The ascension of the Lord Jesus Christ set in motion the coming of the Holy Spirit through whom the work of Jesus would continues. As what the Father had promised. "It is" He had said "what you have heard Me speak about: John baptized with water but you, not many days from now, will be baptized with the Holy Spirit. God determined that the presence of Jesus Christ would be replaced by the presence of the Holy Spirit.
In my earlier work, Theophilus, I dealt with everything Jesus had done and taught from the beginning until the day he gave his instructions to the apostles he had chosen through the Holy Spirit, and was taken up to heaven. He had shown himself alive to them after the Passion by many demonstrations: for forty days he had continued to appear to them and tell them about the kingdom of God. When he had been at table with them, he had told them not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait there for what the Father had promised. 'It is' he had said 'what you have heard me speak about: John baptized with water but you, not many days from now, will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.'
Now having met together, they asked him, 'Lord, has the time come? Are you going to restore the kingdom to Israel?' He replied, 'It is not for you to know times or dates that the Father has decided by his own authority, but you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you, and then you will be my witnesses not only in Jerusalem but throughout Judaea and Samaria, and indeed to the ends of the earth,'
As he said this he was lifted up while they looked on, and a cloud took him from their sight. They were still staring into the sky when suddenly two men in white were standing near them and they said, 'Why are you men from Galilee standing here looking into the sky? Jesus who has been taken up from you into heaven, this same Jesus will come back in the same way as you seen him go there.' - Acts 1:1-11 -
The fact that Saint Paul used an Aramaic expression in addressing the Gentile Christians of Corinth indicates that 'Maranatha' had become a familiar expression of Christian hope - a watchword of the imminent "Second Coming" of the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen!
If anyone does not love the Lord, a curse on him. 'Maran atha.' - 1Cor. 16:22 - Come, Lord Jesus, Come.
Page 1
If you wish to donate. Thank You. God bless.
By bank transfer/cheque deposit:
Name: Alex Chan Kok Wah
Bank: Public Bank Berhad account no: 4076577113
Country: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
I have through years of reading, pondering, reflecting and contemplating, the 3 things that last; FAITH . HOPE . LOVE and I would like to made available my sharing from the many thinkers, authors, scholars and theologians whose ideas and thoughts I have borrowed. God be with them always. Amen!
I STILL HAVE MANY THINGS TO SAY TO YOU BUT THEY WOULD BE TOO MUCH FOR YOU NOW. BUT WHEN THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH COMES, HE WILL LEAD YOU TO THE COMPLETE TRUTH, SINCE HE WILL NOT BE SPEAKING AS FROM HIMSELF, BUT WILL SAY ONLY WHAT HE HAS LEARNT; AND HE WILL TELL YOU OF THE THINGS TO COME.
HE WILL GLORIFY ME, SINCE ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. EVERYTHING THE FATHER HAS IS MINE; THAT IS WHY I SAID: ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. - JOHN 16:12-15 -
Monday, May 14, 2012
Saturday, May 12, 2012
America's greatest enemy is not from without, but from within, and that enemy is hate: hatred of races, peoples, classes, and religions. If America ever dies, it will not be through conquest, but suicide.
Tolerance pleas will not remedy this hate, for why should any creature on God's earth be merely tolerated? There is more tragedy than we suspect in the fact that we have become most united as a nation at a moment when we have developed a hate against certain foreign countries.
Hate can be eradicated only by creating a new focus, and that is possible only by charity. By charity we do not mean kindness, philanthropy, generosity, or big heartedness, but a supernatural gift of God by which we are enabled to love Him above all things for His own sake alone, and in that love, to love all that He loves.
The first quality of charity to be noted is that it resides in the will, not in the emotions or passions or senses. In other words, charity does not mean to like, but to love. Liking is in the feelings or emotions; loving is in the will. A little boy cannot help disliking spinach, as perhaps you cannot help disliking sauerkraut, and I cannot help disliking chicken. The same is true of your reactions to certain people. You cannot help feeling an emotional reaction against the egotistical, the sophisticated, and the loud, or those who run for the first seats, or those who snore in their sleep.
But through you cannot like everyone because you have no control over your physiological reactions, you can love everyone in the divine sense, for love, being in the will, can be commanded. As Our Lord said: "A new commandment I give you: that you love one another, as I have loved you." - John 13:34 -
Outwardly, your neighbor may be very unlikeable; but inwardly he is one in whom the image of God can be recreated by the kiss of charity. You can like only those who like you, but you can love those who dislike you. You can go through life liking those who like you without the love of God. Humanism is sufficient for those of our set, or for those who like to go slumming from ivory towers, but it is not enough to make us love those who apparently are not worth loving. To will to be kind when the emotion is unkind, requires a stronger dynamic than "love of humanity." To love them, we must recall that we who are not worth loving are loved by Love. "For if you love those who love you, what reward will you have? - Matt. 5:46-48 -
A second feature of charity is that it is a habit, not a single act. There is a tremendous amount of sentimental romanticism associated with much human kindness. Remember the great glow you got from giving your overcoat to the beggars on the street, for assisting a blind man up the stairs, for escorting an old woman through traffic, or for contributing a ten dollar bill to relieve an indigent woman. The warmth of self-approval surged through your body, and though you never said it aloud, you did inwardly say: "Gee! I'm Okay!"
These good deeds are not to be reproved but commended. But what we wish to emphasize is that nothing has done so much harm to healthy friendliness as the belief that we ought to do one good act a day. Why one good act? What about all the other acts? Charity is a habit, not an isolated act. A husband and wife are out driving. They see a young blonde along the road side changing a tire. The husband gets out to help her. Would he have done it if the blonde were fifty? He changes the tire, dirties his clothes, cuts his finger, but is all politeness, overflowing sweetness, exuding charm. When he gets back into his own car, his heart aglow with the good deed, his wife says: "I wish you would talk that nice to me. yesterday when I asked you to bring in the milk you said: 'Are you crippled?'"
See the difference between one act and a habit? Charity is a habit, not a gush or a sentiment; it is a virtue, not an ephemeral thing of moods and impulses; it is a quality of the soul, rather than an individual good deed.
How do you judge a good piano player? By an occasional right note or by the habit or virtue of striking all the right notes? An habitually evil man every now and then may do a good deed. Gangsters endowed soup kitchens and the movies glorified them. But in Christians eyes, this did not prove they were good. Occasionally, an habitually good man may fall, but evil is the exception in his life, while it is the rule in the life of the gangster. Whether we know it or not, the actions of our daily life are fixing our character for good or for evil. The things you do, the thoughts you think, the words you say, are turning you either into a saint or a devil, to be placed at either the right or the left side of the Divine Judge. If love of God and neighbor becomes a habit of your soul, you are developing heaven within you. But if hatred and evil become the habit of your soul, then you are developing hell within you. Heaven is a place where charity is eternal. In heaven there will be no faith, for then we will see God; in heaven there will be no hope, for then we will possess God; but in heaven there will be charity, for "love endures forever."
Finally, love is universal. Translating charity's commandment into the concrete, it means that you must love your enemy as you love yourself. Does that mean that you must love Hitler as you love yourself, or the thief who stole your tires, or the woman who said you had so many wrinkles that you had to screw on your hat? It means just that. But how can you love that kind of an enemy as you love yourself?
Well, how do you love yourself? Do you like the way you look? If you did, you would not try to improve it out of a box. Did you ever wish to be anyone else? Why do you lie about your age and say you just turned thirty when you mean re-turned thirty. Do you like yourself when you develop a sense of rumour, or when you spread gossip and run down your neighbor's reputation, or when you are irritable and moody?
You do not like yourself in these moments. But at the same time, you do love yourself, and you know you do! When you come into a room you invariably pick out the softest chair; you buy yourself good clothes, treat yourself to nice presents; when anyone says you are intelligent or beautiful, you always feel that such a person is of very sound judgment. But when anyone says you are "catty" or selfish, you say they don't understand your good nature. or maybe they are "Fascists."
Thus you love yourself, and yet you do not love yourself. What you love about yourself is the person that God made; what you hate about yourself is that God-made person whom you spoiled. You liked the sinner, but you hate the sin. That is why, when you do wrong, you ask to be given another chance, or you say, "I was not my true self." But you never deny there is hope.
That is just the way Our Lord intended that you should love your enemies: love them as you love yourself, hating their sin, loving them as sinners; disliking that which blurs the divine image, loving the divine image beneath the blur, never arrogating to yourself a greater right to God's love than they, since deep in your own heart you know that no one could be less deserving of His love than you. And when you see them receiving the just due of their crimes, you do not gloat over them, but say: "There but for the grace of God go I." In this spirit, we are to understand the words of Our Lord: "Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you. Bless those who curse you, and pray for those who insult you. To the one who strikes you on one cheek, offer your other cheek as well. And from the one who takes your cloak, don't hold back your tunic." - Luke 6:27-29 - It is Christian to hate the evil of anti-Christians, but not without praying for these enemies that they might be saved - for God loved us when as yet we were sinners.
If, then, you bear a hatred toward anyone, overcome it by doing that person a favor. You can begin to like classical music only by listening to it, and you can make friends out of your enemies only by practicing charity. The reason you love someone else is because that person supplies your lack or fills up your void. You find in the other something you do not have: beauty, wealth, virtue, kindness, etc.
But God does not love you because you supply His lack. He finds you lovable not because, of and by yourself, you are lovable, but because He puts some of His love in you. As a mother loves her child because her nature is in the child, as the artist loves the canvas because his idea and his colored pattern is in it, so God loves you because His Power or His Nature or His Love is in some way in you.
If, then, God's love for you makes you lovable, why not put some of your love in other people and make them lovable. Where you do not find love, put it there. Love therefore all things, and all persons in God.
So long as there are poor, I am poor:
So long as there are prisons, I am a prisoner:
So long as there are sick, I am weak:
So long as there is ignorance, I must learn:
So long as there is hate, I must love.
BY ARCHBISHOP FULTON J. SHEEN ( 1895 to 1979 )
Page 3
If you wish to donate. Thank You. God bless.
By bank transfer/cheque deposit:
Name: Alex Chan Kok Wah
Bank: Public Bank Berhad account no: 4076577113
Country: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
I have through years of reading, pondering, reflecting and contemplating, the 3 things that last; FAITH . HOPE . LOVE and I would like to made available my sharing from the many thinkers, authors, scholars and theologians whose ideas and thoughts I have borrowed. God be with them always. Amen!
I STILL HAVE MANY THINGS TO SAY TO YOU BUT THEY WOULD BE TOO MUCH FOR YOU NOW. BUT WHEN THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH COMES, HE WILL LEAD YOU TO THE COMPLETE TRUTH, SINCE HE WILL NOT BE SPEAKING AS FROM HIMSELF, BUT WILL SAY ONLY WHAT HE HAS LEARNT; AND HE WILL TELL YOU OF THE THINGS TO COME.
HE WILL GLORIFY ME, SINCE ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. EVERYTHING THE FATHER HAS IS MINE; THAT IS WHY I SAID: ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. - JOHN 16:12-15 -
Tolerance pleas will not remedy this hate, for why should any creature on God's earth be merely tolerated? There is more tragedy than we suspect in the fact that we have become most united as a nation at a moment when we have developed a hate against certain foreign countries.
Hate can be eradicated only by creating a new focus, and that is possible only by charity. By charity we do not mean kindness, philanthropy, generosity, or big heartedness, but a supernatural gift of God by which we are enabled to love Him above all things for His own sake alone, and in that love, to love all that He loves.
The first quality of charity to be noted is that it resides in the will, not in the emotions or passions or senses. In other words, charity does not mean to like, but to love. Liking is in the feelings or emotions; loving is in the will. A little boy cannot help disliking spinach, as perhaps you cannot help disliking sauerkraut, and I cannot help disliking chicken. The same is true of your reactions to certain people. You cannot help feeling an emotional reaction against the egotistical, the sophisticated, and the loud, or those who run for the first seats, or those who snore in their sleep.
But through you cannot like everyone because you have no control over your physiological reactions, you can love everyone in the divine sense, for love, being in the will, can be commanded. As Our Lord said: "A new commandment I give you: that you love one another, as I have loved you." - John 13:34 -
Outwardly, your neighbor may be very unlikeable; but inwardly he is one in whom the image of God can be recreated by the kiss of charity. You can like only those who like you, but you can love those who dislike you. You can go through life liking those who like you without the love of God. Humanism is sufficient for those of our set, or for those who like to go slumming from ivory towers, but it is not enough to make us love those who apparently are not worth loving. To will to be kind when the emotion is unkind, requires a stronger dynamic than "love of humanity." To love them, we must recall that we who are not worth loving are loved by Love. "For if you love those who love you, what reward will you have? - Matt. 5:46-48 -
A second feature of charity is that it is a habit, not a single act. There is a tremendous amount of sentimental romanticism associated with much human kindness. Remember the great glow you got from giving your overcoat to the beggars on the street, for assisting a blind man up the stairs, for escorting an old woman through traffic, or for contributing a ten dollar bill to relieve an indigent woman. The warmth of self-approval surged through your body, and though you never said it aloud, you did inwardly say: "Gee! I'm Okay!"
These good deeds are not to be reproved but commended. But what we wish to emphasize is that nothing has done so much harm to healthy friendliness as the belief that we ought to do one good act a day. Why one good act? What about all the other acts? Charity is a habit, not an isolated act. A husband and wife are out driving. They see a young blonde along the road side changing a tire. The husband gets out to help her. Would he have done it if the blonde were fifty? He changes the tire, dirties his clothes, cuts his finger, but is all politeness, overflowing sweetness, exuding charm. When he gets back into his own car, his heart aglow with the good deed, his wife says: "I wish you would talk that nice to me. yesterday when I asked you to bring in the milk you said: 'Are you crippled?'"
See the difference between one act and a habit? Charity is a habit, not a gush or a sentiment; it is a virtue, not an ephemeral thing of moods and impulses; it is a quality of the soul, rather than an individual good deed.
How do you judge a good piano player? By an occasional right note or by the habit or virtue of striking all the right notes? An habitually evil man every now and then may do a good deed. Gangsters endowed soup kitchens and the movies glorified them. But in Christians eyes, this did not prove they were good. Occasionally, an habitually good man may fall, but evil is the exception in his life, while it is the rule in the life of the gangster. Whether we know it or not, the actions of our daily life are fixing our character for good or for evil. The things you do, the thoughts you think, the words you say, are turning you either into a saint or a devil, to be placed at either the right or the left side of the Divine Judge. If love of God and neighbor becomes a habit of your soul, you are developing heaven within you. But if hatred and evil become the habit of your soul, then you are developing hell within you. Heaven is a place where charity is eternal. In heaven there will be no faith, for then we will see God; in heaven there will be no hope, for then we will possess God; but in heaven there will be charity, for "love endures forever."
Finally, love is universal. Translating charity's commandment into the concrete, it means that you must love your enemy as you love yourself. Does that mean that you must love Hitler as you love yourself, or the thief who stole your tires, or the woman who said you had so many wrinkles that you had to screw on your hat? It means just that. But how can you love that kind of an enemy as you love yourself?
Well, how do you love yourself? Do you like the way you look? If you did, you would not try to improve it out of a box. Did you ever wish to be anyone else? Why do you lie about your age and say you just turned thirty when you mean re-turned thirty. Do you like yourself when you develop a sense of rumour, or when you spread gossip and run down your neighbor's reputation, or when you are irritable and moody?
You do not like yourself in these moments. But at the same time, you do love yourself, and you know you do! When you come into a room you invariably pick out the softest chair; you buy yourself good clothes, treat yourself to nice presents; when anyone says you are intelligent or beautiful, you always feel that such a person is of very sound judgment. But when anyone says you are "catty" or selfish, you say they don't understand your good nature. or maybe they are "Fascists."
Thus you love yourself, and yet you do not love yourself. What you love about yourself is the person that God made; what you hate about yourself is that God-made person whom you spoiled. You liked the sinner, but you hate the sin. That is why, when you do wrong, you ask to be given another chance, or you say, "I was not my true self." But you never deny there is hope.
That is just the way Our Lord intended that you should love your enemies: love them as you love yourself, hating their sin, loving them as sinners; disliking that which blurs the divine image, loving the divine image beneath the blur, never arrogating to yourself a greater right to God's love than they, since deep in your own heart you know that no one could be less deserving of His love than you. And when you see them receiving the just due of their crimes, you do not gloat over them, but say: "There but for the grace of God go I." In this spirit, we are to understand the words of Our Lord: "Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you. Bless those who curse you, and pray for those who insult you. To the one who strikes you on one cheek, offer your other cheek as well. And from the one who takes your cloak, don't hold back your tunic." - Luke 6:27-29 - It is Christian to hate the evil of anti-Christians, but not without praying for these enemies that they might be saved - for God loved us when as yet we were sinners.
If, then, you bear a hatred toward anyone, overcome it by doing that person a favor. You can begin to like classical music only by listening to it, and you can make friends out of your enemies only by practicing charity. The reason you love someone else is because that person supplies your lack or fills up your void. You find in the other something you do not have: beauty, wealth, virtue, kindness, etc.
But God does not love you because you supply His lack. He finds you lovable not because, of and by yourself, you are lovable, but because He puts some of His love in you. As a mother loves her child because her nature is in the child, as the artist loves the canvas because his idea and his colored pattern is in it, so God loves you because His Power or His Nature or His Love is in some way in you.
