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Jesus and the Kingdom The New Evangelisation Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the Prefect for the
Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, concludes his article on the
New Evangelisation.
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We thirst for the infinite I will not go into the contents of the proclamation of the Saviour. I would only like to briefly mention two important aspects. The first one is the Sequela of Christ - Christ offers Himself as the path of my life. Sequela of Christ does not mean: imitating the man Jesus. This type of attempt would necessarily fail - it would be an anachronism. The Sequela of Christ has a much higher goal: to be assimilated into Christ, that is to attain union with God. Such a word might sound strange to the ears of modern man. But, in truth, we all thirst for the infinite: for an infinite freedom, for happiness without limits. The entire history of revolutions during the last two centuries can only be explained this way. Drugs can only be explained this way. Man is not satisfied with solutions beneath the level of divinization. But all the roads offered by the "serpent" (Genesis 3.5), that is to say by mundane knowledge, fail. The only path is communion with Christ, achieved in sacramental life. The Sequela of Christ is not a question of morality, but a "mysteric" theme - an ensemble of divine action and our response. Thus, in the theme on the sequela we find the presence of the other centre of Christology, which I wished to mention: the Paschal Mystery - the Cross and the Resurrection. In the reconstruction of the "historical Jesus", usually the theme of the cross is without meaning. In a bourgeois interpretation it becomes an incident per se evitable, without theological value; in a revolutionary interpretation it becomes the heroic death of a rebel. The truth is quite different. The cross belongs to the Divine mystery - it is the expression of His love to the end (Jn 13.1). The Sequela of Christ is the participation in the cross, uniting oneself to His love, to the transformation of our life, which becomes the birth of the new man, created according to God (cf Eph 4.24). Whoever omits the cross, omits the essence of Christianity (cf 1 Cor 2:2). Link between Eternal Life and justice A last central element of every true evangelisation is eternal life. Today we must proclaim our faith with new vigour in daily life. Here, I would only like to mention one aspect of the preaching of Jesus, which is often omitted today: the proclamation of the Kingdom of God is the proclamation of God present, God that knows us, listens to us: God that enters into history to do justice. Therefore, this preaching is also the proclamation of justice, the proclamation of our responsibility. Man cannot do or avoid doing what he wants to. He will be judged. He must account for things. This certitude is of value both for the powerful as well as the simple ones. Where this is honoured, the limitations of every power in this world are traced. God renders justice, and only he may ultimately do this. We will be able to do this better the more we are able to live under the eyes of God and to communicate the truth of justice to the world. Thus the article of faith in justice, its force in the formation of consciences, is a central theme of the Gospel and is truly good news. It is for all those suffering the injustices of the world and who are looking for justice. This is also how we can understand the connection between the Kingdom of God and the "poor", the suffering and all those spoken about in the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount. They are protected by the certainty of judgement, by the certitude, that there is a justice. This is the true content of the article on justice, about God as judge: Justice exists. The injustices of the world are not the final word of history. Justice exists. Only whoever does not want there to be justice can oppose this truth. The injustices of the world are not the final word of history If we seriously consider the judgement and the seriousness of the responsibility for us that emerges from this, we will be able to understand full well the other aspect of this proclamation. This is redemption, the fact that Jesus, in the cross, takes on our sins; God himself, in the passion of the Son, becomes the advocate for us sinners. Thus He makes penance possible, the hope for the repentant sinner, hope expressed in a marvellous way by the words of Saint John: Before God, we will reassure our heart, whatever He reproves us for. "For God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything" (1 Jn 3.19 et segue). God's goodness is infinite, but we should not diminish this goodness to mawkish affection without truth. Only by believing in the just judgement of God, only hungering and thirsting for justice (cf Mt 5.6) will we open up our hearts, our life to divine mercy. This can be seen: it isn't true that faith in eternal life makes earthly life insignificant. On the contrary: only if the measure of our life is eternity, then also this life of ours on earth is great and its value immense. God is not the competitor in our life, but the guarantor of our greatness. This way we return to the starting point: God. If we take the Christian message into well thought out consideration, we are not speaking about a whole lot of things. In reality the Christian message is very simple: we speak about God and man, and this way we say everything. |
With
this reflection, the theme of God has already expanded and been achieved
in the theme of Jesus Christ: only in Christ and through Christ does
the theme God become truly concrete: Christ is Emmanuel, the God-with-
us, the becoming concrete of the "I am", the response to
Deism. Today, the temptation is great to diminish Jesus Christ, the
Son of God, into a merely historical Jesus, into a pure man. One does
not necessarily deny the divinity of Jesus, but by using certain methods
one distils from the Bible a Jesus to our size, a Jesus possible and
comprehensible within the parameters of our historiography. But this
"historical Jesus" is an artifact, the image of his authors
rather than the image of the living God. (cf 2 Cor 4:4 et segue; Col
1:15). The Christ of faith is not a myth; the so-called historical
Jesus is a mythological figure, invented by various interpreters.
Two hundred years of history of the "historical Jesus" faithfully
reflect the history of philosophies and ideologies of this period.
