The Fourth Commandment: The Family, the People, and the Community of Jesus' Disciples

"Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land which the Lord your God gives you." - Ex. 20:12 - This is the version of the fourth commandment that is given in the Book of Exodus. The commandment is addressed to sons and it speaks of parents. It thus strengthens the relationship between generations and the community of the family as an order both willed and protected by God. It speaks of the land and of the stable continuance of life in the land. In other words, it connects the land, as the place for the people to live, with the basic order of the family. It binds the continued existence of the people and land to the coexistence of the generations that is built up within the family structure.

Now, Rabbi Neusner rightly sees this commandment as anchoring the heart of the social order, the cohesion of the "eternal Israel" - the real, living, ever-present family of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob, Leah, and Rachel. (pp. 58, 70) According to Neusner, it is this family of Israel that is threatened by Jesus' message, and the foundations of Israel's social order are thrust aside by the primacy of his person. "We pray to the God we know, to begin with, through the testimony of our family, to the God of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Leah and Rachel. So to explain who we are, eternal Israel, sages appeal to the metaphor of genealogy...to the fleshly connection, the family, as the rationale for Israel's social existence." (p. 58)

But this is exactly the connection that Jesus calls into question. He is told that his mother and brothers are outside waiting to speak to him. His answer: "Who is my mother and who are my brothers?" And he stretches out his hand over his disciples and says: "Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother, and sister, and mother." - Mt. 12:46-50 -

Faced with this text, Neusner asks: "Does Jesus not teach me to violate one of the two great commandments...that concern the social order?" (p. 59) The accusation here is a twofold one. The first problem is the seeming individualism of Jesus' message. While the Torah presents a very definite social order, giving the people a juridical and social framework for war and peace, for just politics and for daily life, there is nothing like that to be found in Jesus' teaching. Discipleship of Jesus offers no politically concrete program for structuring society.

The Sermon on the Mount cannot serve as a foundation for a state and a social order, as is frequently and correctly observed. Its message seems to be located on another level. Israel's ordinances have guaranteed its continued existence through the millennia and through all the vicissitudes of history, yet here they are set aside. Jesus' new interpretation of the fourth commandment affects not only the parent-child relation, but the entire scope of the social structure of the people of Israel.

This restructuring of the social order find its basis and its justification in Jesus' claim that he, with his community of disciples, forms the origin and center of a new Israel. Once again we stand before the "I" of Jesus, who speaks on the same level as the Torah itself, on the same level as God. The two spheres - on one hand the modification of the social structure, the opening up of the "eternal Israel" into a new community, and on the other hand Jesus' divine claim - are directly connected.

It should be pointed out that Neusner does not try to score any easy victories by critiquing a straw man. He reminds his reader that students of the Torah were also called by their teachers to leave home and family and had to turn their backs on wife and children for long periods in order to devote themselves totally to the study of the Torah. (p. 60) "The Torah then takes the place of genealogy, and the master of Torah gains a new lineage." (p. 63) In this sense, it seems that Jesus' claim to be founding a new family does remain after all in the framework of what the school of the Torah - the "eternal Israel" - allows.

And yet there is a fundamental difference. In Jesus' case it is not the universally binding adherence to the Torah that forms the new family. Rather, it is adherence to Jesus himself, to his Torah. For the rabbis, everyone is tied by the same relationships to a permanent social order; everyone is subject to the Torah and so everyone is equal within the larger body of all Israel. Neusner thus concludes: "I now realize, only God can demand of me what Jesus is asking." (p. 68)

We come to the same conclusion as in our earlier analysis of the commandment to keep the Sabbath. The Christological (theological) argument and the social argument are inextricably entwined. If Jesus is God, then he is entitled and able to handle the Torah as he does. On that condition alone does he have the right to interpret the Mosaic order of divine commands in such a radically new way as only the Law-giver - God himself - can claim to do.

But here is a question arises: Was it right and proper to create a new community of disciples founded entirely on him? Was it good to set aside the social order of the "eternal Israel" founded on and subsisting through Abraham and Jacob according to the flesh? To declare it to be an "Israel according to the flesh" as Paul will put it? Is there any point that we can discover to all of this?