If, then, God's love for you makes you lovable, why not put some of your love in other people and make them lovable. Where you do not find love, put it there. Love therefore all things, and all persons in God.
So long as there are poor, I am poor:
So long as there are prisons, I am a prisoner:
So long as there are sick, I am weak:
So long as there is ignorance, I must learn:
So long as there is hate, I must love.
BY ARCHBISHOP FULTON J. SHEEN ( 1895 to 1979 )
Page 3
If you wish to donate. Thank You. God bless.
By bank transfer/cheque deposit:
Name: Alex Chan Kok Wah
Bank: Public Bank Berhad account no: 4076577113
Country: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
I have through years of reading, pondering, reflecting and contemplating, the 3 things that last; FAITH . HOPE . LOVE and I would like to made available my sharing from the many thinkers, authors, scholars and theologians whose ideas and thoughts I have borrowed. God be with them always. Amen!
I STILL HAVE MANY THINGS TO SAY TO YOU BUT THEY WOULD BE TOO MUCH FOR YOU NOW. BUT WHEN THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH COMES, HE WILL LEAD YOU TO THE COMPLETE TRUTH, SINCE HE WILL NOT BE SPEAKING AS FROM HIMSELF, BUT WILL SAY ONLY WHAT HE HAS LEARNT; AND HE WILL TELL YOU OF THE THINGS TO COME.
HE WILL GLORIFY ME, SINCE ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. EVERYTHING THE FATHER HAS IS MINE; THAT IS WHY I SAID: ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. - JOHN 16:12-15 -
Friday, May 11, 2012
It is not so much what happens in your life that matters; it is rather how you react to it. You can always tell the character of a person by the size of the things that make him mad. A man can work joyfully at a picture puzzle, so long as he believes the puzzle can be put together into a composite whole. But if the puzzle is a hoax, or if it was not made by a rational mind, then one would go mad trying to work it out. It is this absence of purpose of life, along with its consequent fear and frustration, which has sometimes produced the neuroses and psychoses of the modern mind.
How do you react to the vicissitudes of life? Do you rebel because God does not answer your prayers to become rich? Do you deny God because He called away your husband, your wife, your child? In the midst of a war do you summon God to judgment as the criminal who started it all and ask, "Why does He not stop it?"
May I offer you three considerations to help you build a firm hope in God?
1. - Remember that everything that happens has been foreseen and known by God from all eternity, and is either willed by Him, or at least permitted.
God's knowledge does not grow as ours does, from ignorance to wisdom. The Fall did not catch God napping. God is science, but He is not a scientist: God knows all, but He learns nothing from experience. He does not look on you from heaven as you look down on an ant-hill, seeing you going in and out of your house, walking to work, and then telling an angel-secretary to note down the unkind word you said to the grocery boy. Why is it we always think of God as watching the bad things we do and never the good deeds? You do your own bookkeeping. Your conscience takes your own dictation. God knows all things not by looking at you, but by looking into Himself as the Cause of all things. He never reads over your shoulder. An architect can tell you how many rooms will be in your house, and the exact size of each, before the house is built, because he is the cause of the becoming of that house. God is the cause of the being of all things. He knows all before they happen. As a motion picture reel contains the whole story before it is thrown upon the screen, so God knows all before it is acted on the stage of history.
But do not think that because God knows all, therefore He has predetermined you to heaven or hell independently of your merits and irrespective of your freedom.
His knowledge that you shall act in a particular manner is not the immediate cause of your acting, any more than your knowledge that you are sitting down caused you to sit down or prevents you from getting up if you willed to do it. Our Blessed Mother could have refused the dignity of becoming the Mother of God, as Judas could have resisted the temptation to betray. The fact that God knew what each would do did not make them act the way they did.
Because there is no future in God, foreknowing is not forecausing. You may know the stock market very well and, such a stock will sell for 50 points in three months. In three months it does reach 50 points. Did you cause it to reach 50 points, or did you merely foreknow it? You may be in a tower where you can see a man advancing in the distance who has never been over that terrain before. You know that before he reaches the bower he must cross that ditch, wade that pond, tramp those bushes, and climb that hill. You foresee all the possibilities, but you do not cause him to cross those obstacles.
The following story illustrates the fallacy of predestination without freedom. In the colonial days of our country there was a wife who believed in a peculiar kind of predestination, which left no room for human freedom. Her husband, who did not share her eccentricities, one day left for the market. He came back after a few minutes saying he forgot his gun. She said: "You are either predestined to be shot by an Indian, or you are not predestined to be shot. If you are predestined to be shot, the gun will do you no good. If you are not predestined to be shot, you will not need it. Therefore do not take your gun." But he answered: "Suppose I am predestined to be shot by an Indian on condition I do not have my gun?" And that was sound religion. It allows for human freedom. We are our own creators. To those who ask: "If God knew I would lose my soul, why did He make me?" the answer is: "God did not make you as a lost soul. You make yourself." The universe is moral and therefore conditional: "Behold I stand at the door and knock." God knocks! He breaks down no doors. The latch is on our side - not God's.
2. - God allows or permits evil but always for the reason of a greater good related to His love and the salvation of our souls.
God does permit evil. Our Lord Jesus told Judas: "This is your hour." - Luke 22:53 - Evil does have its hour. All that it can do within that hour is to put out the lights of the world. But God has His day. The evil of the world is inseparably from human freedom, and hence the cost of destroying the world's evil or stopping this war would be the destruction of human freedom. Certainly none of us wants to pay that high price, particularly since God would never permit evil unless He could draw some good from it.
God can draw good out of evil because while the power of doing evil is ours, the effects of our evil deeds are outside of our control and therefore in the hands of God. The brethren of Joseph were free to toss him into a well, but from that point on Joseph was in God's hands. Rightly did he say to his brothers: "You thought evil against me; but God turned it into good...." - Gen. 50:20 -
The evil which God permits must not be judged by its immediate effects, but rather by its ultimate effects. When you go to a theatre you do not walk out because you see a good man suffering in the first act. You give the dramatists credit for a plot. Why can you not do that much with God. The mouse in the piano cannot understand why anyone should disturb his gnawing at the keys by making weird sounds. Much less can our puny minds grasp the plan of God. The slaughter of the Innocents probably saved many boys from growing up into men who on Good Friday would have shouted, "Crucify Him." The physician would not permit an operation if he could not draw health from it and God would not permit evil unless He could draw good from it.
3. - We must do everything within our power to fulfill God's will as it is made known to us by His Mystical Body, the commandments, and our lawfully constituted superiors, and we must also fulfill our duties flowing from our state of life. But everything that is outside our power, we must abandon and surrender to His Holy will.
Notice the distinction between within our power and outside our power. There is to be no fatalism. Some things are under our control. We are not to be like the man who perilously walked the railing of a ship in a storm at sea saying: "I am a fatalist! I believe that when your time comes, there is nothing you can do about it." What is wrong in fatalism is its failure to recognize that, within certain limits, our will can affect the events of life. It would be wrong for us, then, not to do our very best to make that course one which does good to our neighbor and renders glory to God. It is God's will that men should have a free will which they can use in subordination to His and thereby be happy. There was much wisdom in the preacher who said: "You run up against a brick wall every now and then during life. If God wants you to go through that wall, it is up to God to make the hole."
But we are here concerned with those things outside our power, for example, sickness, accidents, bumps on buses, trampled toes in subways, the barbed word of a fellow worker, rain on picnic days, the death of loved one on your wedding day, cold on vacation, the loss of your purse, and moth holes in your suit. God would have prevented any of these things. He could have stopped your headache, prevented a bullet from hitting your boy, forestalled cramps during a swim, and killed the germ that laid you low. But if He did not, it was for a superior reason. Therefore say: "God's will be done."
If you tell an Irishman it is a bad day, nine times out of ten he will answer: "It's a good day to save your soul." It is one of the paradoxes of creation that you gain control by submission.
Does not the scientist gain control over nature by humbly sitting down before the facts of nature and being docile to its teaching? In like manner, surrender yourself to God, and all is yours. Even the irritations of life can be made a stepping stones to salvation. An oyster develops a pearl because a gain of sand irritates it. Cease complaining about your pains and aches. When anyone asks, "How are you?" remember it is not a question, it is a greeting. An act of thanksgiving when things go against our will means more than a thousand acts of thanksgiving when things go according to our will.
Every person in the world is possessed: some are possessed by the devil, some are possessed by self, others are possessed by God.
This broadcast is an appeal to give your to God as if it were yours no longer, for your will is yours only to make it His. Pray not to change God's will; pray rather to change your own. Measure not God's Goodness by His readiness to do your will.
Shall we call Him "Father" and still not believe He wills what is best for His children? Think not that you could do more good for souls if you were well, or you had another position. What matters in life is not where we are but whether we are doing God's will.
Trust not in God because you are good, but because He is good and you are not. Often during the day say: "God loves me, and He is on my side, by my side."
In wartime, do not ask: "If the Japanese and the English, the Germans and the Americans, pray to God; on whose side is God?" For the answer to this question is: "If we all prayed as we ought, we would all be on the same side: "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven."
Neither ask: "Why do nations which love God fight one another?" The answer is: "They don't." You see how important is the love of God.
Page 2
If you wish to donate. Thank You. God bless.
By bank transfer/cheque deposit:
Name: Alex Chan Kok Wah
Bank: Public Bank Berhad account no: 4076577113
Country: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
I have through years of reading, pondering, reflecting and contemplating, the 3 things that last; FAITH . HOPE . LOVE and I would like to made available my sharing from the many thinkers, authors, scholars and theologians whose ideas and thoughts I have borrowed. God be with them always. Amen!
I STILL HAVE MANY THINGS TO SAY TO YOU BUT THEY WOULD BE TOO MUCH FOR YOU NOW. BUT WHEN THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH COMES, HE WILL LEAD YOU TO THE COMPLETE TRUTH, SINCE HE WILL NOT BE SPEAKING AS FROM HIMSELF, BUT WILL SAY ONLY WHAT HE HAS LEARNT; AND HE WILL TELL YOU OF THE THINGS TO COME.
HE WILL GLORIFY ME, SINCE ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. EVERYTHING THE FATHER HAS IS MINE; THAT IS WHY I SAID: ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. - JOHN 16:12-15 -
How do you react to the vicissitudes of life? Do you rebel because God does not answer your prayers to become rich? Do you deny God because He called away your husband, your wife, your child? In the midst of a war do you summon God to judgment as the criminal who started it all and ask, "Why does He not stop it?"
May I offer you three considerations to help you build a firm hope in God?
1. - Remember that everything that happens has been foreseen and known by God from all eternity, and is either willed by Him, or at least permitted.
God's knowledge does not grow as ours does, from ignorance to wisdom. The Fall did not catch God napping. God is science, but He is not a scientist: God knows all, but He learns nothing from experience. He does not look on you from heaven as you look down on an ant-hill, seeing you going in and out of your house, walking to work, and then telling an angel-secretary to note down the unkind word you said to the grocery boy. Why is it we always think of God as watching the bad things we do and never the good deeds? You do your own bookkeeping. Your conscience takes your own dictation. God knows all things not by looking at you, but by looking into Himself as the Cause of all things. He never reads over your shoulder. An architect can tell you how many rooms will be in your house, and the exact size of each, before the house is built, because he is the cause of the becoming of that house. God is the cause of the being of all things. He knows all before they happen. As a motion picture reel contains the whole story before it is thrown upon the screen, so God knows all before it is acted on the stage of history.
But do not think that because God knows all, therefore He has predetermined you to heaven or hell independently of your merits and irrespective of your freedom.
His knowledge that you shall act in a particular manner is not the immediate cause of your acting, any more than your knowledge that you are sitting down caused you to sit down or prevents you from getting up if you willed to do it. Our Blessed Mother could have refused the dignity of becoming the Mother of God, as Judas could have resisted the temptation to betray. The fact that God knew what each would do did not make them act the way they did.
Because there is no future in God, foreknowing is not forecausing. You may know the stock market very well and, such a stock will sell for 50 points in three months. In three months it does reach 50 points. Did you cause it to reach 50 points, or did you merely foreknow it? You may be in a tower where you can see a man advancing in the distance who has never been over that terrain before. You know that before he reaches the bower he must cross that ditch, wade that pond, tramp those bushes, and climb that hill. You foresee all the possibilities, but you do not cause him to cross those obstacles.
The following story illustrates the fallacy of predestination without freedom. In the colonial days of our country there was a wife who believed in a peculiar kind of predestination, which left no room for human freedom. Her husband, who did not share her eccentricities, one day left for the market. He came back after a few minutes saying he forgot his gun. She said: "You are either predestined to be shot by an Indian, or you are not predestined to be shot. If you are predestined to be shot, the gun will do you no good. If you are not predestined to be shot, you will not need it. Therefore do not take your gun." But he answered: "Suppose I am predestined to be shot by an Indian on condition I do not have my gun?" And that was sound religion. It allows for human freedom. We are our own creators. To those who ask: "If God knew I would lose my soul, why did He make me?" the answer is: "God did not make you as a lost soul. You make yourself." The universe is moral and therefore conditional: "Behold I stand at the door and knock." God knocks! He breaks down no doors. The latch is on our side - not God's.
2. - God allows or permits evil but always for the reason of a greater good related to His love and the salvation of our souls.
God does permit evil. Our Lord Jesus told Judas: "This is your hour." - Luke 22:53 - Evil does have its hour. All that it can do within that hour is to put out the lights of the world. But God has His day. The evil of the world is inseparably from human freedom, and hence the cost of destroying the world's evil or stopping this war would be the destruction of human freedom. Certainly none of us wants to pay that high price, particularly since God would never permit evil unless He could draw some good from it.
God can draw good out of evil because while the power of doing evil is ours, the effects of our evil deeds are outside of our control and therefore in the hands of God. The brethren of Joseph were free to toss him into a well, but from that point on Joseph was in God's hands. Rightly did he say to his brothers: "You thought evil against me; but God turned it into good...." - Gen. 50:20 -
The evil which God permits must not be judged by its immediate effects, but rather by its ultimate effects. When you go to a theatre you do not walk out because you see a good man suffering in the first act. You give the dramatists credit for a plot. Why can you not do that much with God. The mouse in the piano cannot understand why anyone should disturb his gnawing at the keys by making weird sounds. Much less can our puny minds grasp the plan of God. The slaughter of the Innocents probably saved many boys from growing up into men who on Good Friday would have shouted, "Crucify Him." The physician would not permit an operation if he could not draw health from it and God would not permit evil unless He could draw good from it.
3. - We must do everything within our power to fulfill God's will as it is made known to us by His Mystical Body, the commandments, and our lawfully constituted superiors, and we must also fulfill our duties flowing from our state of life. But everything that is outside our power, we must abandon and surrender to His Holy will.
Notice the distinction between within our power and outside our power. There is to be no fatalism. Some things are under our control. We are not to be like the man who perilously walked the railing of a ship in a storm at sea saying: "I am a fatalist! I believe that when your time comes, there is nothing you can do about it." What is wrong in fatalism is its failure to recognize that, within certain limits, our will can affect the events of life. It would be wrong for us, then, not to do our very best to make that course one which does good to our neighbor and renders glory to God. It is God's will that men should have a free will which they can use in subordination to His and thereby be happy. There was much wisdom in the preacher who said: "You run up against a brick wall every now and then during life. If God wants you to go through that wall, it is up to God to make the hole."
But we are here concerned with those things outside our power, for example, sickness, accidents, bumps on buses, trampled toes in subways, the barbed word of a fellow worker, rain on picnic days, the death of loved one on your wedding day, cold on vacation, the loss of your purse, and moth holes in your suit. God would have prevented any of these things. He could have stopped your headache, prevented a bullet from hitting your boy, forestalled cramps during a swim, and killed the germ that laid you low. But if He did not, it was for a superior reason. Therefore say: "God's will be done."
If you tell an Irishman it is a bad day, nine times out of ten he will answer: "It's a good day to save your soul." It is one of the paradoxes of creation that you gain control by submission.
Does not the scientist gain control over nature by humbly sitting down before the facts of nature and being docile to its teaching? In like manner, surrender yourself to God, and all is yours. Even the irritations of life can be made a stepping stones to salvation. An oyster develops a pearl because a gain of sand irritates it. Cease complaining about your pains and aches. When anyone asks, "How are you?" remember it is not a question, it is a greeting. An act of thanksgiving when things go against our will means more than a thousand acts of thanksgiving when things go according to our will.
Every person in the world is possessed: some are possessed by the devil, some are possessed by self, others are possessed by God.
This broadcast is an appeal to give your to God as if it were yours no longer, for your will is yours only to make it His. Pray not to change God's will; pray rather to change your own. Measure not God's Goodness by His readiness to do your will.
Shall we call Him "Father" and still not believe He wills what is best for His children? Think not that you could do more good for souls if you were well, or you had another position. What matters in life is not where we are but whether we are doing God's will.
Trust not in God because you are good, but because He is good and you are not. Often during the day say: "God loves me, and He is on my side, by my side."
In wartime, do not ask: "If the Japanese and the English, the Germans and the Americans, pray to God; on whose side is God?" For the answer to this question is: "If we all prayed as we ought, we would all be on the same side: "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven."
