EMERITUS POPE BENEDICT XVI - HOW JESUS ENTERED MY LIFE

    EMERITUS POPE BENEDICT XVI:  HOW JESUS ENTERED MY LIFE?

JUSTICE IS TRUTH IN ACTION - HTTP://WWW.CINOPSBEGONEBLOGSPOT.COM - WED. APRIL 22, 2020

# "How Jesus entered my life: I met him first, not in literature or philosophy, but in the faith of the Church. That means from the beginning he was not, for me, an important figure from the past (like Plato or Thomas Aquinas, for example), but someone who lives and works today, someone whom we can meet today.

 

It means, above all, that I have learned to know him within the history of the Faith that originates in him, to see him as faith sees him in its most enduring formulation by the Council of Chalcedon. In my opinion, Chalcedon is a great and most courageous reduction of an extremely complex and multilayerd fund of tradition to a single, central, and fundamental statement:

 

Son OF  God, possessed of one nature with God and nature with us. In contrast to many other possibilities that have been broached in the course of history, Chalcedon interpreted Jesus theologically; I regard that as the only interpretation that can do justice to the whole spectrum of Tradition and can bear the full implications of the phenomenon.

 

Every other interpretation is, in some way, too restricted; every other concept includes one part of the truth and excludes another. Here, and here alone, is the whole truth revealed. Ultimately, everything else derives from this interpretation.

 

First of all that Jesus and the Church are, for me, as impossible to separate as they are impossible to identify one with the other. Jesus is always infinitely transcendent to the Church. It was not through Vatican Council II that we first learned that, as Lord of the Church, he also her standard. I have always regarded this truth as both consolation and challenge.

As consolation because we have always known that the scrupulosity of the rubricists and the legalists does not have its source in Jesus, in that infinite magnanimity that comes to us from the words of the Gospel like a fresh breeze and collapses all excessive literalness like a house of cards. We have always known that nearness to him is as totally independent of the ecclesiastical rank one may hold as of one's knowledge of juridical and historical details. That has enabled me to look upon external details with a corresponding ease of mind.

 

To that extant the person of Jesus has always been for me a source of optimism and liberation. On the other hand I have never been able to ignore the fact that, in many respects, he asks more of me than the Church would ever dare to ask, that the radicalism of his words can be equated only with the kind of radicalism displayed by Anthony, the Desert Father, and Francis of Assisi in their wholly literal acceptance of the Gospel.

 

If we do not do that, we have already taken refuge in casuistry, and cannot escape the corroding restlessness, the knowledge, that, like the rich young man, we have turned away when we should have taken seriously the words of the Gospel....

 

The fact that I learned to know and see Jesus Christ in terms of the interpretation formulated at Chalcedon does not mean that a part of the Tradition must now be eliminated because it does not seem sufficiently divine and cannot, therefore be brought into harmony wit the dogmas as stated.

 

The opposite is, in fact, true. Ecclesiastical Tradition, in which the historical movement founded by Jesus has remained alive even to the present time, gives me, at the same time, more confidence in biblical tradition in which I have more trust than in the effort to reconstruct in the retort of historical reason a chemically pure historical Jesus. I trust the tradition in its entirety....

 

In consequence, the dispute about the ipsissima (the actual words of Jesus) is not especially meaningful for me. I know that the Jesus of the gospels is the true Jesus, that I can trust myself to him with far greater confidence than to the most learned reconstructions, for he will outlast all of them.... In conclusion, it remains to be said that one who believes with the Church meets Jesus directly in prayer and the sacraments - especially the Eucharist.

 

George H. Kubeck
# Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger. "Co-Workers of the Truth" Meditations For Every Day of the Year, Ignatius, for April 20 and April 21st.