Now, when we read the Torah together with the entire Old testament canon, the Prophets, the Psalms, and the Wisdom Literature, we realize very clearly a point that is already substantially present in the Torah itself. That is, Israel does not exist simply for itself, in order to live according to the "eternal" dispositions of the Law - it exists to be a light to the nations. In the Psalms and the prophetic books we hear more and more clearly the promise that God's salvation will come to all the nations.

We hear more and more clearly that the God of Israel - being, as he is, the only God, the true God, the Creator of heaven and earth, the God of all peoples and all men, who holds their fate in his hands - does not wish to abandon the nations to themselves. We hear that all will come to know him, that Egypt and Babylon - the two secular powers opposed to Israel - will give Israel their hand and join together in worshiping the one God of Israel will be acknowledged and revered by all the nations as their God, as the one God. It is our Jewish interlocutors who, quite rightly ask again and again: So what has your "Messiah" Jesus actually brought? He has not brought world peace, and he has not conquered the world's misery. So he can hardly be the true Messiah, who, after all, is supposed to do just that. Yes, what has Jesus brought? We have already encountered this question and we know the answer. He has brought the God of Israel to the nations, so that all the nations now pray to him and recognize Israel's Scriptures as his word, the word of the living God. He has brought the gift of universality, which was the one great definitive promise to Israel and the world.

This universality, this faith in the one God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob - extended now in Jesus' new family to all nations over and above the bonds of descent according to the flesh - is the fruit of Jesus' work. It is what proves him to be the Messiah. It signals a new interpretation of the messianic promise that based on Moses and the Prophets, but also opens them up in a completely new way.

The vehicle of this universalization is the new family, whose only admission requirement is communion with Jesus, communion in God's will. For Jesus' "I" is by no means a self-willed ego revolving around itself alone. "Whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother, and sister, and mother" - Mk. 3:34f. - Jesus' "I" incarnates the Son's communion of will with the Father. It is an "I" that hears and obeys. Communion with him is filial communion with the Father - it is yes to the fourth commandment on a new level, the highest level. It is entry into the family of those who call God Father and who can do so because they belong to a "we" - formed of those who are united with Jesus and, by listening to him, united with the will of the Father, thereby attaining to the heart of the obedience intended by the Torah.

This unity with the will of God the Father through communion with Jesus, whose "food" is to do the Father's will - cf. Jn. 4:34 - now gives us a new perspective on the individual regulations of the Torah as well. The Torah did indeed have the task of giving a concrete juridical and social order to this particular people, Israel. But while Israel is on one hand a definite nation, whose members are bound together by birth and the succession of generations, on the other hand it has been from the beginning and is by its very nature the bearer of a universal promise.

In Jesus' new family, which will later be called "the Church" these individual juridical and social regulations no longer apply universally in their literal historical form. This was precisely the issue at the beginning of the "Church of the Gentiles" and it was the bone of contention between Paul and the so-called Judaizers. A literal application of Israel's social order to the people of all nations would have been tantamount to a denial of the universality of the growing community of God. Paul saw this with perfect clarity. The Torah of the Messiah could not be like that. Nor is it, as the Sermon on the Mount shows - and likewise the whole dialogue with Rabbi Neusner, a believing Jew and a truly attentive listener.

That said, what is happening here is an extremely important process whose full scope was not grasped until modern times, even though the moderns at first understood it in a one sided and false way. Concrete juridical and social forms and political arrangements are no longer treated as a sacred law that is fixed ad litteram for all times and so for all peoples. The decisive thing is the underlying communion of will with God given by Jesus. It frees men and nations to discover what aspects of political and social order accord with this communion of will and so to work out their own juridical arrangements.

The absence of the whole social dimension in Jesus' preaching, which Neusner discerningly critiques from a Jewish perspective, includes, but also conceals, an epoch-making event in world history that has not occurred as such in any other culture: The concrete political and social order is released from the directly sacred realm, from theocratic legislation, and is transferred to the freedom of man, whom Jesus has established in God's will and taught thereby to see the right and the good.