Neither ask: "Why do nations which love God fight one another?" The answer is: "They don't." You see how important is the love of God.
Page 2
If you wish to donate. Thank You. God bless.
By bank transfer/cheque deposit:
Name: Alex Chan Kok Wah
Bank: Public Bank Berhad account no: 4076577113
Country: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
I have through years of reading, pondering, reflecting and contemplating, the 3 things that last; FAITH . HOPE . LOVE and I would like to made available my sharing from the many thinkers, authors, scholars and theologians whose ideas and thoughts I have borrowed. God be with them always. Amen!
I STILL HAVE MANY THINGS TO SAY TO YOU BUT THEY WOULD BE TOO MUCH FOR YOU NOW. BUT WHEN THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH COMES, HE WILL LEAD YOU TO THE COMPLETE TRUTH, SINCE HE WILL NOT BE SPEAKING AS FROM HIMSELF, BUT WILL SAY ONLY WHAT HE HAS LEARNT; AND HE WILL TELL YOU OF THE THINGS TO COME.
HE WILL GLORIFY ME, SINCE ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. EVERYTHING THE FATHER HAS IS MINE; THAT IS WHY I SAID: ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. - JOHN 16:12-15 -
Thursday, May 10, 2012
Have you ever noticed the tremendous disparity of point of view between those possess the Divine Faith and those who have it not? Have you ever observed when discussing important subjects, such as pain, sorrow, sin, death, marriage, children, education, that the point of view of faith is now poles apart from what is called the modern view?
It was not so many years ago that those who rejected many Christian truths were considered off the reservation; for example, the divorced who remarried, the atheists, the enemies of the family, and so forth. But today it is those with faith who are considered off the reservation. It is the others who are on it.
Why this difference in point of view between those who have faith, and those who have it not? It is due to the fact that a soul in the state of grace has its intellect illumined, which enables it to perceive new truths beyond reason.
You have exactly the same eyes at night as you have in the day, but you cannot see at night, because you lack the additional light of the sun. So too, let two minds with identically the same education and the same mental capacities look on a Host enthroned on an altar. The one sees bread, the other sees Christ - not, of course, with the eyes of the flesh, but with the eyes of faith. Let them both look on death: one sees the end of a biological entity, the other an immortal creature being judges by God on how it used its freedom. The reason for the difference is: One has a light which the other lacks, namely, the light of faith.
What then is faith? Faith is not believing that something will happen, nor is it the acceptance of what is contrary to reason, nor is it an intellectual recognition which a man might give to something he does not understand or which his reason cannot prove, for example, relativity. Rather, faith is the acceptance of a truth on the authority of God revealing. Assisted by the grace of God, we believe as true of these things is clearly evident from reason alone, but because of the authority of God, who cannot deceive nor be deceived.
You believe not because of the arguments; they were only a necessary preliminary. You believe because God said it. The torch now burns by its own brilliance.
Would you like to know four things which faith will do for you?
1. - It will perfect your reason. Faith is your reason which a telescope is to your eye. It opens vaster fields of vision and new worlds, which before were hidden and unknown. As reason is the perfection of the senses, so faith is the perfection of reason. (Incidentally, reason alone will not get us out of the mess we are in today, because reason unaided cannot function well enough to handle the problems created by sin, by loss of faith, and by misuse of reason.)
Faith is not a dam which prevents the flow of the river of thought; it is a levee which prevents unreason from overflowing the countryside of sanity. Faith will enlarge your knowledge, because there are so many truths beyond the power of reason. You can tell something of the skill, the power, the technique of an artist by looking at his painting, but you could never know his inmost thoughts unless he revealed them to you. In a like manner, you can know something of the Power and Wisdom of God by looking at His universe, but you could never know His Thoughts unless He told you. And the telling of the inner life is Revelation, which we know by faith.
Without faith many minds are like flattened Japanese lanterns, a riot of colour without pattern or purpose, a conglomeration of bits of information, but with no unifying philosophy of life. What a candle on the inside of the lantern will do to its pattern, that faith will do for your reason, that is, converge all your different pieces of knowledge into one absorbing philosophy of life which leads to God. That incidentally is why faith does not necessarily require an education. Faith is an education. God is our Teacher. That is why a little child in the first grade who knows God made him and that he is made for God is far wiser than a university professor who can explain an atom, but does not know why he is here or where he is going.
Unless you know why you are living, there is not much purpose in living.
2. - Faith will perfect your freedom. Our Divine Lord said: "...truth shall make you free." - John 8:32 - If you know the truth about an airplane, you are free to fly it; if you know the truth about a triangle, that it has three sides, you are free to draw it. Try to be "broad-minded" and give a square five sides instead of four, as they did in the Dark Ages, and see where you end. Turning the words of Our Lord around, they mean that if you do not know the truth you will be enslaved. That is why, as the world denies Absolute Truth and Righteousness, it becomes enslaved. Socialism, for example, is nothing but the compulsory organization of a chaos by the repudiation of Truth and Morality. Never, therefore, believe that you lose your freedom by accepting the Faith.
A few years ago, I received a letter from a radio listener who said: "I imagine that you from your earliest youth were surrounded by priests and nuns who never permitted you to think for yourself. Why not throw off the yoke of Rome and begin to be free."
I answered him thus: "In the centre of a sea was an island on which children played and danced and sang. Around that island were great high walls which had stood for centuries. One day some strange
men came to the island in individual row boats, and said to the children: 'Who put up those walls? Can you not see that they are destroying you freedom? Tear them down!' The children tore them down! Now if you go there, you will find all the children huddled together in the centre of the island, afraid to play, afraid to sing, afraid to dance - afraid of falling into the sea."
Oh! how right was Our Lord. It is the truth that makes us free.
3.- Faith assures equality to all men as children of God. Have you not noticed, if you have worked for or with a person of deep faith in Christ, that you have always been treated with gentleness, equality, and charity? You cannot point to a single person who truly loves God who is mean to his fellow man. A man who does not believe in God will soon cease to believe in man.
In vain will the world for equality until it has seen men through the eyes of faith. Faith teaches that all men, however poor, or ignorant, or crippled, however maimed, ugly, or degraded they may be, all bear within themselves the image of God, and have been bought by the precious blood of the Lord Jesus Christ. As this truth is forgotten, men are valued only because of what they can do, not because of what they are. And since men cannot do things equally well - for example, play violins, fly planes, teach philosophy, or stoke an engine - they are and must remain forever unequal. From the Christian point of view, all may not have the same right to do certain jobs, because they lack the capacity - but all men have the right to a decent, purposeful, and comfortable life in the structure of the community for which God has fitted them, and first and foremost of all, because of what they are: persons made to the image and likeness of God.
The false idea of the superiority of certain races and classes is due to the forgetfulness of the spiritual foundations of equality. We of the Western world have been rightly proud of the fact that we have a civilization superior to others. But we have given the wrong reason for that superiority. We assume that we are superiority because we are white. We are not. We are superiority because we are Christian. The moment we cease to be Christian we will revert to the barbarism from which we came. In like manner, if the black and brown and yellow races of the world become converted to Christ, they will produce a civilization and culture which will surpass ours if we forget Him who truly made us great. It is conceivable, if we could project ourselves a thousand years in the future, and then look back in retrospect over those thousand years, that we might see in China the record of a Christian civilization which would make us forget Notre Dame and Chartres.
4. - Finally, faith will give you peace of soul. In the multitudinous duties of modern life you will do nothing which you cannot offer to God as a prayer; your sense of values will change; you will think less of what you can store away, and more about what you can take with you when you die; your rebellious moods will give way to resignation; your tendency to discouragement, which is due to pride, will become an additional reason for throwing yourself, like a wounded child, into the Father's loving arms; you will think of God's love as an unalterable dedication to goodness, to which you submit even when it hurts.
If you are sick you will see Christ's pierced hand laid upon you, and offer your sickness for your own sins and the sins of the world.
If your heart has been broken by infidelity, you will unite your loneliness with the Master who was deserted by His disciples who walked with Him no more.
If you are the victim of another's sin, then like the young woman who wrote me, the tragedy will be suffered through life for the redemption of the one who caused her ruin.
If your son is away in service, you will follow him, not by letter alone, but by prayer, as you both find a common centre in God.
If you lost your boy in war, then you who spared not a son to save a world from tyranny, will be solaced by the Heavenly Father who spared not His Son to redeem a world from sin.
Faith will not explain why these tragedies happen, for if it did where would be room for the merit of faith? But it does give you the insight and strength to bear them. Anything in life can be borne if there is someone you love. The reason we are at war is because there are not enough people in love - with God.
Page 1
If you wish to donate. Thank You. God bless.
By bank transfer/cheque deposit:
Name: Alex Chan Kok Wah
Bank: Public Bank Berhad account no: 4076577113
Country: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
I have through years of reading, pondering, reflecting and contemplating, the 3 things that last; FAITH . HOPE . LOVE and I would like to made available my sharing from the many thinkers, authors, scholars and theologians whose ideas and thoughts I have borrowed. God be with them always. Amen!
I STILL HAVE MANY THINGS TO SAY TO YOU BUT THEY WOULD BE TOO MUCH FOR YOU NOW. BUT WHEN THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH COMES, HE WILL LEAD YOU TO THE COMPLETE TRUTH, SINCE HE WILL NOT BE SPEAKING AS FROM HIMSELF, BUT WILL SAY ONLY WHAT HE HAS LEARNT; AND HE WILL TELL YOU OF THE THINGS TO COME.
HE WILL GLORIFY ME, SINCE ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. EVERYTHING THE FATHER HAS IS MINE; THAT IS WHY I SAID: ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. - JOHN 16:12-15 -
It was not so many years ago that those who rejected many Christian truths were considered off the reservation; for example, the divorced who remarried, the atheists, the enemies of the family, and so forth. But today it is those with faith who are considered off the reservation. It is the others who are on it.
Why this difference in point of view between those who have faith, and those who have it not? It is due to the fact that a soul in the state of grace has its intellect illumined, which enables it to perceive new truths beyond reason.
You have exactly the same eyes at night as you have in the day, but you cannot see at night, because you lack the additional light of the sun. So too, let two minds with identically the same education and the same mental capacities look on a Host enthroned on an altar. The one sees bread, the other sees Christ - not, of course, with the eyes of the flesh, but with the eyes of faith. Let them both look on death: one sees the end of a biological entity, the other an immortal creature being judges by God on how it used its freedom. The reason for the difference is: One has a light which the other lacks, namely, the light of faith.
What then is faith? Faith is not believing that something will happen, nor is it the acceptance of what is contrary to reason, nor is it an intellectual recognition which a man might give to something he does not understand or which his reason cannot prove, for example, relativity. Rather, faith is the acceptance of a truth on the authority of God revealing. Assisted by the grace of God, we believe as true of these things is clearly evident from reason alone, but because of the authority of God, who cannot deceive nor be deceived.
You believe not because of the arguments; they were only a necessary preliminary. You believe because God said it. The torch now burns by its own brilliance.
Would you like to know four things which faith will do for you?
1. - It will perfect your reason. Faith is your reason which a telescope is to your eye. It opens vaster fields of vision and new worlds, which before were hidden and unknown. As reason is the perfection of the senses, so faith is the perfection of reason. (Incidentally, reason alone will not get us out of the mess we are in today, because reason unaided cannot function well enough to handle the problems created by sin, by loss of faith, and by misuse of reason.)
Faith is not a dam which prevents the flow of the river of thought; it is a levee which prevents unreason from overflowing the countryside of sanity. Faith will enlarge your knowledge, because there are so many truths beyond the power of reason. You can tell something of the skill, the power, the technique of an artist by looking at his painting, but you could never know his inmost thoughts unless he revealed them to you. In a like manner, you can know something of the Power and Wisdom of God by looking at His universe, but you could never know His Thoughts unless He told you. And the telling of the inner life is Revelation, which we know by faith.
Without faith many minds are like flattened Japanese lanterns, a riot of colour without pattern or purpose, a conglomeration of bits of information, but with no unifying philosophy of life. What a candle on the inside of the lantern will do to its pattern, that faith will do for your reason, that is, converge all your different pieces of knowledge into one absorbing philosophy of life which leads to God. That incidentally is why faith does not necessarily require an education. Faith is an education. God is our Teacher. That is why a little child in the first grade who knows God made him and that he is made for God is far wiser than a university professor who can explain an atom, but does not know why he is here or where he is going.
Unless you know why you are living, there is not much purpose in living.
2. - Faith will perfect your freedom. Our Divine Lord said: "...truth shall make you free." - John 8:32 - If you know the truth about an airplane, you are free to fly it; if you know the truth about a triangle, that it has three sides, you are free to draw it. Try to be "broad-minded" and give a square five sides instead of four, as they did in the Dark Ages, and see where you end. Turning the words of Our Lord around, they mean that if you do not know the truth you will be enslaved. That is why, as the world denies Absolute Truth and Righteousness, it becomes enslaved. Socialism, for example, is nothing but the compulsory organization of a chaos by the repudiation of Truth and Morality. Never, therefore, believe that you lose your freedom by accepting the Faith.
A few years ago, I received a letter from a radio listener who said: "I imagine that you from your earliest youth were surrounded by priests and nuns who never permitted you to think for yourself. Why not throw off the yoke of Rome and begin to be free."
I answered him thus: "In the centre of a sea was an island on which children played and danced and sang. Around that island were great high walls which had stood for centuries. One day some strange
men came to the island in individual row boats, and said to the children: 'Who put up those walls? Can you not see that they are destroying you freedom? Tear them down!' The children tore them down! Now if you go there, you will find all the children huddled together in the centre of the island, afraid to play, afraid to sing, afraid to dance - afraid of falling into the sea."
Oh! how right was Our Lord. It is the truth that makes us free.
3.- Faith assures equality to all men as children of God. Have you not noticed, if you have worked for or with a person of deep faith in Christ, that you have always been treated with gentleness, equality, and charity? You cannot point to a single person who truly loves God who is mean to his fellow man. A man who does not believe in God will soon cease to believe in man.
In vain will the world for equality until it has seen men through the eyes of faith. Faith teaches that all men, however poor, or ignorant, or crippled, however maimed, ugly, or degraded they may be, all bear within themselves the image of God, and have been bought by the precious blood of the Lord Jesus Christ. As this truth is forgotten, men are valued only because of what they can do, not because of what they are. And since men cannot do things equally well - for example, play violins, fly planes, teach philosophy, or stoke an engine - they are and must remain forever unequal. From the Christian point of view, all may not have the same right to do certain jobs, because they lack the capacity - but all men have the right to a decent, purposeful, and comfortable life in the structure of the community for which God has fitted them, and first and foremost of all, because of what they are: persons made to the image and likeness of God.
The false idea of the superiority of certain races and classes is due to the forgetfulness of the spiritual foundations of equality. We of the Western world have been rightly proud of the fact that we have a civilization superior to others. But we have given the wrong reason for that superiority. We assume that we are superiority because we are white. We are not. We are superiority because we are Christian. The moment we cease to be Christian we will revert to the barbarism from which we came. In like manner, if the black and brown and yellow races of the world become converted to Christ, they will produce a civilization and culture which will surpass ours if we forget Him who truly made us great. It is conceivable, if we could project ourselves a thousand years in the future, and then look back in retrospect over those thousand years, that we might see in China the record of a Christian civilization which would make us forget Notre Dame and Chartres.
4. - Finally, faith will give you peace of soul. In the multitudinous duties of modern life you will do nothing which you cannot offer to God as a prayer; your sense of values will change; you will think less of what you can store away, and more about what you can take with you when you die; your rebellious moods will give way to resignation; your tendency to discouragement, which is due to pride, will become an additional reason for throwing yourself, like a wounded child, into the Father's loving arms; you will think of God's love as an unalterable dedication to goodness, to which you submit even when it hurts.
If you are sick you will see Christ's pierced hand laid upon you, and offer your sickness for your own sins and the sins of the world.
If your heart has been broken by infidelity, you will unite your loneliness with the Master who was deserted by His disciples who walked with Him no more.
If you are the victim of another's sin, then like the young woman who wrote me, the tragedy will be suffered through life for the redemption of the one who caused her ruin.
If your son is away in service, you will follow him, not by letter alone, but by prayer, as you both find a common centre in God.
If you lost your boy in war, then you who spared not a son to save a world from tyranny, will be solaced by the Heavenly Father who spared not His Son to redeem a world from sin.
Faith will not explain why these tragedies happen, for if it did where would be room for the merit of faith? But it does give you the insight and strength to bear them. Anything in life can be borne if there is someone you love. The reason we are at war is because there are not enough people in love - with God.
Page 1
If you wish to donate. Thank You. God bless.
By bank transfer/cheque deposit:
Name: Alex Chan Kok Wah
Bank: Public Bank Berhad account no: 4076577113
Country: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
I have through years of reading, pondering, reflecting and contemplating, the 3 things that last; FAITH . HOPE . LOVE and I would like to made available my sharing from the many thinkers, authors, scholars and theologians whose ideas and thoughts I have borrowed. God be with them always. Amen!
I STILL HAVE MANY THINGS TO SAY TO YOU BUT THEY WOULD BE TOO MUCH FOR YOU NOW. BUT WHEN THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH COMES, HE WILL LEAD YOU TO THE COMPLETE TRUTH, SINCE HE WILL NOT BE SPEAKING AS FROM HIMSELF, BUT WILL SAY ONLY WHAT HE HAS LEARNT; AND HE WILL TELL YOU OF THE THINGS TO COME.
