might say that the nave
is the University campus: the altarpiece, the University library; over there,
the machinery for constructing new buildings; above us, the sky of Navarre
“Surely this confirms in your
minds, in a tangible and unforgettable way, the fact that everyday life is the
true setting for your lives as Christians. Your daily encounter with Christ
takes place where your fellow men, your yearnings, your work, and your affections
are. It is in the midst of the most material things of the earth that we must
sanctify ourselves, serving God and all mankind….
“Don’t doubt it, my
children: any attempt to escape from the noble reality of daily life is, for
you men and women of the world, something opposed to the will of God.
God and the Ordinary
“On the contrary, you
must realize now, more clearly than ever, that God is calling you to serve him
in and from the ordinary secular and civil activities of human life. He
waits for us everyday, in the laboratory, in the operating theatre, in the army
barracks, in the university chair, in the factory, in the workshop, in the
fields, in the home, and in all the immense panorama of work. Understand this
well: there is something holy, something divine hidden in the most
ordinary situations, and it is up to each one of you to discover it.”[8]
[1] J.
Ratzinger, “What It Means To Be A Christian,” Ignatius (1965-2005)25-26.
[2]
Josemaria Escriva, “Christ is Passing By,” Scepter #129.
[5] J.
Ratzinger, “Eschatology,” CUA (1988) 34-35.
[6] Ibid
234.
[7] J.
Ratzinger, “What It Means to Be a Christian” Ignatius (2006) 28-29.
[8]
Josemaria Escriva, “Passionately Loving the World,” Scepter 3-5.
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