This brings us back to the Torah of the Messiah, to the Letter to the Galatians. "You were called to freedom" - Gal. 5:13 - not to a blind and arbitrary freedom, to a freedom "understood according to the flesh" as Paul would say, but to a "seeing" freedom, anchored in communion of will with Jesus and so with God himself. It is a freedom that, as a result of this new way of seeing, is able to build the very thing that is at the heart of the Torah - with Jesus, universalizing the essential content of the Torah and thus truly "fulfilling" it.

In our day, of course, this freedom has been totally wrenched away from any godly perspective or from communion with Jesus. Freedom for universality and so for the legitimate secularity of the state has been transformed into an absolute secularism, for which forgetfulness of God and exclusive concern with success seem to have become guiding principles. For the believing Christian, the commandments of the Torah remain a decisive point of reference, that he constantly keeps in view; for him the search for God's will in communion with Jesus is above all a signpost for his reason, without which it is always in danger of being dazzled and blinded.

There is another essential observation. This universalization of Israel's faith and hope, and the concomitant liberation from the letter of the Law for the new communion with Jesus, is tied to Jesus' authority and his claim to Sonship. It loses its historical weight and its whole foundation if Jesus is interpreted merely as a liberal reform rabbi. A liberal interpretation of the Torah would be nothing but the personal opinion of one teacher - it would have no power to shape history. It would also relativize both the Torah itself and its origin in God's will. For each statement there would be only human authority: the authority of one scholar. There can be no new faith community built upon that.

The leap into universality, the new freedom that such a leap requires, is possible only on the basis of a greater obedience. Its power to shape history can come into play only if the authority of the new interpretation is no less than the authority of the original: It must be a divine authority. The new universal family is the purpose of Jesus' mission, but his divine authority - his Sonship in communion with the Father - is the prior condition that makes possible the irruption of a new and broader reality without betrayal or high-handedness.

We have heard that Neusner asks Jesus whether he is trying to tempt him into violating two or three of God's commandments. If Jesus does not speak with the full authority of the Son, if his interpretation is not the beginning of a new communion in a new, free obedience, then there is only one alternative: Jesus is enticing us to disobedience against God's commandment.

It is fundamentally important for the Christian world in every age to pay careful attention to the contention between transcendence and fulfillment. We have seen that Neusner, despite his reverence for Jesus, strongly criticizes the dissolution of the family that for him is implied by Jesus' invitation to "transgress" the fourth commandment. He mounts a similar critique against Jesus' threat to the Sabbath, which is a cardinal point of Israel's social order. Now, Jesus' intention is not to abolish either the family or the Sabbath-as-celebration-of-creation, but he has to create a new and broader context for both.

It is true that his invitation to join him as a member of a new and universal family through sharing his obedience to the Father does at first break up the social order of Israel. But from her very inception, the Church that emerged, and continues to emerge, has attached fundamental importance to defending the family as the core of all social order, and to standing up for the fourth commandment in the whole breadth of its meaning. We see how hard the Church fights to protect these things today. Likewise it soon became clear that the essential content of the Sabbath had to be reinterpreted in terms of the Lord's day. The fight for Sunday is another of the Church's major concerns in the present day, when there is so much to upset the rhythm of time that sustains community.

The proper interplay of Old and New Testaments was and is constitutive for the Church. In his discourses after the Resurrection, Jesus insists that he can be understood only in the context of  "the Law and the prophets" and that his community can live only in this properly understood context. From the beginning, the Church has been, and always will be, exposed to two opposite dangers on this score: on one hand a false legalism of the sort Paul fought against, which throughout history has unfortunately been given the unhappy name of "Judaizing" and on the other hand a repudiation of Moses and the Prophets - of the Old Testament. This was first proposed by Marcion in the second century, and it is one of the great temptations of modernity. It is no accident that Harnack, leading exponent of liberal theology that he was, insisted that it was high time to fulfill the inheritance of Marcion and free Christianity from the burden of the Old Testament once and for all. Today's widespread temptation to give the New Testament a purely spiritual interpretation, in isolation from any social and political relevance, tends in the same direction.