HE WILL GLORIFY ME, SINCE ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. EVERYTHING THE FATHER HAS IS MINE; THAT IS WHY I SAID: ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. - JOHN 16:12-15 -
Tuesday, May 8, 2012
The nature of true love, or authentic love is much more than a surface relationship; it extends to the very core of one's being. Love like this cannot be bought and sold like some commodity on the open market.
Aphorism of a sage : Were a man to offer all the wealth of his house to buy love, contempt is all he would purchase. - The Song Of Songs -
With king Solomon large harem, how could he write such a beautiful love song to one specific wife? He had many wives, but the Shulamite woman may have been the only one with whom he enjoyed a warm, enriching relationship. Perhaps his union with the Shulamite woman was the only authentic marriage relationship which he ever know. Most of his marriages were political arrangements, designed to seal treaties and trade agreements with other nations. In contrast, the Shulamite woman was not a cultured princess but a lowly vineyard keeper whose skin had been darkened by her long exposure to the sun. - The Song Of Songs 1:6 - Yet, she was the bride to whom king Solomon declared, "How much better than wine is your love, and the scent of your perfumes than all spices."
What spells lie in your love,
my sister, my promised bride!
How delicious is your love, more delicious than wine!
How fragrant your perfumes,
more fragrant than all other spices! - The Song Of Songs 4:10 -
The great message of the Song of Songs is the beauty of love between a man and a woman [male and female] as experienced in the relationship of marriage. In its frank but beautiful language, the song praises the mutual love which husband and wife feel toward each other in this highest of all human relationships.
The sexual and physical side of marriage is a natural and proper part of God's plan, reflecting His purpose and desire for the human race. This is the same truth so evident at the beginning of time in the Creation itself. God created man and woman [male and female] and brought them together to serve as companions and to share their lives with one another. A bold, Yes! to the beauty and sanctity of married love.
Yahweh God built the rib he had taken from the man into a woman, and brought her to the man. The man exclaimed:
"This at last is bone from my bones,
and flesh from my flesh!
This is to be called woman,
for this was taken from man."
This is why a man leaves his father and mother and joins himself to his wife, and they become one body. - Gen. 2:22-24 -
Some Pharisees approached Jesus, and to test him they said, 'Is it against the Law for a man to divorce his wife on any pretext whatever?' He answered, 'Have you not read that the creator from the beginning made them male and female and that he said: This is why a man leave father and mother, and cling to his wife, and the two become one body? There are no longer two, therefore, but one body. So then, what God has united, man must not divide.' - Matt. 19:3-6 - Mark 10:2-12 -
You know, surely, that your bodied are members making up the body of Christ; do not think I can take parts of Christ's body and join them to the body of a prostitute? Never! As you know, a man who goes with a prostitute is one body with her, since the two, as it is said, become one flesh. But anyone who is joined to the Lord is one spirit with him.
Keep away from fornication. All the other sins are committed outside the body; but to fornicate is to sin against your own body. Your body, you know is the temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you since you received him from God. Your are not your own property; you have been bought and paid for. That is why you should use your body for the glory of God. - 1Cor. 6:15-20 -
A man never hates his own body, but he feeds it and looks after it; and that is the way Christ treats the Church, because it is his body - and we are its living parts. For this reason, a man must leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two will become one body. This mystery has many implications; but I am saying it applies to Christ and the Church. To sum up; you too, each one of you, must love his wife as he loves himself; and let every wife respect her husband. - Eph. 5:29-33 -
Agape, and authentic love is possible in the world because God brought love into being and planted that emotions in the hearts of His people. Even husbands and wives should remember that the love which they share for one another is not a product of their human goodness or kindness. We are able to love because the love of God is working in our lives.
My dear people,
let us love one another
since love comes from God
and everyone who loves is begotten by God and knows God.
Anyone who fails to love can never have known God,
because God is love.
God love for us was revealed
when God sent into the world his only Son
so that we could have life through him;
this the love I mean:
not our love for God,
but God love for us when he sent his Son
to be the sacrifice that takes our sins away. - 1John 4:7-10 -
Page 1
If you wish to donate. Thank You. God bless.
By bank transfer/cheque deposit:
Name: Alex Chan Kok Wah
Bank: Public Bank Berhad account no: 4076577113
Country: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
I have through years of reading, pondering, reflecting and contemplating, the 3 things that last; FAITH . HOPE . LOVE and I would like to made available my sharing from the many thinkers, authors, scholars and theologians whose ideas and thoughts I have borrowed. God be with them always. Amen!
I STILL HAVE MANY THINGS TO SAY TO YOU BUT THEY WOULD BE TOO MUCH FOR YOU NOW. BUT WHEN THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH COMES, HE WILL LEAD YOU TO THE COMPLETE TRUTH, SINCE HE WILL NOT BE SPEAKING AS FROM HIMSELF, BUT WILL SAY ONLY WHAT HE HAS LEARNT; AND HE WILL TELL YOU OF THE THINGS TO COME.
HE WILL GLORIFY ME, SINCE ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. EVERYTHING THE FATHER HAS IS MINE; THAT IS WHY I SAID: ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. - JOHN 16:12-15 -
Aphorism of a sage : Were a man to offer all the wealth of his house to buy love, contempt is all he would purchase. - The Song Of Songs -
With king Solomon large harem, how could he write such a beautiful love song to one specific wife? He had many wives, but the Shulamite woman may have been the only one with whom he enjoyed a warm, enriching relationship. Perhaps his union with the Shulamite woman was the only authentic marriage relationship which he ever know. Most of his marriages were political arrangements, designed to seal treaties and trade agreements with other nations. In contrast, the Shulamite woman was not a cultured princess but a lowly vineyard keeper whose skin had been darkened by her long exposure to the sun. - The Song Of Songs 1:6 - Yet, she was the bride to whom king Solomon declared, "How much better than wine is your love, and the scent of your perfumes than all spices."
What spells lie in your love,
my sister, my promised bride!
How delicious is your love, more delicious than wine!
How fragrant your perfumes,
more fragrant than all other spices! - The Song Of Songs 4:10 -
The great message of the Song of Songs is the beauty of love between a man and a woman [male and female] as experienced in the relationship of marriage. In its frank but beautiful language, the song praises the mutual love which husband and wife feel toward each other in this highest of all human relationships.
The sexual and physical side of marriage is a natural and proper part of God's plan, reflecting His purpose and desire for the human race. This is the same truth so evident at the beginning of time in the Creation itself. God created man and woman [male and female] and brought them together to serve as companions and to share their lives with one another. A bold, Yes! to the beauty and sanctity of married love.
Yahweh God built the rib he had taken from the man into a woman, and brought her to the man. The man exclaimed:
"This at last is bone from my bones,
and flesh from my flesh!
This is to be called woman,
for this was taken from man."
This is why a man leaves his father and mother and joins himself to his wife, and they become one body. - Gen. 2:22-24 -
Some Pharisees approached Jesus, and to test him they said, 'Is it against the Law for a man to divorce his wife on any pretext whatever?' He answered, 'Have you not read that the creator from the beginning made them male and female and that he said: This is why a man leave father and mother, and cling to his wife, and the two become one body? There are no longer two, therefore, but one body. So then, what God has united, man must not divide.' - Matt. 19:3-6 - Mark 10:2-12 -
You know, surely, that your bodied are members making up the body of Christ; do not think I can take parts of Christ's body and join them to the body of a prostitute? Never! As you know, a man who goes with a prostitute is one body with her, since the two, as it is said, become one flesh. But anyone who is joined to the Lord is one spirit with him.
Keep away from fornication. All the other sins are committed outside the body; but to fornicate is to sin against your own body. Your body, you know is the temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you since you received him from God. Your are not your own property; you have been bought and paid for. That is why you should use your body for the glory of God. - 1Cor. 6:15-20 -
A man never hates his own body, but he feeds it and looks after it; and that is the way Christ treats the Church, because it is his body - and we are its living parts. For this reason, a man must leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two will become one body. This mystery has many implications; but I am saying it applies to Christ and the Church. To sum up; you too, each one of you, must love his wife as he loves himself; and let every wife respect her husband. - Eph. 5:29-33 -
Agape, and authentic love is possible in the world because God brought love into being and planted that emotions in the hearts of His people. Even husbands and wives should remember that the love which they share for one another is not a product of their human goodness or kindness. We are able to love because the love of God is working in our lives.
My dear people,
let us love one another
since love comes from God
and everyone who loves is begotten by God and knows God.
Anyone who fails to love can never have known God,
because God is love.
God love for us was revealed
when God sent into the world his only Son
so that we could have life through him;
this the love I mean:
not our love for God,
but God love for us when he sent his Son
to be the sacrifice that takes our sins away. - 1John 4:7-10 -
Page 1
If you wish to donate. Thank You. God bless.
By bank transfer/cheque deposit:
Name: Alex Chan Kok Wah
Bank: Public Bank Berhad account no: 4076577113
Country: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
I have through years of reading, pondering, reflecting and contemplating, the 3 things that last; FAITH . HOPE . LOVE and I would like to made available my sharing from the many thinkers, authors, scholars and theologians whose ideas and thoughts I have borrowed. God be with them always. Amen!
I STILL HAVE MANY THINGS TO SAY TO YOU BUT THEY WOULD BE TOO MUCH FOR YOU NOW. BUT WHEN THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH COMES, HE WILL LEAD YOU TO THE COMPLETE TRUTH, SINCE HE WILL NOT BE SPEAKING AS FROM HIMSELF, BUT WILL SAY ONLY WHAT HE HAS LEARNT; AND HE WILL TELL YOU OF THE THINGS TO COME.
HE WILL GLORIFY ME, SINCE ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. EVERYTHING THE FATHER HAS IS MINE; THAT IS WHY I SAID: ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. - JOHN 16:12-15 -
Sunday, May 6, 2012
3. Summary: The Nature Of Jesus' Resurrection And Its Historical Significance
Let us ask once more, by way of summary, what it was like to encounter the risen Lord. The following distinctions are important:
Jesus did not simply return to normal biological life as one who, by the laws of biology, would eventually have to die again.
Jesus is not a ghost ("spirit"). In other words, he does not belong to the realm of the dead but is somehow able to reveal him in the realm of the living.
Nevertheless, the encounters with the risen Lord are not the same as mystical experiences, in which the human spirit is momentarily drawn aloft out of itself and perceives the realm of the divine and eternal, only to return then to the normal horizon of its existence. Mystical experience is a temporary removal of the soul's spatial and cognitive limitations. But it is not an encounter with a person coming toward me from without. Saint Paul clearly distinguished his mystical experiences, such as his elevation to the third heaven described in 2Corinthians 12:1-4 - from his encounter with the risen Lord on the road to Damascus, which was a historical event - an encounter with a living person.
On the basis of all this biblical evidence, what are we now in a position to say about the true nature of Christ's Resurrection?
It is a historical event that nevertheless bursts open the dimensions of history and transcends it. Perhaps we may draw upon analogical language here, inadequate in many ways, yet still able to open up a path toward understanding: as already anticipated in the first section of this chapter, we could regard the Resurrection as something akin to a radical "evolutionary leap" in which a new dimension of life emerges, a new dimension of human existence.
Indeed, matter itself is remolded into a new type of reality. the man Jesus, complete with his body, now belongs totally to the sphere of the divine and eternal. From now on, as Tertullian once said, "spirit and blood" have a place within God. (cf. De Resurrect. Mort. 51:3, CCSL II, 994) Even if a man by his nature is created for immortality, it is only now that the place exists in which his immortal soul can find its "space" its "bodiliness" in which immortality takes on its meaning as communion with God and with the whole of reconciled mankind. This is what is meant by those passages in Saint Paul's prison letters - Col. 1:12-23; Eph. 1:3-23 - that speak of the cosmic body of Christ, indicating thereby that Christ's transformed body is also the place where men enter into communion with God and with one another and are thus able to live definitely in the fullness of indestructible life. Since ourselves have no experience of such renewed and transformed type or matter, or such a renewed and transformed kind of life, it is not surprising that it oversteps the boundaries of what we are able to conceive.
Essential, then, is the fact that Jesus' Resurrection was not just about some deceased individual coming back to life at a certain point, but that an ontological leap occurred, one that touches being as such, opening up a dimension that affects us all, creating for all of us a new space of life, a new space of being in union with God.
It is in these terms that the question of the historicity of the Resurrection should be addressed. On the one hand, we must acknowledge that it is of the essence of the Resurrection precisely to burst open history and usher in a new dimension commonly described as a eschatological. The Resurrection opens up the new space that transcends history and creates the definitive. In this sense, it follows that Resurrection is not the same kind of historical event as the birth or crucifixion of Jesus. It is something new, a new type of event.
Yet at the same time it must be understood that the Resurrection does not simply stand outside or above history. As something that breaks out of history and transcends it, the Resurrection nevertheless has its origin within history and up to a certain point still belongs there. Perhaps we could put it this way: Jesus' Resurrection points beyond history but has left a footprint within history. Therefore it can be attested by witnesses as an event of an entirely new kind.
Indeed, the apostolic preaching with all its boldness and passion would be unthinkable unless the witnesses had experienced a real encounter, coming to them from outside, with something entirely new and unforseen, namely, the self-revelation and verbal communication of the risen Christ. Only a real event of a radically new quality could possibly have given rise to the apostolic preaching, which cannot be explained on the basis of speculations or inner, mystical experiences. In all its boldness and originality, it draws life from the impact of an event that no one had invented, an event that surpassed all that could be imagined.
To conclude, all of us are constantly inclined to ask the question that Saint Jude Thaddaeus put to Jesus during the Last Supper: "Lord, how is it that you will manifest yourself to us, and not to the world?" - John 14:22 - Why, indeed, did you not forcefully resist your enemies who brought you to the Cross? - we might well ask. Why did you not show them with incontrovertible power that you are the living one, the Lord of life and death? Why did you reveal yourself only to a small flock of disciples, upon whose testimony we must now rely?
The question applies not only to the Resurrection, but to the whole manner of God's revelation in the world. Why only to Abraham and not to the mighty of the world? Why only to Israel and not irrefutably to all the peoples of the earth?
It is part of the mystery of God that he acts so gently, that he only gradually builds up his history within the great history of mankind; that he becomes man and so can be overlooked by his contemporaries and by the decisive forces within history; that he suffers and dies and that, having risen again, he chooses to come to mankind only through the faith of the disciples to whom he reveals himself; that he continues to knock gently at the doors of our hearts and slowly opens our eyes if we open our doors to him.
And yet - is not this the truly divine way? Not to overwhelm with external power, but to give freedom, to offer and elicit love. And if we really think about it, is it not what seems so small that is truly great? Does not a ray of light issue from Jesus, growing brighter across the centuries, that could not come from any mere man and through which the light of God truly shines into the world? Could the apostolic preaching have found faith and built up a worldwide community unless the power of truth had been at work within it?
If we attend to the witnesses with listening hearts and open ourselves to the signs by which the Lord again and again authenticates both them and himself, then we know that he is truly risen. He is alive. Let us entrust ourselves to him, knowing that we are on the right path. With Thomas let us place our hands into Jesus' pierced side and confess: "My Lord and my God!" - John 20:28 -
BY HIS HOLINESS POPE BENEDICT XVI
Page 4
If you wish to donate. Thank You. God bless.
By bank transfer/cheque deposit:
Name: Alex Chan Kok Wah
Bank: Public Bank Berhad account no: 4076577113
Country: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
I have through years of reading, pondering, reflecting and contemplating, the 3 things that last; FAITH . HOPE . LOVE and I would like to made available my sharing from the many thinkers, authors, scholars and theologians whose ideas and thoughts I have borrowed. God be with them always. Amen!
I STILL HAVE MANY THINGS TO SAY TO YOU BUT THEY WOULD BE TOO MUCH FOR YOU NOW. BUT WHEN THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH COMES, HE WILL LEAD YOU TO THE COMPLETE TRUTH, SINCE HE WILL NOT BE SPEAKING AS FROM HIMSELF, BUT WILL SAY ONLY WHAT HE HAS LEARNT; AND HE WILL TELL YOU OF THE THINGS TO COME.
HE WILL GLORIFY ME, SINCE ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. EVERYTHING THE FATHER HAS IS MINE; THAT IS WHY I SAID: ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. - JOHN 16:12-15 -
Let us ask once more, by way of summary, what it was like to encounter the risen Lord. The following distinctions are important:
Jesus did not simply return to normal biological life as one who, by the laws of biology, would eventually have to die again.
Jesus is not a ghost ("spirit"). In other words, he does not belong to the realm of the dead but is somehow able to reveal him in the realm of the living.
Nevertheless, the encounters with the risen Lord are not the same as mystical experiences, in which the human spirit is momentarily drawn aloft out of itself and perceives the realm of the divine and eternal, only to return then to the normal horizon of its existence. Mystical experience is a temporary removal of the soul's spatial and cognitive limitations. But it is not an encounter with a person coming toward me from without. Saint Paul clearly distinguished his mystical experiences, such as his elevation to the third heaven described in 2Corinthians 12:1-4 - from his encounter with the risen Lord on the road to Damascus, which was a historical event - an encounter with a living person.