Conversely, political theologies, of whatever sort, theologize one particular political formula in a way that contradicts the novelty and breadth of Jesus message. It would, however, be false to characterize such tendencies as a "Judaizing" of Christianity, because Israel offers obedience to the concrete social ordinances of the Torah for the sake of the "eternal Israel's" ethnic community and does not hold up this obedience as a universal political recipe. All in all, it would be good for the Christian world to look respectfully at this obedience of Israel, and thus to appreciate better the great commandments of the Decalogue, which Christians have to transfer into the context of God's universal family and which Jesus, as the "new Moses" has given to us. In him we see the fulfillment of the promise made to Moses: "The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your brethren." - Deut. 18:15 -

Compromise and Prophetic Radicalism

In following the dialogue of the Jewish rabbi with Jesus, adding our own thoughts and observations, we have already moved some distance beyond the Sermon on the Mount and have accompanied Jesus on his journey to Jerusalem. We must now go back once more to the antitheses of the sermon of the Mount, where Jesus takes up questions associated with the second tablet of the Decalogue and brings a new radicalism to bear on the old commandments of the Torah in their understanding of justice before God. Not only are we not to kill, but we must offer reconciliation to our unreconciled brother. No more divorce. Not only are we to be even-handed in justice (eye for eye, tooth for tooth) but we must let ourselves be struck without striking back. we are to love not simply our neighbor, but also our enemy.

The lofty ethics that is expressed here will continue to astonish people of all backgrounds and to impress them as the height of moral greatness. We need only recall Mohandas Gandhi's interest in Jesus, which was based on these very texts. But is what Jesus says here actually realistic? Is it incumbent upon us - is it even legitimate - to act like this? Doesn't some of it, as Neusner objects, destroy all concrete social order? Is it possible to build a community, a people, on such a basis?

Recent scholarly exegesis has gained important insights about this question through a precise investigation of the internal structure of the Torah and its legislation. Particularly important for our question is the analysis of the so-called Book of the Covenant. - Ex. 20:22-23:19 - Two kinds of law [Recht] can be distinguished in this code: so-called casuistic law and apodictic law.

What is called casuistic law stipulates legal arrangements for very specific juridical issues: those pertaining to the ownership and emancipation of slaves, bodily injury by people or animals, recompense for theft, and so forth. No theological explanations are offered here, just specific sanctions that are proportionate to the wrong done. These juridical norms emerged from practice and they form a practically oriented legal corpus that serves to build up a realistic social order, corresponding to the concrete possibilities of a society in a particular historical and cultural situation.

In this respect, the body of law in question is also historically conditioned and entirely open to criticism, often - at least from our ethical perspective - actually in need of it. Even within the context of Old Testament legislation, it undergoes further development. Newer prescriptions contradict older ones regarding the same object. These casuistic provisions, while situated in the fundamental context of faith in the God of revelation who spoke on Sinai, are nonetheless not directly divine law, but are developed from the underlying deposit of divine law, and are therefore subject to further development and correction.

And the fact of the matter is that social order has to be capable of development. It must address changing historical situations within the limits of the possible, but without ever losing sight of the ethical standard as such, which gives law its character as law. As Oliver Artus and others have shown, there is a sense in which the prophetic critique of Isaiah, Hosea, Amos, and Micah is also aimed at casuistic law that, although it is contained in the Torah, has in practice become a form of injustice. This happens when, in view of Israel's particular economic situation, the law no longer serves to protect the poor, widows, and orphans, though the Prophets would see such protection as the highest intention of the legislation given by God.

There are affinities to this critique of the Prophets, though, in parts of the book of the Covenant itself, the parts concerned with so-called apodictic law. - Ex. 22:20, 23:9-12 - This apodictic law is pronounced in the name of God himself; there are no concrete sanctions indicated here. "You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. You shall not afflict any widow or orphan." - Ex. 22:21f. - It was these great norms that formed the basis of the Prophets' critique, serving as a constant touchstone for challenging concrete legal provisions, so that the essential divine nucleus of law could be vindicated as the standard and rule of every juridical development and every social order. F. Crusemann, to whom we owe much of our essential knowledge on this subject, has termed the commandments of apodictic law "metanorms" which provide a platform for critiquing the rules of casuistic law. He explains the relationship between casuistic and apodictic law in terms of the distinction between "rules" and "principles."