On the basis of all this biblical evidence, what are we now in a position to say about the true nature of Christ's Resurrection?
It is a historical event that nevertheless bursts open the dimensions of history and transcends it. Perhaps we may draw upon analogical language here, inadequate in many ways, yet still able to open up a path toward understanding: as already anticipated in the first section of this chapter, we could regard the Resurrection as something akin to a radical "evolutionary leap" in which a new dimension of life emerges, a new dimension of human existence.
Indeed, matter itself is remolded into a new type of reality. the man Jesus, complete with his body, now belongs totally to the sphere of the divine and eternal. From now on, as Tertullian once said, "spirit and blood" have a place within God. (cf. De Resurrect. Mort. 51:3, CCSL II, 994) Even if a man by his nature is created for immortality, it is only now that the place exists in which his immortal soul can find its "space" its "bodiliness" in which immortality takes on its meaning as communion with God and with the whole of reconciled mankind. This is what is meant by those passages in Saint Paul's prison letters - Col. 1:12-23; Eph. 1:3-23 - that speak of the cosmic body of Christ, indicating thereby that Christ's transformed body is also the place where men enter into communion with God and with one another and are thus able to live definitely in the fullness of indestructible life. Since ourselves have no experience of such renewed and transformed type or matter, or such a renewed and transformed kind of life, it is not surprising that it oversteps the boundaries of what we are able to conceive.
Essential, then, is the fact that Jesus' Resurrection was not just about some deceased individual coming back to life at a certain point, but that an ontological leap occurred, one that touches being as such, opening up a dimension that affects us all, creating for all of us a new space of life, a new space of being in union with God.
It is in these terms that the question of the historicity of the Resurrection should be addressed. On the one hand, we must acknowledge that it is of the essence of the Resurrection precisely to burst open history and usher in a new dimension commonly described as a eschatological. The Resurrection opens up the new space that transcends history and creates the definitive. In this sense, it follows that Resurrection is not the same kind of historical event as the birth or crucifixion of Jesus. It is something new, a new type of event.
Yet at the same time it must be understood that the Resurrection does not simply stand outside or above history. As something that breaks out of history and transcends it, the Resurrection nevertheless has its origin within history and up to a certain point still belongs there. Perhaps we could put it this way: Jesus' Resurrection points beyond history but has left a footprint within history. Therefore it can be attested by witnesses as an event of an entirely new kind.
Indeed, the apostolic preaching with all its boldness and passion would be unthinkable unless the witnesses had experienced a real encounter, coming to them from outside, with something entirely new and unforseen, namely, the self-revelation and verbal communication of the risen Christ. Only a real event of a radically new quality could possibly have given rise to the apostolic preaching, which cannot be explained on the basis of speculations or inner, mystical experiences. In all its boldness and originality, it draws life from the impact of an event that no one had invented, an event that surpassed all that could be imagined.
To conclude, all of us are constantly inclined to ask the question that Saint Jude Thaddaeus put to Jesus during the Last Supper: "Lord, how is it that you will manifest yourself to us, and not to the world?" - John 14:22 - Why, indeed, did you not forcefully resist your enemies who brought you to the Cross? - we might well ask. Why did you not show them with incontrovertible power that you are the living one, the Lord of life and death? Why did you reveal yourself only to a small flock of disciples, upon whose testimony we must now rely?
The question applies not only to the Resurrection, but to the whole manner of God's revelation in the world. Why only to Abraham and not to the mighty of the world? Why only to Israel and not irrefutably to all the peoples of the earth?
It is part of the mystery of God that he acts so gently, that he only gradually builds up his history within the great history of mankind; that he becomes man and so can be overlooked by his contemporaries and by the decisive forces within history; that he suffers and dies and that, having risen again, he chooses to come to mankind only through the faith of the disciples to whom he reveals himself; that he continues to knock gently at the doors of our hearts and slowly opens our eyes if we open our doors to him.
And yet - is not this the truly divine way? Not to overwhelm with external power, but to give freedom, to offer and elicit love. And if we really think about it, is it not what seems so small that is truly great? Does not a ray of light issue from Jesus, growing brighter across the centuries, that could not come from any mere man and through which the light of God truly shines into the world? Could the apostolic preaching have found faith and built up a worldwide community unless the power of truth had been at work within it?
If we attend to the witnesses with listening hearts and open ourselves to the signs by which the Lord again and again authenticates both them and himself, then we know that he is truly risen. He is alive. Let us entrust ourselves to him, knowing that we are on the right path. With Thomas let us place our hands into Jesus' pierced side and confess: "My Lord and my God!" - John 20:28 -
BY HIS HOLINESS POPE BENEDICT XVI
Page 4
If you wish to donate. Thank You. God bless.
By bank transfer/cheque deposit:
Name: Alex Chan Kok Wah
Bank: Public Bank Berhad account no: 4076577113
Country: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
I have through years of reading, pondering, reflecting and contemplating, the 3 things that last; FAITH . HOPE . LOVE and I would like to made available my sharing from the many thinkers, authors, scholars and theologians whose ideas and thoughts I have borrowed. God be with them always. Amen!
I STILL HAVE MANY THINGS TO SAY TO YOU BUT THEY WOULD BE TOO MUCH FOR YOU NOW. BUT WHEN THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH COMES, HE WILL LEAD YOU TO THE COMPLETE TRUTH, SINCE HE WILL NOT BE SPEAKING AS FROM HIMSELF, BUT WILL SAY ONLY WHAT HE HAS LEARNT; AND HE WILL TELL YOU OF THE THINGS TO COME.
HE WILL GLORIFY ME, SINCE ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. EVERYTHING THE FATHER HAS IS MINE; THAT IS WHY I SAID: ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. - JOHN 16:12-15 -
Saturday, May 5, 2012
The Narrative Tradition - Let us now move on - having considered the most important element of the confessional tradition. Whereas the former authoritatively condenses the shared faith of Christianity in fixed formulae and insists on their binding character, down to the letter, for the whole believing community, the narrative accounts of the Resurrection appearances reflect different traditions.
They are linked to various bearers of tradition, and they can be divided geographically between Jerusalem and Galilee. They are not binding in every detail in the same way as the confessions; but by the virtue of being taken up into the Gospels, they are clearly to be regarded as valid testimony, giving content and shape to the faith. The confessions presuppose the narratives and grew out of them. They express in concentrated form the nucleus of the narrative content, and at the same time they point back toward the narratives.
Every reader will be struck immediately by the differences between the Resurrection accounts of the four Gospels. Matthew, apart from the risen Lord's appearance to the women at the empty tomb, gives only one other appearance - in Galilee to the Eleven. Luke gives only Jerusalem traditions. John tells of appearances in both Jerusalem and Galilee. None of the evangelists recounts Jesus' Resurrection itself. It is an event taking place within the mystery of God between Jesus and the Father, which for us defies description: by its very nature it lies outside human experience.
The ending of Mark poses a particular problem. According to authoritative manuscripts, the Gospel comes to a close with 16:8 - "and they went out and fled from the tomb; for trembling and astonishment had come upon them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid." The authentic text of the Gospel as it has come to us ends with the fear and trembling of the women. Previously the text had spoken of the discovery of the empty tomb by the women who came to anoint the body and of the appearance of angels who announced Jesus' Resurrection to them and urged them to tell the disciples, "and Peter, that Jesus would go before them to Galilee as he had promised.
It is impossible that the Gospel would have ended with the words that follow concerning the women silence: it takes for granted that the news of their encounter was passed on. And it must obviously have known of the appearance to Peter and the Twelve, described in the essentially older account of the First Letter to the Corinthians. For what reason our text breaks off at this point, we do not know. In the second century, a concluding summary was added, bringing together the most important Resurrection traditions and the mission of the disciples to proclaim the Gospel to the whole world. - Mark 16:9-20 - Whatever the facts of the case, even the short ending of Mark presupposes the discovery of the empty tomb by the women, the message of the Resurrection, and knowledge of the appearances to Peter and to the Twelve. Its enigmatic interruption we must leave unexplained.
The narrative tradition tells of encounters with the risen Lord and the words spoken by him on those occasions; the confessional tradition merely establishes the key facts that serve to confirm the faith: this is another way of describing the essential difference between the two types of tradition. Specific differences ensue from this.
One initial difference is that in the confessional tradition only men are named as witnesses, whereas in the narrative tradition women play a key role, indeed they take precedence over the men. This may be linked to the fact that in the Jewish tradition only men could be admitted as witnesses in court - the testimony of women was considered unreliable. So the "official" tradition, which is, so to speak, addressing the court of Israel and the court of the world, has to observe this norm if it is to prevail in what we might describe as Jesus' ongoing trail.
The narratives, on the other hand, do not feel bound by this juridical structure, but they communicate the whole breadth of the Resurrection experience. Just as there were only women standing by the Cross - apart from the beloved disciple - so too the first encounter with the risen Lord was destined to be for them. The Church's juridical structure is founded on Peter and the Eleven, but in the day to day life of the Church it is the women who are constantly opening the door to the Lord and accompanying him to the Cross, and so it is they who come to experience the Risen One.
Jesus' Appearances To Paul - A second important difference, by which the narrative tradition completes the creedal formulae, lies in the fact that the risen Lord's appearances are not only confessed but described in a certain amount of detail. How are we to picture to ourselves the appearances of the Risen One, who had not returned to normal human life, but had passed over into a new manner of human existence?
To begin with, there is a marked difference between on the one hand, the appearance of the risen Jesus to Paul, described in the Acts of the Apostles, and, on the other hand, the Gospels narratives concerning the encounters of the Apostles and the women with the living Lord.
According to all three accounts of Saint Paul's conversion in the Acts of the Apostles, there were two elements to his encounter with the risen Christ: a light that shone "brighter than the sun" - 26:13 - together with a voice that spoke to Saul "in the Hebrew language." - 26:14 - Whereas the first account says that the people accompanying Saul could hear the voice but "[saw] no one" - 9:7 - the second account says, conversely, that they "saw the light but did not hear the voice of the one who was speaking to me." 22:9 - The third account says of the people accompanying Saul only that they all fell to the ground with him. - 26:14 -
This much is clear: there was a difference between what was perceived by the people accompanying Saul and what Saul himself perceived. Only he was the direct recipient of a message involving a mission, but the people with him were also in some sense witnesses of an extraordinary event.
For the one who actually received the message, Saul/Paul, the two elements belong together: first, the blinding light that recalls the Tabor story - the Risen One is simply light, and second, the words by which Jesus identifies himself with the persecuted Church and entrusts Paul with a mission. While in the first and second accounts Paul is sent to Damascus, where he will receive more precise instructions for his mission in the third account a detailed and quite specific mission statement is communicated directly: "Rise and stand upon your feet; for I have appeared to you for this purpose, to appoint you to serve and bear witness to the things in which you have seen me and to those in which I will appear to you, delivering you from the people and from the Gentiles - to whom I send you to open their eyes, that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me." - acts 26:16-18 -
Despite all the differences between the three accounts, it is still clear that the apparition (light) and the word belong together. The risen Lord, whose essence is light, speaks as a man with Paul in Paul's own language. His words serve, on the one hand, as self-identification, and this includes his identification with the persecuted Church, and, on the other hand, they serve to communicate a mission, whose content will be further explained in what follows.
The Appearances Of Jesus In The Gospels - The appearances that we read of in the Gospels are manifestly different. On the one hand, the Lord appears as a man like other men: he walks alongside the Emmaus disciples; he invited Thomas to touch his wounds, and in Luke's account he even asks for a piece of fish to eat, in order to prove his real bodily presence. And yet these narratives do not present him simply as a man who has come back from death in the same condition as before.
One thing that strikes us straightaway is that the disciples do not recognize him as first. This is true not only of the two in the Emmaus story, but also of Mary Magdalene and then again at the Lake of Gennesaret: "Just as day was breaking, Jesus stood on the beach; yet the disciples did not know that it was Jesus." - John 21:4 - Only after the Lord has instructed them to set out once again does the beloved disciple recognized him: "That disciple whom Jesus loved said to Peter, 'It is the Lord!'" - 21:7 - It is, as it were, an inward recognition, which nevertheless remains shrouded in mystery. For after the catch of fish, when Jesus invites them to eat, there is still a strange quality about him. "None of the disciples dared ask him, 'Who are you?' They knew it was the Lord." - 21:12 - They knew from within, not from observing the Lord's outward appearance.
This dialectic of recognition and non-recognition corresponds to the manner of the apparitions. Jesus comes through closed doors: he suddenly stands in their midst. And in the same way he suddenly withdraws again, as at the end of the Emmaus encounter. His presence is entirely physical, yet he is not bound by physical laws, by the laws of space and time. In this remarkable dialectic of identity and otherness, of real physically and freedom from the constraints of the body, we see the special mysterious nature of the risen Lord's new existence. Both elements apply here: he is the same embodied man, and he is the new man, having entered upon a different manner of existence.
The dialectic, which pertains to the nature of the Risen One, is presented quite clumsily in the narratives, and it is this that manifests their veracity. Had it been necessary to invent the Resurrection, then all the emphasis would have been placed on full physicality, on immediate recognizability, and perhaps, too, some special power would have been thought up as a distinguishing feature of the risen Lord. But in the internal contradictions characteristic of all the accounts of what the disciples experienced, in the mysterious combination of otherness and identity, we see reflected a new form of encounter, one that from an apologetic standpoint may seem rather awkward but that is all the more credible as a record of the experience.
A help toward understanding the mysterious appearances of the risen Jesus can, I think, be provided by the theophanies of the Old Testament. I would like to mention briefly just three types of such theophanies.
First there is God's appearance to Abraham at the oak of Mamre. - Gen. 18:1-33 - Three men present themselves at Abraham's home. And yet Abraham knows at once, from deep within, that it is "the Lord" who wishes to be his guest. In the Book of Joshua, we are told that, lifting up his eyes, Joshua suddenly sees standing before him a man with a drawn sword in his hand. Not recognizing him, Joshua asks: "Are you for us, or for our adversaries?" He receives this reply: "No, but as commander of the army of the LORD I have now come... Put off your shoes from your feet; for the place where you stand is holy." - Josh. 5:13-15 -
The stories of Gideon and Samson are also significant. - Judg 6:11-24, Judg 13 - In each case the "angel of the Lord" appearing in human form is recognized only at the moment of his mysterious withdrawal. Both times a flame consumes the food-offering as the "angel of the Lord" disappears. The mythological language expresses, on the one hand, the Lord's closeness, as he reveals himself in human form, and, on the other hand, his otherness, as he stands outside the laws of material existence.
Admittedly these are only analogies. What is radically new about the "theophany" of the risen Lord is that Jesus is truly man: he suffered and died as man and now lives anew in the dimension of the living God. He appears now a true man and yet as coming from God - as being God himself.
So two qualifications are important. On the one hand, Jesus has not returned to the empirical existence that is subject to the law of death, but he lives anew in fellowship with God, permanently beyond the reach of death. On the other hand, it is important that the encounter with the risen Lord are not just interior events or mystical experiences - they are real encounters with the living one who is now embodied in a new way and remains embodied. Luke emphasizes this very strongly: Jesus is not, as the disciples initially feared, a "ghost" or a "spirit": he has "flesh and bones." - Luke 24:36-43 -
What a ghost is, what is meant by the apparition of a "spirit" as opposed to the apparition of the risen Lord, can best be seen in the biblical account of the medium at Endor, who at Saul's behest conjures up the spirit of Samuel from the underworld. - 1Sam. 28:7-19 - The "spirit" that she calls forth is a dead man dwelling among the shadows in the underworld, who from time to time can be summoned forth, only to return to the realm of the dead.
Jesus, however, does not come from the realm of the dead, which he has definitely left behind: on the contrary, he comes from the realm of pure life, from God; he comes as the one who is truly alive, who is himself the source of life. Luke underlines quite dramatically how different the risen Lord is from a mere "spirit" by recounting that Jesus asked the still fearful disciples for something to eat and then ate a piece of grilled fish before their eyes.
Most exegetes take the view that Luke is exaggerating here in his apologetic zeal, that a statement of this kind seems to draw Jesus back into the empirical physicality that had been transcended by the Resurrection. Thus Luke ends up contradicting his own narrative, in which Jesus appears suddenly in the midst of the disciples in a physicality that is no longer subject to the laws of space and time.
I think it is helpful here to consider the other three passages in which the risen Jesus is presented participating in a meal.
Immediately before the text just mentioned is the Emmaus story. It ends with Jesus sitting down to table with the disciples, taking the bread, giving thanks and praise, breaking the bread, and giving it to the two of them. At this moment their eyes are opened, "and they recognized him; and he vanished out of their sight." - Luke 24:31 - The Lord sits at table with his disciples as before, with thanks and praise and breaking of bread. Then he vanishes from their outward view, and through this vanishing their inner vision is opened up: they recognize him. It is real table fellowship, and yet it is new. In the breaking of the bread he manifests himself, yet only in vanishing does he become truly recognizable.
In terms of their inner structure, these two meal narratives are quite similar to the one in John 21:1-14 - the disciples have spent a fruitless night, and not a single fish has been caught in their nets. In the morning, Jesus is standing on the shore, but they do not recognize him. He asks them: "Children, have you any fish?" When they respond in the negative, he instructs them to set out once again, and this time they come back with an abundant catch. Yet Jesus, who already has fish cooking on a charcoal fire, himself invites them: "Come and have breakfast." And now "they knew" that it was Jesus.