Within the Torah itself, then, there are quite different levels of authority. As Artus puts it, the Torah contains an ongoing dialogue between historically conditioned norms and metanorms. The latter express the perennial requirements of the Covenant. Fundamentally, the metanorms reflect God's option to defend the poor, who are easily deprived of justice and cannot procure it for themselves.

This is connected with a further point. The fundamental norm in the Torah, on which everything depends, is insistence upon faith in the one God (YHWH): He alone may be worshiped. But now, as the Prophets develop the Torah, responsibility for the poor, widows, and orphans gradually ascends to the same level as the exclusive worship of the one God. It fuses with the image of God, defining it very specifically. The social commandments are theological commandments, and the theological commandments have a social character - love of God and love of neighbor are inseparable, and love of neighbor, understood in this context as recognition of God's immediate presence in the poor and the weak, receives a very practical definition here.

All of this is essential if we are to understand the Sermon on the Mount correctly. Within the Torah itself, and subsequently in the dialogue between the Law and the Prophets, we already see the contrast between changeable casuistic law, which shapes the social structure of a given time, and the essential principles of the divine law itself, in terms of which practical norms constantly have to be measured, developed, and corrected.

Jesus does nothing new or unprecedented when he contrasts the practical, casuistic norms developed in the Torah with the pure will of God, which he presents as the "greater righteousness" - Mt. 5:20 - expected of God's children. He takes up the intrinsic dynamism of the Torah itself, as further developed by the Prophets, and - in his capacity as the Chosen Prophet who sees God face-to-face - Deut. 18;15 - he gives it its radical forms. Obviously, then, these words do not formulate a social order, but they do provide social orderings with their fundamental criteria - even though these criteria can never be purely realized as such in any given social order. By giving actual juridical and social ordinances a new dynamism, by removing then from the immediate purview of the divine and transferring responsibility for them to enlightened reason, Jesus reflects the internal structure of the Torah itself.

In the antitheses of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus stands before us neither as a rebel nor as a liberal, but as the prophetic interpreter of the Torah. He does not abolish it, but he fulfills it, and he does so precisely by assigning reason its sphere of responsibility for acting within history. Consequently, Christianity constantly has to reshape and reformulate social structures and "Christian social teaching." There will always be new developments to correct what has gone before. In the inner structure of the Torah, in its further development under the critique of the Prophets, and in Jesus' message, which takes up both elements. Christianity finds the wide scope for necessary historical evolution as well as the solid ground that guarantees the dignity of man by rooting it in the dignity of God.

BY  HIS  HOLINESS  POPE  BENEDICT  XVI

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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 -

The Torah Of The Messiah

"You Have Heard That It Was Said.......
But I Say to You......."

The Messiah was expected to bring a renewed Torah - his Torah. Paul may be alluding to this in the Letter to the Galatians when he speaks of the "law of Christ." - Gal. 6:2 - His great, passionate defense of freedom from the Law culminates in the following statement in chapter 5: "For freedom Christ has set us free; stand fast therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery." - Gal. 5:1 - But when he goes on to repeat at 5:13 the claim that "you were called to freedom" he adds, "Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love be servants of one another." - Gal. 5:13 -

And now he explains what freedom is - namely, freedom in the service of good, freedom that allows itself to be led by the Spirit of God. It is precisely by letting oneself be led by God's Spirit, moreover, that one becomes free from the law. Immediately after this Paul details what the freedom of the Spirit actually consists in and what is incompatible with it.

The "law of Christ" is freedom - that is the paradox of Paul's message in the Letter to the Galatians. This freedom has content, then, it has direction, and it therefore contradicts what only apparently liberates man, but in truth makes him a slave. The "Torah of the Messiah" is totally new and different - but it is precisely by being such that it fulfills the Torah of Moses.