Particularly important and helpful for an understanding of the risen Jesus' participation in meals is the last account, found in the Acts of the Apostles. In most translations, admittedly, the singular significance of this text is not brought out. The Jerusalem Bible corresponds to the conventional type of translation when it says" "For forty days he had continued to appear to them and tell them about the kingdom of God. When he had been at table with them, he had told them not to leave Jerusalem." - Acts 1:3-4 - Through the period after the word "God" which the sentence construction requires, an inner connection is concealed. Luke speaks of three elements that characterized the time spent by the risen Jesus in the company of his disciples: he appeared to them, he spoke to them, he sat at table with them. Appearing, speaking, and sharing meals: these three self-manifestations of the risen Lord belong together; they were his ways of proving that he was alive.
For a correct understanding of the third element, which like the first two extends over the "forty days" the word used by Luke - synalizomenos - is of great significance. Literally translated, it means "eating salt with them." Luke must have chosen this word quite deliberately. Yet what is it supposed to mean? In the Old Testament the shared enjoyment of bread and salt, or of salt alone, served to establish lasting covenants. - Num. 18:19; 2Chron. 13:5; Hauck, TDNTI, p.228 - Salt is regarded as a guarantee of durability. It is a remedy against putrefaction, against the corruption that pertains to the nature of death. To eat is always to hold death at bay - it is a way of preserving life. The "eating of salt" by Jesus after the Resurrection, which we therefore encounter as a sign of new and everlasting life, points to the risen Lord's new banquet with his followers.
It is a covenant event, and in this sense it has an inner association with the Last Supper, when the Lord established the New Covenant. So the mysterious cipher of eating salt expresses an inner bond between the meal on the eve of Jesus' Passion and the risen Lord's new table fellowship: he gives himself to his followers as food and thus makes them sharers in his life, in life itself.
Finally, it is helpful to recall here a saying of Jesus from Saint Mark's Gospel: "For everyone will be salted with fire. Salt is good; but if the salt has lost its saltiness, how will you season it? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another." - Mark 9:49-50 - Some manuscripts add, with reference to Leviticus 2:13: "and every sacrifice will be salted with salt." The salting of sacrifices was similarly intended to add spice to the offering and preserve it from putrefaction. So different meaning comes together here: covenant renewal, the gift of life, and purification of one's own being for self-offering to God.
When Luke summarizes the post-Resurrection events at the beginning of the Acts of the Apostles and makes reference to the risen Lord's table fellowship with his followers by means of the expression "eating salt with them" - 1:4 - on the one hand, the mystery of this new table fellowship remains. On the other hand, though, its essential meaning is made clear: the Lord is drawing the disciples into a new covenant-fellowship with him and with the living God; he is giving them a share in real life, making them truly alive and salting their lives through participation in his Passion, in the purifying power of his suffering.
What this table fellowship with the disciples actually looked like is beyond our powers of imagination. But we can recognize its inner nature, and we can see that in the worshipping community, in the celebration of the Eucharist, this table fellowship with the risen Lord continues, albeit in a different form.
3. Summary: The Nature Of Jesus' Resurrection and Its Historical Significance...
Page 3
If you wish to donate. Thank You. God bless.
By bank transfer/cheque deposit:
Name: Alex Chan Kok Wah
Bank: Public Bank Berhad account no: 4076577113
Country: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
I have through years of reading, pondering, reflecting and contemplating, the 3 things that last; FAITH . HOPE . LOVE and I would like to made available my sharing from the many thinkers, authors, scholars and theologians whose ideas and thoughts I have borrowed. God be with them always. Amen!
I STILL HAVE MANY THINGS TO SAY TO YOU BUT THEY WOULD BE TOO MUCH FOR YOU NOW. BUT WHEN THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH COMES, HE WILL LEAD YOU TO THE COMPLETE TRUTH, SINCE HE WILL NOT BE SPEAKING AS FROM HIMSELF, BUT WILL SAY ONLY WHAT HE HAS LEARNT; AND HE WILL TELL YOU OF THE THINGS TO COME.
HE WILL GLORIFY ME, SINCE ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. EVERYTHING THE FATHER HAS IS MINE; THAT IS WHY I SAID: ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. - JOHN 16:12-15 -
They are linked to various bearers of tradition, and they can be divided geographically between Jerusalem and Galilee. They are not binding in every detail in the same way as the confessions; but by the virtue of being taken up into the Gospels, they are clearly to be regarded as valid testimony, giving content and shape to the faith. The confessions presuppose the narratives and grew out of them. They express in concentrated form the nucleus of the narrative content, and at the same time they point back toward the narratives.
Every reader will be struck immediately by the differences between the Resurrection accounts of the four Gospels. Matthew, apart from the risen Lord's appearance to the women at the empty tomb, gives only one other appearance - in Galilee to the Eleven. Luke gives only Jerusalem traditions. John tells of appearances in both Jerusalem and Galilee. None of the evangelists recounts Jesus' Resurrection itself. It is an event taking place within the mystery of God between Jesus and the Father, which for us defies description: by its very nature it lies outside human experience.
The ending of Mark poses a particular problem. According to authoritative manuscripts, the Gospel comes to a close with 16:8 - "and they went out and fled from the tomb; for trembling and astonishment had come upon them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid." The authentic text of the Gospel as it has come to us ends with the fear and trembling of the women. Previously the text had spoken of the discovery of the empty tomb by the women who came to anoint the body and of the appearance of angels who announced Jesus' Resurrection to them and urged them to tell the disciples, "and Peter, that Jesus would go before them to Galilee as he had promised.
It is impossible that the Gospel would have ended with the words that follow concerning the women silence: it takes for granted that the news of their encounter was passed on. And it must obviously have known of the appearance to Peter and the Twelve, described in the essentially older account of the First Letter to the Corinthians. For what reason our text breaks off at this point, we do not know. In the second century, a concluding summary was added, bringing together the most important Resurrection traditions and the mission of the disciples to proclaim the Gospel to the whole world. - Mark 16:9-20 - Whatever the facts of the case, even the short ending of Mark presupposes the discovery of the empty tomb by the women, the message of the Resurrection, and knowledge of the appearances to Peter and to the Twelve. Its enigmatic interruption we must leave unexplained.
The narrative tradition tells of encounters with the risen Lord and the words spoken by him on those occasions; the confessional tradition merely establishes the key facts that serve to confirm the faith: this is another way of describing the essential difference between the two types of tradition. Specific differences ensue from this.
One initial difference is that in the confessional tradition only men are named as witnesses, whereas in the narrative tradition women play a key role, indeed they take precedence over the men. This may be linked to the fact that in the Jewish tradition only men could be admitted as witnesses in court - the testimony of women was considered unreliable. So the "official" tradition, which is, so to speak, addressing the court of Israel and the court of the world, has to observe this norm if it is to prevail in what we might describe as Jesus' ongoing trail.
The narratives, on the other hand, do not feel bound by this juridical structure, but they communicate the whole breadth of the Resurrection experience. Just as there were only women standing by the Cross - apart from the beloved disciple - so too the first encounter with the risen Lord was destined to be for them. The Church's juridical structure is founded on Peter and the Eleven, but in the day to day life of the Church it is the women who are constantly opening the door to the Lord and accompanying him to the Cross, and so it is they who come to experience the Risen One.
Jesus' Appearances To Paul - A second important difference, by which the narrative tradition completes the creedal formulae, lies in the fact that the risen Lord's appearances are not only confessed but described in a certain amount of detail. How are we to picture to ourselves the appearances of the Risen One, who had not returned to normal human life, but had passed over into a new manner of human existence?
To begin with, there is a marked difference between on the one hand, the appearance of the risen Jesus to Paul, described in the Acts of the Apostles, and, on the other hand, the Gospels narratives concerning the encounters of the Apostles and the women with the living Lord.
According to all three accounts of Saint Paul's conversion in the Acts of the Apostles, there were two elements to his encounter with the risen Christ: a light that shone "brighter than the sun" - 26:13 - together with a voice that spoke to Saul "in the Hebrew language." - 26:14 - Whereas the first account says that the people accompanying Saul could hear the voice but "[saw] no one" - 9:7 - the second account says, conversely, that they "saw the light but did not hear the voice of the one who was speaking to me." 22:9 - The third account says of the people accompanying Saul only that they all fell to the ground with him. - 26:14 -
This much is clear: there was a difference between what was perceived by the people accompanying Saul and what Saul himself perceived. Only he was the direct recipient of a message involving a mission, but the people with him were also in some sense witnesses of an extraordinary event.
For the one who actually received the message, Saul/Paul, the two elements belong together: first, the blinding light that recalls the Tabor story - the Risen One is simply light, and second, the words by which Jesus identifies himself with the persecuted Church and entrusts Paul with a mission. While in the first and second accounts Paul is sent to Damascus, where he will receive more precise instructions for his mission in the third account a detailed and quite specific mission statement is communicated directly: "Rise and stand upon your feet; for I have appeared to you for this purpose, to appoint you to serve and bear witness to the things in which you have seen me and to those in which I will appear to you, delivering you from the people and from the Gentiles - to whom I send you to open their eyes, that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me." - acts 26:16-18 -
Despite all the differences between the three accounts, it is still clear that the apparition (light) and the word belong together. The risen Lord, whose essence is light, speaks as a man with Paul in Paul's own language. His words serve, on the one hand, as self-identification, and this includes his identification with the persecuted Church, and, on the other hand, they serve to communicate a mission, whose content will be further explained in what follows.
The Appearances Of Jesus In The Gospels - The appearances that we read of in the Gospels are manifestly different. On the one hand, the Lord appears as a man like other men: he walks alongside the Emmaus disciples; he invited Thomas to touch his wounds, and in Luke's account he even asks for a piece of fish to eat, in order to prove his real bodily presence. And yet these narratives do not present him simply as a man who has come back from death in the same condition as before.
One thing that strikes us straightaway is that the disciples do not recognize him as first. This is true not only of the two in the Emmaus story, but also of Mary Magdalene and then again at the Lake of Gennesaret: "Just as day was breaking, Jesus stood on the beach; yet the disciples did not know that it was Jesus." - John 21:4 - Only after the Lord has instructed them to set out once again does the beloved disciple recognized him: "That disciple whom Jesus loved said to Peter, 'It is the Lord!'" - 21:7 - It is, as it were, an inward recognition, which nevertheless remains shrouded in mystery. For after the catch of fish, when Jesus invites them to eat, there is still a strange quality about him. "None of the disciples dared ask him, 'Who are you?' They knew it was the Lord." - 21:12 - They knew from within, not from observing the Lord's outward appearance.
This dialectic of recognition and non-recognition corresponds to the manner of the apparitions. Jesus comes through closed doors: he suddenly stands in their midst. And in the same way he suddenly withdraws again, as at the end of the Emmaus encounter. His presence is entirely physical, yet he is not bound by physical laws, by the laws of space and time. In this remarkable dialectic of identity and otherness, of real physically and freedom from the constraints of the body, we see the special mysterious nature of the risen Lord's new existence. Both elements apply here: he is the same embodied man, and he is the new man, having entered upon a different manner of existence.
The dialectic, which pertains to the nature of the Risen One, is presented quite clumsily in the narratives, and it is this that manifests their veracity. Had it been necessary to invent the Resurrection, then all the emphasis would have been placed on full physicality, on immediate recognizability, and perhaps, too, some special power would have been thought up as a distinguishing feature of the risen Lord. But in the internal contradictions characteristic of all the accounts of what the disciples experienced, in the mysterious combination of otherness and identity, we see reflected a new form of encounter, one that from an apologetic standpoint may seem rather awkward but that is all the more credible as a record of the experience.
A help toward understanding the mysterious appearances of the risen Jesus can, I think, be provided by the theophanies of the Old Testament. I would like to mention briefly just three types of such theophanies.
First there is God's appearance to Abraham at the oak of Mamre. - Gen. 18:1-33 - Three men present themselves at Abraham's home. And yet Abraham knows at once, from deep within, that it is "the Lord" who wishes to be his guest. In the Book of Joshua, we are told that, lifting up his eyes, Joshua suddenly sees standing before him a man with a drawn sword in his hand. Not recognizing him, Joshua asks: "Are you for us, or for our adversaries?" He receives this reply: "No, but as commander of the army of the LORD I have now come... Put off your shoes from your feet; for the place where you stand is holy." - Josh. 5:13-15 -
The stories of Gideon and Samson are also significant. - Judg 6:11-24, Judg 13 - In each case the "angel of the Lord" appearing in human form is recognized only at the moment of his mysterious withdrawal. Both times a flame consumes the food-offering as the "angel of the Lord" disappears. The mythological language expresses, on the one hand, the Lord's closeness, as he reveals himself in human form, and, on the other hand, his otherness, as he stands outside the laws of material existence.
Admittedly these are only analogies. What is radically new about the "theophany" of the risen Lord is that Jesus is truly man: he suffered and died as man and now lives anew in the dimension of the living God. He appears now a true man and yet as coming from God - as being God himself.
So two qualifications are important. On the one hand, Jesus has not returned to the empirical existence that is subject to the law of death, but he lives anew in fellowship with God, permanently beyond the reach of death. On the other hand, it is important that the encounter with the risen Lord are not just interior events or mystical experiences - they are real encounters with the living one who is now embodied in a new way and remains embodied. Luke emphasizes this very strongly: Jesus is not, as the disciples initially feared, a "ghost" or a "spirit": he has "flesh and bones." - Luke 24:36-43 -
What a ghost is, what is meant by the apparition of a "spirit" as opposed to the apparition of the risen Lord, can best be seen in the biblical account of the medium at Endor, who at Saul's behest conjures up the spirit of Samuel from the underworld. - 1Sam. 28:7-19 - The "spirit" that she calls forth is a dead man dwelling among the shadows in the underworld, who from time to time can be summoned forth, only to return to the realm of the dead.
Jesus, however, does not come from the realm of the dead, which he has definitely left behind: on the contrary, he comes from the realm of pure life, from God; he comes as the one who is truly alive, who is himself the source of life. Luke underlines quite dramatically how different the risen Lord is from a mere "spirit" by recounting that Jesus asked the still fearful disciples for something to eat and then ate a piece of grilled fish before their eyes.
Most exegetes take the view that Luke is exaggerating here in his apologetic zeal, that a statement of this kind seems to draw Jesus back into the empirical physicality that had been transcended by the Resurrection. Thus Luke ends up contradicting his own narrative, in which Jesus appears suddenly in the midst of the disciples in a physicality that is no longer subject to the laws of space and time.
I think it is helpful here to consider the other three passages in which the risen Jesus is presented participating in a meal.
Immediately before the text just mentioned is the Emmaus story. It ends with Jesus sitting down to table with the disciples, taking the bread, giving thanks and praise, breaking the bread, and giving it to the two of them. At this moment their eyes are opened, "and they recognized him; and he vanished out of their sight." - Luke 24:31 - The Lord sits at table with his disciples as before, with thanks and praise and breaking of bread. Then he vanishes from their outward view, and through this vanishing their inner vision is opened up: they recognize him. It is real table fellowship, and yet it is new. In the breaking of the bread he manifests himself, yet only in vanishing does he become truly recognizable.
In terms of their inner structure, these two meal narratives are quite similar to the one in John 21:1-14 - the disciples have spent a fruitless night, and not a single fish has been caught in their nets. In the morning, Jesus is standing on the shore, but they do not recognize him. He asks them: "Children, have you any fish?" When they respond in the negative, he instructs them to set out once again, and this time they come back with an abundant catch. Yet Jesus, who already has fish cooking on a charcoal fire, himself invites them: "Come and have breakfast." And now "they knew" that it was Jesus.
Particularly important and helpful for an understanding of the risen Jesus' participation in meals is the last account, found in the Acts of the Apostles. In most translations, admittedly, the singular significance of this text is not brought out. The Jerusalem Bible corresponds to the conventional type of translation when it says" "For forty days he had continued to appear to them and tell them about the kingdom of God. When he had been at table with them, he had told them not to leave Jerusalem." - Acts 1:3-4 - Through the period after the word "God" which the sentence construction requires, an inner connection is concealed. Luke speaks of three elements that characterized the time spent by the risen Jesus in the company of his disciples: he appeared to them, he spoke to them, he sat at table with them. Appearing, speaking, and sharing meals: these three self-manifestations of the risen Lord belong together; they were his ways of proving that he was alive.
For a correct understanding of the third element, which like the first two extends over the "forty days" the word used by Luke - synalizomenos - is of great significance. Literally translated, it means "eating salt with them." Luke must have chosen this word quite deliberately. Yet what is it supposed to mean? In the Old Testament the shared enjoyment of bread and salt, or of salt alone, served to establish lasting covenants. - Num. 18:19; 2Chron. 13:5; Hauck, TDNTI, p.228 - Salt is regarded as a guarantee of durability. It is a remedy against putrefaction, against the corruption that pertains to the nature of death. To eat is always to hold death at bay - it is a way of preserving life. The "eating of salt" by Jesus after the Resurrection, which we therefore encounter as a sign of new and everlasting life, points to the risen Lord's new banquet with his followers.