The greater part of the Sermon on the Mount - cf. Mt. 5:17, 7:27 - is devoted to the same topic: After a programmatic introduction in the form of the Beatitudes, it goes on to present, so to speak, the Torah of the Messiah. Even in terms of the addresses and the actual intentions of the text, there is an analogy with the Letter to the Galatians: Paul writes there to Jewish Christians who have begun to wonder whether continued observance of the whole Torah as hitherto understood may in fact be necessary after all.

This uncertainty affected above all circumcision, the commandments concerning food, the whole area of prescriptions relating to purity, and how to keep the Sabbath. Paul sees these ideas as a return to the status quo before the messianic revolution, a relapse in which the essential content of this revolution is lost - namely, the universalization of the People of God, as a result of which Israel can now embrace all the peoples of the world; the God of Israel has truly been brought to the nations, in accordance with the promises, and now shown that he is the God of them all, the one God.

The flesh - physical descent from Abraham - is no longer what matters; rather, it is the spirit: belonging to the heritage of Israel's faith and life through communion with Jesus Christ, who "spiritualizes" the Law and in so doing makes it the path to life for all. In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus speaks to his people, to Israel, as to the first bearer of the promise. But in giving them the new Torah, he opens them up, in order to bring to birth a great new family of God drawn from Israel and the Gentiles.

Matthew wrote his Gospel for Jewish Christians and, more widely, for the Jewish world, in order to renew this great impulse that Jesus had initiated. Through his Gospel, Jesus speaks to Israel in a new and ongoing manner. In the historical setting in which Matthew writes, he speaks in a very particular way to Jewish Christians, who thereby recognize both the novelty and the continuity of the history of God's dealings with mankind, beginning with Abraham and undergoing a revolution with Jesus. In this way they are to find the path of life.

But what does this Torah of the Messiah actually look like? At the very beginning there stands, as a sort of epigraph and interpretive key, a statement that never ceases to surprise us. It makes God's fidelity to himself and Jesus' fidelity to the faith of Israel unmistakably clear: "Think not that I have come to abolish the Law and the Prophets; I have come not abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished. Whoever then relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but he who does them and teaches them shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven." - Mt. 5:17-19 -

The intention is not to abolish, but to fulfill, and this fulfillment demands a surplus, not a deficit, of righteousness, as Jesus immediately goes on to say: "Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven." - Mt. 5;20 - Is the point, then, merely increased rigor in obeying the law? What else is this greater righteousness if not that?

True, at the beginning of this "relecture" - this new reading of essential portions of the Torah - there is an emphasis on extreme fidelity and unbroken continuity. Yet as we listen further, we are struck by Jesus' presentation of the relationship of Moses' Torah to the Torah of the Messiah in a series of antitheses: It was said to them of old...but I say to you..."Jesus' "I" is accorded a status that no teacher of the law can legitimately allow himself. The crowd feels this -

Matthew tells us explicitly that the people "were alarmed" at his way of teaching. He teaches not as the rabbis do, but as one who has "authority." - Mt. 7:28; cf. Mk. 1:22; Lk. 4:32 - Obviously this does not refer to the rhetorical quality of Jesus' discourses, but rather to the open claim that he himself is on the same exalted level as the Lawgiver - as God. The people's "alarm" (the RSV translation unfortunately tones this down to "astonishment") is precisely over the fact that a human being dares to speak with the authority of God. Either he is misappropriating God's majesty - which would be terrible - or else, and this seems almost inconceivable, he really does stand on the same exalted level as God.

How, then are we to understand this Torah of the Messiah? Which path does it point toward? What does it tell us about Jesus, about Israel, about the Church? What does it say about us, and to us? In my search for answers, I have been greatly helped by the book I mentioned earlier by the Jewish scholar Jacob Neusner: A Rabbi Talks with Jesus.

Neusner, a believing Jew and rabbi, grew up with Catholic and Protestant friends, teaches with Christian theologians at the university, and is deeply respectful of the faith of his Christians colleagues. He remains, however, profoundly convinced of the validity of the Jewish interpretation of Holy Scripture. His reverence for the Christian faith and his fidelity to Judaism prompted him to seek a dialogue with Jesus.

In his book, he takes his place among the crowds of Jesus' disciples on the "mount" in Galilee. He listens to Jesus and compares his words with those of the Old Testament and with the rabbinic traditions as set down in the Mishnah and Talmud. He sees in these works an oral tradition going back to the beginnings, which gives him the key to interpreting the Torah. He listens, he compares, and he speaks with Jesus himself. He is touched by the greatness and the purity of what is said, and yet at the same time he is troubled by the ultimate incompatibility that he finds at the heart of the Sermon on the Mount.

He then accompanies Jesus on his journey to Jerusalem and listens as Jesus' words return to the same ideas and develop them further. He constantly tries to understand; he is constantly moved by the greatness of Jesus; again and again he talks with him. But in the end he decides not to follow Jesus. He remains - as himself puts it - with the "eternal Israel."

The rabbi's dialogue with Jesus shows that faith in the word of God in the Holy Scriptures creates a contemporaneous bond across the ages: Setting out from Scripture, the rabbi can enter into the "today" of Jesus, setting out from Scripture, can enter into our "today." This dialogue is conducted with great honesty. It highlights the differences in all their sharpness, but it also takes place in great love. The rabbi accepts the otherness of Jesus' message, and takes his leave free of any rancor; this parting, accomplished in the rigor of truth, is ever mindful of the reconciling power of love.

Let us try to draw out the essential points of this conversation in order to know Jesus and to understand our Jewish brothers better. The central point, it seems to me, is wonderfully revealed in one of the most moving scenes that Neusner presents in his book. In his interior dialogue Neusner has just spent the whole day following Jesus, and now he retires for prayer and Torah study with the Jews of a certain town, in order to discuss with the rabbi of that place - once again he is thinking in terms of contemporaneity across the millennia - all that he has heard. The rabbi cites from the Babylonian Talmud: "Rabbi Simelai expounded: 'Six hundred and thirteen commandments were given to Moses, three hundred and sixty-five negative ones, corresponding to the number of the days of the solar year, and two hundred forty-eight positive commandments, corresponding to the parts of man's body.

"David came and reduced them to eleven...
"Isaiah came and reduced them to six...
"Isaiah again came and reduced them to two...
"Habakkuk further came and based them on one, as it is said: "But the righteous shall live by his faith." - Hab. 2:4 -

Neusner then continues his book with the following dialogue: "So', the master says, 'is this what the sage, Jesus had to say?'
"I: 'Not exactly, but close.'
"He: 'What did he leave out?'
"I: 'Nothing.'
"He: 'Then what did he add?'
"I: 'Himself'" (pp. 107-8).

This is the central point where the believing Jew Neusner experiences alarm at Jesus' message, and this is the central reason why he does not wish to follow Jesus, but remains with the "eternal Israel": the centrality of Jesus' "I" in his message, which gives everything a new direction. At this point Neusner cites as evidence of this "addition" Jesus' words to the rich young man: "If you would be perfect, go sell all you have and come, follow me" - cf. Mt. 19:21 - Neusner, p.109 [emphasis added]) Perfection, the state of being holy as God is holy - cf. Lev. 19:2, 11:44 - as demanded by the Torah, now consists in following Jesus.

It is only with great respect and reverence that Neusner addresses this mysterious identification of Jesus and God that is found in the discourses of the Sermon on the Mount. Nonetheless, his analysis shows that this is the point where Jesus' message diverges fundamentally from the faith of the "eternal Israel." Neusner demonstrates this after investigating Jesus' attitude toward three fundamental commandments: the fourth commandment (the commandment to love one's parents) the third commandment (to keep holy the Sabbath) and, finally, the commandment to be holy as God is holy (which we touched upon just a moment ago). Neusner comes to the disturbing conclusion that Jesus is evidently trying to persuade him to cease following these three fundamental commandments of God and to adhere to Jesus instead.