It is a covenant event, and in this sense it has an inner association with the Last Supper, when the Lord established the New Covenant. So the mysterious cipher of eating salt expresses an inner bond between the meal on the eve of Jesus' Passion and the risen Lord's new table fellowship: he gives himself to his followers as food and thus makes them sharers in his life, in life itself.
Finally, it is helpful to recall here a saying of Jesus from Saint Mark's Gospel: "For everyone will be salted with fire. Salt is good; but if the salt has lost its saltiness, how will you season it? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another." - Mark 9:49-50 - Some manuscripts add, with reference to Leviticus 2:13: "and every sacrifice will be salted with salt." The salting of sacrifices was similarly intended to add spice to the offering and preserve it from putrefaction. So different meaning comes together here: covenant renewal, the gift of life, and purification of one's own being for self-offering to God.
When Luke summarizes the post-Resurrection events at the beginning of the Acts of the Apostles and makes reference to the risen Lord's table fellowship with his followers by means of the expression "eating salt with them" - 1:4 - on the one hand, the mystery of this new table fellowship remains. On the other hand, though, its essential meaning is made clear: the Lord is drawing the disciples into a new covenant-fellowship with him and with the living God; he is giving them a share in real life, making them truly alive and salting their lives through participation in his Passion, in the purifying power of his suffering.
What this table fellowship with the disciples actually looked like is beyond our powers of imagination. But we can recognize its inner nature, and we can see that in the worshipping community, in the celebration of the Eucharist, this table fellowship with the risen Lord continues, albeit in a different form.
3. Summary: The Nature Of Jesus' Resurrection and Its Historical Significance...
Page 3
If you wish to donate. Thank You. God bless.
By bank transfer/cheque deposit:
Name: Alex Chan Kok Wah
Bank: Public Bank Berhad account no: 4076577113
Country: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
I have through years of reading, pondering, reflecting and contemplating, the 3 things that last; FAITH . HOPE . LOVE and I would like to made available my sharing from the many thinkers, authors, scholars and theologians whose ideas and thoughts I have borrowed. God be with them always. Amen!
I STILL HAVE MANY THINGS TO SAY TO YOU BUT THEY WOULD BE TOO MUCH FOR YOU NOW. BUT WHEN THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH COMES, HE WILL LEAD YOU TO THE COMPLETE TRUTH, SINCE HE WILL NOT BE SPEAKING AS FROM HIMSELF, BUT WILL SAY ONLY WHAT HE HAS LEARNT; AND HE WILL TELL YOU OF THE THINGS TO COME.
HE WILL GLORIFY ME, SINCE ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. EVERYTHING THE FATHER HAS IS MINE; THAT IS WHY I SAID: ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. - JOHN 16:12-15 -
Friday, May 4, 2012
2. The Two Different Of Resurrection Testimony
Let us turn now to the individual Resurrection accounts in the New Testament. As we consider them, the first thing we notice is that there are two different types of testimony, which we may label the "confessional tradition" and the "narrative tradition".
The Confessional Tradition - The confessional tradition crystallizes the essentials in short phrase that establish the kernel of what took place. The are an expression of Christian identity, a "confession" indeed, by which Christians recognize one another, by which they identify themselves before God and man. I would like to propose three examples.
At the end of the Emmaus story, the two disciples find the eleven Apostles assembled in Jerusalem and are greeted with these words: "The Lord has risen indeed, and has appeared to Simon!" - Luke 24:34 - In its context, this functions as a brief narrative, but it also serves as a formula of acclamation and confession, in which the essential is proclaimed: the event itself and the witness who testifies to it.
We find a combination of two formulae in the tenth chapter of the Letter to the Romans: "If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved". - Rom. 10:9 - In this example - as also in the account of Peter's confession at Caesarea Philippi - Matt. 16:13-16 - there are two elements to the confession: it is said that Jesus is "Lord" which in terms of the Old Testament meaning of the word refers to his divinity. Then comes the confession of the fundamental historical event: God raised him from the dead. This already makes clear what the significance of the confession is for Christians: it brings salvation. It leads us to the truth that is salvation. We have here a prototype of the confessional formulae used in Baptism, which always link Christ's lordship to the story of his life, death, and Resurrection. In Baptism man hands himself over to the new life of the Risen One, Confession becomes life.
By far the most important of the Easter confessions is found in the fifteenth chapter of the First Letter to the Corinthians. As with the account of the Last Supper - 1Cor. 11:23-26 - Paul emphasizes strongly that he is not speaking on his own initiative here: "I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received" - 1Cor. 15:3 - Paul deliberately takes his place within the chain of reception and transmission. Here, regarding the essential content on which everything depends, what is demanded above all is fidelity. And Paul, who characteristically places so much emphasis on his personal witness of the Risen One and on the apostolate that he received directly from the Lord, insists here with great emphasis on literal fidelity in the transmission of what has been received, on the common tradition of the Church from her beginnings.
The Gospel of which Paul speaks is the foundation "in which you stand, by which you are saved, if you hold it [that is, the word, the literal formulation] fast" that "I preached to you" - 1Cor. 15:1-2 - In this central message, what matters is not only the content, but also the literal formulation, which must be preserved intact. This link with the very earliest tradition is the source of both the unity of the faith and its universally binding nature. "Whether then it was I or they [the others who proclaimed it] so we preach and so you believe" - 1Cor. 15;11 - In its nucleus the faith, even down to its literal formulation, is one - it binds all Christians.
When exactly and from whom Paul received this confession has been the object of further inquiry, just as we saw in the case of the Last Supper tradition. In any event, it forms part of the primary catechesis that he as a convert would have received while still in Damascus, but its essential content was doubtless formulated in Jerusalem and therefore dates back to the 30s - a real testimony to the origins.
The text handed down in the First Letter to the Corinthians has been extended by Paul, inasmuch as he has added, among others, his own encounter with the risen Lord. For Saint Paul's self-understanding and for the faith of the early Church I find it significant that Paul felt entitled to add on to the original confession, with equally binding character, the risen Lord's appearance to him and the apostolic mission that came with it. He was evidently convinced that this revelation of the risen Lord to him was still a central part of the emerging creedal formula, that it belonged to the faith of the universal Church as an essential element intended for all.
Let us listen now to the whole text, as Paul presents it: "That Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the Twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brethren at one time, most of whom are still alive... Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me." - 1Cor. 15:3-8 -
In the view of most exegetes, the original confession ends with verse 5, that is, with the appearance to Cephas and the Twelve. From further traditions, Paul added James, the group of over five hundred brethren, and "all" the Apostles - here he is evidently applying an understanding of "apostles" that extends beyond the circle of the Twelve. James is important because with him, Jesus' family, who had previously been decidedly ambivalent - Mark 3:20-21, 31-35; John 7:5 - enter the circle of believers and also because James is the one who assumed the leadership of the Mother Church in the Holy City after Peter's flight from Jerusalem.
Jesus' Death - Let us turn now to the confession itself, which demands more detailed consideration. It begins with the phrase: "Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures." The fact of his death is qualified by two additional expressions: "for our sins" and "in accordance with the Scriptures."
Let us begin with the second expression. It is important for the whole approach taken by the early Church toward the facts of Jesus' life. What the risen Lord taught the disciples on the road to Emmaus now becomes the basic method for understanding the figure of Jesus: everything that happened to him is fulfillment of the "Scriptures." Only on the basis of the "Scriptures," the Old Testament, can he be understood at all. With reference to Jesus' death on the Cross, this means that his death is no coincidence. It belongs in the context of God's ongoing relationship with the people, from which it receives its inner logic and its meaning. It is an event in which the words of Scripture are fulfilled; it bears within itself Logos, or logic; it proceeds from the word and returns to the word; it surrounds the word and fulfills it.
A pointer toward a deeper understanding of this fundamental relationship with the word is given by the earlier qualification: Christ died "for our sins". Because his death has to do with the word of God, it has to do with us, it is a dying "for". In the chapter on Jesus' death on the Cross, we saw what an enormous wealth of tradition in the form of scriptural allusions feeds into the background here, chief among them the fourth Suffering Servant Song. - Isaiah 53 - Insofar as Jesus' death can be located within this context of God's word and God's love, it is differentiated from the kind of death resulting from man's original sin as a consequence of his presumption in seeking to be like God, a presumption that could only lead to man's plunge into wretchedness, into the destiny of death.
Jesus' death is of another kind: it is occasioned, not by the presumption of men, but by the humility of God. It is not the inevitable consequence of a false hubris, but the fulfillment of a love in which God himself comes down to us, so as to draw us back to himself. Jesus' death is rooted, not in the sentence of expulsion from Paradise, but in the Suffering Servant Songs. It is a death in the context of his service of expiation - a death that achieves reconciliation and becomes a light for the nations. Thus it is that the twofold qualification that Paul adds, when handing on this creedal formula, to the expression "he died" opens up the path from the Cross to the Resurrection.
The Question Of The Empty Tomb - Next in the confession of faith, direct and without commentary, comes the statement "he was buried." This makes it clear that Jesus really was dead, that he fully participated in the human destiny of death. Jesus traveled the path of death right to the bitter and seemingly hopeless end in the tomb. Jesus' tomb was evidently known. And here the question naturally arises: Did he remain in the tomb? Or was it empty after he had risen?
In modern theology this question has been extensively debated. Most commentators come to the conclusion that an empty tomb would not be enough to prove the Resurrection. If the tomb were indeed empty, there could be some explanation for it. On this basis, the commentators conclude that the question of the empty tomb is immaterial and can therefore be ignored, which tends also to mean that it probably was not empty anyway, so at least a dispute with modern science over the possibility of bodily resurrection can be avoided. But at the basis of all this lies a distorted way of posing the question.
Naturally, the empty tomb as such does not prove the Resurrection. Mary Magdalene, in John's account, found it empty and assumed that someone must have taken Jesus' body away. The empty tomb is no proof of the Resurrection, that much is undeniable. Conversely, though, one may ask: Is the Resurrection compatible with the body remaining in the tomb? Can Jesus be risen if he still lying in the tomb? What kind of resurrection would that be? Today, notions of resurrection have been developed for which the fate of the corpse is inconsequential. Yet the content of the Resurrection becomes so vague in the process that one must ask with what kind of reality we are dealing in this form of Christianity.
Be that as it may: Thomas Soding, Ulrich Wilckens, and others rightly point out that in Jerusalem at the time, the proclamation of the Resurrection would have been completely possible if anyone had been able to point to a body lying in the tomb. To this extent, for the sake of posing the question correctly, we have to say that the empty tomb as such, while it cannot prove the Resurrection, it nevertheless a necessary condition for Resurrection faith, which was specifically concerned with the body and, consequently, with the whole of the person. In Saint Paul's confessional statement, it is not explicitly stated that the tomb was empty, but this is clearly presupposed. All four Gospels speak of it extensively in their Resurrection accounts.
For a theological understanding of the empty tomb, a passage from Saint Peter's Pentecost sermon strikes me as important, when Peter for the first time openly proclaims Jesus' Resurrection to the assembled crowds. He communicates it, not in his own words, but by quoting Psalm 16:8-10 - as follow: "... my flesh will dwell in hope. For you will not abandon my soul to Hades, nor let your Holy One see corruption. You have made known to me the ways of life." - Acts 2:26-28 - Peter quotes the psalm text using the version found in the Greek Bible. The Hebrew text is slightly different: "You do not give me up to Sheol, or let your godly one see the Pit. You show me the path of life." - Ps. 16:10-11 - In the Hebrew version the psalmist speaks in the certainty that God will protect him, even in the threatening situation in which he evidently finds himself, that God will shield him from death and that he may dwell securely: he will not see the grave. The version Peter quotes is different: here the psalmist is confident that he will not remain in the underworld, that he will not see corruption.
Peter takes it for granted that it was David who originally prayed this psalm, and he goes on to state that this hope was not fulfilled in David: "He both died and was buried, and his tomb is with us to this day." - Acts 2:29 - The tomb containing his corpse is the proof of his not having risen. Yet the psalm text is still true: it applies to the definitive David. Indeed, Jesus is revealed here as the true David, precisely because in him this promise is fulfilled: "You will not let your Holy One see corruption."
We need not go into the question here of whether this address really goes back to Peter and, if not, who else may have redacted it and precisely when and where it originated. Whatever the answer may be, we are dealing here with a primitive form of Resurrection proclamation, whose high authority in the early Church is clear from the fact that it was attributed to Saint Peter himself and was regarded as the original proclamation of the Resurrection.
If in the early creedal formula from Jerusalem, transmitted by Saint Paul, it is stated that Jesus rose according to the Scriptures, then surely Psalm 16 must have been seen as key scriptural evidence for the early Church. Here they found a clear statement that Christ, the definitive David, will not see corruption - that he must truly have risen. "not to see corruption": this is virtually a definition of resurrection. Only with corruption was death regarded as definitive. Once the body had decomposed, once it had broken down into its elements - marking man's dissolution and return to dust - then death had conquered. From now on this man no longer exists as a man - only a shadow may remain in the underworld. From this point of view, it was fundamental for the early Church that Jesus' body did not decompose. Only then could it be maintained that he did not remain in death, that in him life truly conquered death.
What the early Church deduced from the Septuagint version of Psalm 16:10 also determined the viewpoint of the entire patristic period. Resurrection essentially implies that Jesus' body was not subject to corruption. In this sense, the empty tomb is a strongly scriptural element of the Resurrection proclamation. Theological speculations arguing that Jesus' decomposition and Resurrection could be mutually compatible belong to modern thinking and stand in clear contradiction of the biblical vision. On this basis, too, we have further confirmation that a Resurrection proclamation would have been impossible if Jesus' body had been lying in the grave.
The Third Day - Let us return to our creedal formula. The next article states: "He was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures." - 1Cor. 15:4 - "In accordance with the Scriptures" applies to the entire phrase, not specifically to the third day, although this is included. The essential point is that Resurrection itself is in accordance with the Scriptures - that it forms part of the whole promise that in Jesus became, not just word, but reality. So for scriptural background we could certainly look to Psalm 16:10, but also to basic promise texts like Isaiah 53. There is no direct scriptural testimony pointing to the "third day."
The thesis that the third day may possibly have been derived from Hosea 6;1-2 cannot be sustained, as Hans Conzelmann and likewise Martin Hengel and Anna Maria Schwemer have shown. The text reads: "Come, let us return to the LORD; for he has torn, that he may heal us; he has stricken, and he will bind us up. After two days he will revive us; on the third day he will raise us up, that we may live before him." This text is a penitential prayer on the part of sinful Israel. There is no mention of resurrection from the dead, properly speaking. The text is not quoted in the New Testament or at any point during the second century (cf. Hengel and Schwemer, Jesus und das Judentum, p.631). It could become an anticipatory pointer toward resurrection on the third day only once the event that took place on the Sunday after the Lord's crucifixion had given this day a special meaning.
The third day is not a "theological" date, but the day when an event took place that became the decisive turning point for the disciples after the calamity of the Cross. Josef Blank formulated it like this: "The expression 'on the third day' is a chronological indication in harmony with the earliest Christian tradition in the Gospels, and it relates to the discovery of the empty tomb." (Paulus und Jesus, p.156)
I would add: it relates to the first encounter with the risen Lord. The first day of the week - the third after Friday - is attested in the New Testament from a very early stage as a day when the Christian community assembled for worship. (1Cor. 16:2; Acts 20:7; Rev. 1:10) Ignatius of Antioch (late first century, early second century) provides evidence, as we saw earlier, that for Christians Sunday had already supplanted the Jewish Sabbath culture: "We have seen how former adherents of the ancient customs have since attained to a new hope; so that they have given up keeping the Sabbath and now order their lives by the Lord's day instead (the day when life first dawned for us, thanks to him and his death)" (Ad Magn., 9:1)
If we bear in mind the immense importance attached to the Sabbath in the Old Testament tradition on the basis of the Creation account and the Decalogue, then it is clear that only an event of extraordinary impart could have led to the abandonment of the Sabbath and its replacement by the first day of the week. Only an event that marked souls indelibly could bring such a profound realignment in the religious culture of the week. Mere theological speculations could not have achieved this. For me, the celebration of the Lord's day, which was a characteristic part of the Christian community from the outset, is one of the most convincing proofs that something extraordinary happened that day - the discovery of the empty tomb and the encounter with the risen Lord.
The Witnesses - While verse 4 of the Pauline confession expounds the fact of the Resurrection. verse 5 introduces the list of witnesses. "He appeared to Cephas, then to the Twelve" it states succinctly. If we regard this verse as the conclusion of the original Jerusalem formula, then this indication of names carries particular theological weight: it reveals the very foundation of the Church's faith.
On the one hand, "the Twelve" remain the actual foundation stone of the Church, the permanent point of reference. On the other hand, the special task given to Peter is underlined here, the commission that was first assigned to him at Caesarea Philippi and then confirmed during the Last Supper - Luke 22:32 - when Peter was, as it were, introduced into the Church's Eucharistic structure. Now, after the Resurrection, the Lord appears first to him, before appearing to the Twelve, and thus once again renews Peter's particular mission.
If being Christian essentially means believing in the risen Lord, then Peter's special witnessing role is a confirmation of his commission to be the rock on which the Church is built. John, in his account of the risen Lord's threefold question to Peter, "Do you love me?' and Peter's threefold commissioning to feed Christ's flock, clearly underlined once more Peter's continuing mission vis-a-vis the faith of the whole Church. - John 21:15-17 - So the Resurrection account flows naturally into ecclesiology; the encounter with the risen Lord is mission, and it shapes the nascent Church.
The Narrative Tradition.
Page 2
If you wish to donate. Thank You. God bless.
By bank transfer/cheque deposit:
Name: Alex Chan Kok Wah
Bank: Public Bank Berhad account no: 4076577113
Country: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
I have through years of reading, pondering, reflecting and contemplating, the 3 things that last; FAITH . HOPE . LOVE and I would like to made available my sharing from the many thinkers, authors, scholars and theologians whose ideas and thoughts I have borrowed. God be with them always. Amen!
I STILL HAVE MANY THINGS TO SAY TO YOU BUT THEY WOULD BE TOO MUCH FOR YOU NOW. BUT WHEN THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH COMES, HE WILL LEAD YOU TO THE COMPLETE TRUTH, SINCE HE WILL NOT BE SPEAKING AS FROM HIMSELF, BUT WILL SAY ONLY WHAT HE HAS LEARNT; AND HE WILL TELL YOU OF THE THINGS TO COME.
HE WILL GLORIFY ME, SINCE ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. EVERYTHING THE FATHER HAS IS MINE; THAT IS WHY I SAID: ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. - JOHN 16:12-15 -
Let us turn now to the individual Resurrection accounts in the New Testament. As we consider them, the first thing we notice is that there are two different types of testimony, which we may label the "confessional tradition" and the "narrative tradition".
The Confessional Tradition - The confessional tradition crystallizes the essentials in short phrase that establish the kernel of what took place. The are an expression of Christian identity, a "confession" indeed, by which Christians recognize one another, by which they identify themselves before God and man. I would like to propose three examples.
At the end of the Emmaus story, the two disciples find the eleven Apostles assembled in Jerusalem and are greeted with these words: "The Lord has risen indeed, and has appeared to Simon!" - Luke 24:34 - In its context, this functions as a brief narrative, but it also serves as a formula of acclamation and confession, in which the essential is proclaimed: the event itself and the witness who testifies to it.
We find a combination of two formulae in the tenth chapter of the Letter to the Romans: "If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved". - Rom. 10:9 - In this example - as also in the account of Peter's confession at Caesarea Philippi - Matt. 16:13-16 - there are two elements to the confession: it is said that Jesus is "Lord" which in terms of the Old Testament meaning of the word refers to his divinity. Then comes the confession of the fundamental historical event: God raised him from the dead. This already makes clear what the significance of the confession is for Christians: it brings salvation. It leads us to the truth that is salvation. We have here a prototype of the confessional formulae used in Baptism, which always link Christ's lordship to the story of his life, death, and Resurrection. In Baptism man hands himself over to the new life of the Risen One, Confession becomes life.
By far the most important of the Easter confessions is found in the fifteenth chapter of the First Letter to the Corinthians. As with the account of the Last Supper - 1Cor. 11:23-26 - Paul emphasizes strongly that he is not speaking on his own initiative here: "I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received" - 1Cor. 15:3 - Paul deliberately takes his place within the chain of reception and transmission. Here, regarding the essential content on which everything depends, what is demanded above all is fidelity. And Paul, who characteristically places so much emphasis on his personal witness of the Risen One and on the apostolate that he received directly from the Lord, insists here with great emphasis on literal fidelity in the transmission of what has been received, on the common tradition of the Church from her beginnings.
The Gospel of which Paul speaks is the foundation "in which you stand, by which you are saved, if you hold it [that is, the word, the literal formulation] fast" that "I preached to you" - 1Cor. 15:1-2 - In this central message, what matters is not only the content, but also the literal formulation, which must be preserved intact. This link with the very earliest tradition is the source of both the unity of the faith and its universally binding nature. "Whether then it was I or they [the others who proclaimed it] so we preach and so you believe" - 1Cor. 15;11 - In its nucleus the faith, even down to its literal formulation, is one - it binds all Christians.
When exactly and from whom Paul received this confession has been the object of further inquiry, just as we saw in the case of the Last Supper tradition. In any event, it forms part of the primary catechesis that he as a convert would have received while still in Damascus, but its essential content was doubtless formulated in Jerusalem and therefore dates back to the 30s - a real testimony to the origins.
The text handed down in the First Letter to the Corinthians has been extended by Paul, inasmuch as he has added, among others, his own encounter with the risen Lord. For Saint Paul's self-understanding and for the faith of the early Church I find it significant that Paul felt entitled to add on to the original confession, with equally binding character, the risen Lord's appearance to him and the apostolic mission that came with it. He was evidently convinced that this revelation of the risen Lord to him was still a central part of the emerging creedal formula, that it belonged to the faith of the universal Church as an essential element intended for all.
Let us listen now to the whole text, as Paul presents it: "That Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the Twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brethren at one time, most of whom are still alive... Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me." - 1Cor. 15:3-8 -
In the view of most exegetes, the original confession ends with verse 5, that is, with the appearance to Cephas and the Twelve. From further traditions, Paul added James, the group of over five hundred brethren, and "all" the Apostles - here he is evidently applying an understanding of "apostles" that extends beyond the circle of the Twelve. James is important because with him, Jesus' family, who had previously been decidedly ambivalent - Mark 3:20-21, 31-35; John 7:5 - enter the circle of believers and also because James is the one who assumed the leadership of the Mother Church in the Holy City after Peter's flight from Jerusalem.
Jesus' Death - Let us turn now to the confession itself, which demands more detailed consideration. It begins with the phrase: "Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures." The fact of his death is qualified by two additional expressions: "for our sins" and "in accordance with the Scriptures."
Let us begin with the second expression. It is important for the whole approach taken by the early Church toward the facts of Jesus' life. What the risen Lord taught the disciples on the road to Emmaus now becomes the basic method for understanding the figure of Jesus: everything that happened to him is fulfillment of the "Scriptures." Only on the basis of the "Scriptures," the Old Testament, can he be understood at all. With reference to Jesus' death on the Cross, this means that his death is no coincidence. It belongs in the context of God's ongoing relationship with the people, from which it receives its inner logic and its meaning. It is an event in which the words of Scripture are fulfilled; it bears within itself Logos, or logic; it proceeds from the word and returns to the word; it surrounds the word and fulfills it.
A pointer toward a deeper understanding of this fundamental relationship with the word is given by the earlier qualification: Christ died "for our sins". Because his death has to do with the word of God, it has to do with us, it is a dying "for". In the chapter on Jesus' death on the Cross, we saw what an enormous wealth of tradition in the form of scriptural allusions feeds into the background here, chief among them the fourth Suffering Servant Song. - Isaiah 53 - Insofar as Jesus' death can be located within this context of God's word and God's love, it is differentiated from the kind of death resulting from man's original sin as a consequence of his presumption in seeking to be like God, a presumption that could only lead to man's plunge into wretchedness, into the destiny of death.
Jesus' death is of another kind: it is occasioned, not by the presumption of men, but by the humility of God. It is not the inevitable consequence of a false hubris, but the fulfillment of a love in which God himself comes down to us, so as to draw us back to himself. Jesus' death is rooted, not in the sentence of expulsion from Paradise, but in the Suffering Servant Songs. It is a death in the context of his service of expiation - a death that achieves reconciliation and becomes a light for the nations. Thus it is that the twofold qualification that Paul adds, when handing on this creedal formula, to the expression "he died" opens up the path from the Cross to the Resurrection.
The Question Of The Empty Tomb - Next in the confession of faith, direct and without commentary, comes the statement "he was buried." This makes it clear that Jesus really was dead, that he fully participated in the human destiny of death. Jesus traveled the path of death right to the bitter and seemingly hopeless end in the tomb. Jesus' tomb was evidently known. And here the question naturally arises: Did he remain in the tomb? Or was it empty after he had risen?
In modern theology this question has been extensively debated. Most commentators come to the conclusion that an empty tomb would not be enough to prove the Resurrection. If the tomb were indeed empty, there could be some explanation for it. On this basis, the commentators conclude that the question of the empty tomb is immaterial and can therefore be ignored, which tends also to mean that it probably was not empty anyway, so at least a dispute with modern science over the possibility of bodily resurrection can be avoided. But at the basis of all this lies a distorted way of posing the question.
Naturally, the empty tomb as such does not prove the Resurrection. Mary Magdalene, in John's account, found it empty and assumed that someone must have taken Jesus' body away. The empty tomb is no proof of the Resurrection, that much is undeniable. Conversely, though, one may ask: Is the Resurrection compatible with the body remaining in the tomb? Can Jesus be risen if he still lying in the tomb? What kind of resurrection would that be? Today, notions of resurrection have been developed for which the fate of the corpse is inconsequential. Yet the content of the Resurrection becomes so vague in the process that one must ask with what kind of reality we are dealing in this form of Christianity.
Be that as it may: Thomas Soding, Ulrich Wilckens, and others rightly point out that in Jerusalem at the time, the proclamation of the Resurrection would have been completely possible if anyone had been able to point to a body lying in the tomb. To this extent, for the sake of posing the question correctly, we have to say that the empty tomb as such, while it cannot prove the Resurrection, it nevertheless a necessary condition for Resurrection faith, which was specifically concerned with the body and, consequently, with the whole of the person. In Saint Paul's confessional statement, it is not explicitly stated that the tomb was empty, but this is clearly presupposed. All four Gospels speak of it extensively in their Resurrection accounts.
For a theological understanding of the empty tomb, a passage from Saint Peter's Pentecost sermon strikes me as important, when Peter for the first time openly proclaims Jesus' Resurrection to the assembled crowds. He communicates it, not in his own words, but by quoting Psalm 16:8-10 - as follow: "... my flesh will dwell in hope. For you will not abandon my soul to Hades, nor let your Holy One see corruption. You have made known to me the ways of life." - Acts 2:26-28 - Peter quotes the psalm text using the version found in the Greek Bible. The Hebrew text is slightly different: "You do not give me up to Sheol, or let your godly one see the Pit. You show me the path of life." - Ps. 16:10-11 - In the Hebrew version the psalmist speaks in the certainty that God will protect him, even in the threatening situation in which he evidently finds himself, that God will shield him from death and that he may dwell securely: he will not see the grave. The version Peter quotes is different: here the psalmist is confident that he will not remain in the underworld, that he will not see corruption.
Peter takes it for granted that it was David who originally prayed this psalm, and he goes on to state that this hope was not fulfilled in David: "He both died and was buried, and his tomb is with us to this day." - Acts 2:29 - The tomb containing his corpse is the proof of his not having risen. Yet the psalm text is still true: it applies to the definitive David. Indeed, Jesus is revealed here as the true David, precisely because in him this promise is fulfilled: "You will not let your Holy One see corruption."
We need not go into the question here of whether this address really goes back to Peter and, if not, who else may have redacted it and precisely when and where it originated. Whatever the answer may be, we are dealing here with a primitive form of Resurrection proclamation, whose high authority in the early Church is clear from the fact that it was attributed to Saint Peter himself and was regarded as the original proclamation of the Resurrection.
If in the early creedal formula from Jerusalem, transmitted by Saint Paul, it is stated that Jesus rose according to the Scriptures, then surely Psalm 16 must have been seen as key scriptural evidence for the early Church. Here they found a clear statement that Christ, the definitive David, will not see corruption - that he must truly have risen. "not to see corruption": this is virtually a definition of resurrection. Only with corruption was death regarded as definitive. Once the body had decomposed, once it had broken down into its elements - marking man's dissolution and return to dust - then death had conquered. From now on this man no longer exists as a man - only a shadow may remain in the underworld. From this point of view, it was fundamental for the early Church that Jesus' body did not decompose. Only then could it be maintained that he did not remain in death, that in him life truly conquered death.
What the early Church deduced from the Septuagint version of Psalm 16:10 also determined the viewpoint of the entire patristic period. Resurrection essentially implies that Jesus' body was not subject to corruption. In this sense, the empty tomb is a strongly scriptural element of the Resurrection proclamation. Theological speculations arguing that Jesus' decomposition and Resurrection could be mutually compatible belong to modern thinking and stand in clear contradiction of the biblical vision. On this basis, too, we have further confirmation that a Resurrection proclamation would have been impossible if Jesus' body had been lying in the grave.
The Third Day - Let us return to our creedal formula. The next article states: "He was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures." - 1Cor. 15:4 - "In accordance with the Scriptures" applies to the entire phrase, not specifically to the third day, although this is included. The essential point is that Resurrection itself is in accordance with the Scriptures - that it forms part of the whole promise that in Jesus became, not just word, but reality. So for scriptural background we could certainly look to Psalm 16:10, but also to basic promise texts like Isaiah 53. There is no direct scriptural testimony pointing to the "third day."
The thesis that the third day may possibly have been derived from Hosea 6;1-2 cannot be sustained, as Hans Conzelmann and likewise Martin Hengel and Anna Maria Schwemer have shown. The text reads: "Come, let us return to the LORD; for he has torn, that he may heal us; he has stricken, and he will bind us up. After two days he will revive us; on the third day he will raise us up, that we may live before him." This text is a penitential prayer on the part of sinful Israel. There is no mention of resurrection from the dead, properly speaking. The text is not quoted in the New Testament or at any point during the second century (cf. Hengel and Schwemer, Jesus und das Judentum, p.631). It could become an anticipatory pointer toward resurrection on the third day only once the event that took place on the Sunday after the Lord's crucifixion had given this day a special meaning.
The third day is not a "theological" date, but the day when an event took place that became the decisive turning point for the disciples after the calamity of the Cross. Josef Blank formulated it like this: "The expression 'on the third day' is a chronological indication in harmony with the earliest Christian tradition in the Gospels, and it relates to the discovery of the empty tomb." (Paulus und Jesus, p.156)
I would add: it relates to the first encounter with the risen Lord. The first day of the week - the third after Friday - is attested in the New Testament from a very early stage as a day when the Christian community assembled for worship. (1Cor. 16:2; Acts 20:7; Rev. 1:10) Ignatius of Antioch (late first century, early second century) provides evidence, as we saw earlier, that for Christians Sunday had already supplanted the Jewish Sabbath culture: "We have seen how former adherents of the ancient customs have since attained to a new hope; so that they have given up keeping the Sabbath and now order their lives by the Lord's day instead (the day when life first dawned for us, thanks to him and his death)" (Ad Magn., 9:1)
If we bear in mind the immense importance attached to the Sabbath in the Old Testament tradition on the basis of the Creation account and the Decalogue, then it is clear that only an event of extraordinary impart could have led to the abandonment of the Sabbath and its replacement by the first day of the week. Only an event that marked souls indelibly could bring such a profound realignment in the religious culture of the week. Mere theological speculations could not have achieved this. For me, the celebration of the Lord's day, which was a characteristic part of the Christian community from the outset, is one of the most convincing proofs that something extraordinary happened that day - the discovery of the empty tomb and the encounter with the risen Lord.
The Witnesses - While verse 4 of the Pauline confession expounds the fact of the Resurrection. verse 5 introduces the list of witnesses. "He appeared to Cephas, then to the Twelve" it states succinctly. If we regard this verse as the conclusion of the original Jerusalem formula, then this indication of names carries particular theological weight: it reveals the very foundation of the Church's faith.
On the one hand, "the Twelve" remain the actual foundation stone of the Church, the permanent point of reference. On the other hand, the special task given to Peter is underlined here, the commission that was first assigned to him at Caesarea Philippi and then confirmed during the Last Supper - Luke 22:32 - when Peter was, as it were, introduced into the Church's Eucharistic structure. Now, after the Resurrection, the Lord appears first to him, before appearing to the Twelve, and thus once again renews Peter's particular mission.
If being Christian essentially means believing in the risen Lord, then Peter's special witnessing role is a confirmation of his commission to be the rock on which the Church is built. John, in his account of the risen Lord's threefold question to Peter, "Do you love me?' and Peter's threefold commissioning to feed Christ's flock, clearly underlined once more Peter's continuing mission vis-a-vis the faith of the whole Church. - John 21:15-17 - So the Resurrection account flows naturally into ecclesiology; the encounter with the risen Lord is mission, and it shapes the nascent Church.
The Narrative Tradition.
Page 2
If you wish to donate. Thank You. God bless.
By bank transfer/cheque deposit:
Name: Alex Chan Kok Wah
Bank: Public Bank Berhad account no: 4076577113
Country: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
I have through years of reading, pondering, reflecting and contemplating, the 3 things that last; FAITH . HOPE . LOVE and I would like to made available my sharing from the many thinkers, authors, scholars and theologians whose ideas and thoughts I have borrowed. God be with them always. Amen!
I STILL HAVE MANY THINGS TO SAY TO YOU BUT THEY WOULD BE TOO MUCH FOR YOU NOW. BUT WHEN THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH COMES, HE WILL LEAD YOU TO THE COMPLETE TRUTH, SINCE HE WILL NOT BE SPEAKING AS FROM HIMSELF, BUT WILL SAY ONLY WHAT HE HAS LEARNT; AND HE WILL TELL YOU OF THE THINGS TO COME.
HE WILL GLORIFY ME, SINCE ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. EVERYTHING THE FATHER HAS IS MINE; THAT IS WHY I SAID: ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. - JOHN 16:12-15 -
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)