The Dispute Concerning the Sabbath

Let us follow Rabbi Neusner's dialogue with Jesus, beginning with the Sabbath. For Israel, observing the Sabbath with scrupulous care is the central expression of life in Covenant with God. Even the superficial reader of the Gospels realizes that the dispute over what does and does not belong to the Sabbath is at heart of Jesus' differences with the people of Israel of his time. The conventional interpretation is that Jesus broke open a narrow-minded, legalistic practice and replaced it with a more generous, more liberal view, and thereby opened the door for acting rationally in accord with the given situation. Jesus' statement that "the Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath" - Mk. 2:27 - is cited as evidence, the idea being that it represents an anthropocentric view of reality, from which a "liberal" interpretation of the commandments supposedly follows naturally.

It was, in fact, the Sabbath disputes that became the basis for the image of the liberal Jesus. His critique of the Judaism of his time, so it is said, was a freedom loving and rational man's critique of an ossified legalism - hypocritical to the core and guilty of dragging religion down to the level of a slavish system of utterly unreasonable obligations that hold man back from developing his work and his freedom. It goes without saying that this interpretation did not favor a particularly friendly image of Judaism. Of course, the modern critique - beginning with the Reformation - saw in Catholicism the return of this supposedly "Jewish" element.

At any rate, the question about Jesus - who he really was, and what he really wanted - as well as the whole question as to what Judaism and Christianity actually are: This is the point at issue. Was Jesus in reality a liberal rabbi - a forerunner of Christian liberalism? Is the Christ of faith, and therefore the whole faith of the Church, just one big mistake?

Neusner is surprisingly quick to brush this sort of interpretation aside - as well he might, because he lays bare the real bone of contention so convincingly. Commenting on the dispute over the disciples' right to pluck the ears of wheat, he simply writes: "What troubles me, therefore, is not that the disciples do not obey one of the rules of the Sabbath. That is trivial and beside the point."

To be sure, when we read the dispute over the healing on the Sabbath and the accounts of Jesus' angry grief at the hard-heartedness of those who spoke for the dominant interpretation of the Sabbath, we see that these debates concern deeper questions about man and about the right way to honor God. This side of the conflict is therefore by no means simply "trivial." Neusner is nonetheless right to identify Jesus' answer in the dispute over the ears of wheat as the place where the heart of the conflict is laid bare.

Jesus begins his defense of the disciples' way of satisfying their hunger by pointing out that David and his companions entered the House of God and ate the holy bread, "which it was not lawful for him to eat nor for those who were with him, but only for the priests." - Mt. 12:4 -

Jesus then continues: "Or have you not read in the law how on the Sabbath the priests in the temple profane the Sabbath, and are guiltless? I tell you, something greater than the temple is here. And if you had known what this means, 'I desire mercy, and not sacrifice' - cf. Hos. 6:6; 1 Sam. 15:22 - you would not have condemned the guiltless. For the Son of man is Lord of the Sabbath. - Mt. 12:5-8 - Neusner comments: He [Jesus] and his disciples may do on the Sabbath what they do because they stand in the place if the priests in the Temple; the holy place has shifted, now being formed by the circle made up of the master and his disciple. (pp. 83f.)

At this point we need to pause for a moment in order to see what the Sabbath meant for Israel. This will also help us to understand what is at stake in this dispute. God rested on the seventh day, as the creation account in Genesis tell us. Neusner rightly concludes that "on that day we...celebrate creation. (p. 74) He then adds: "Not working on the Sabbath stands for more than nitpicking ritual. It is a way of imitating God ." (p. 75)

The Sabbath is therefore not just a negative matter of not engaging in outward activities, but a positive matter of "resting" which must also be expressed in a spatial dimension: "So to keep the Sabbath, one remains at home. It is not enough merely not to work. One also has to rest. And resting means, re-forming one day a week the circle of family and household, everyone at home and in place." (p. 80) The Sabbath is not just a matter of personal piety; it is the core of the social order. This day "makes eternal Israel what it is, the people that, like God in creating the world, rest from creation on the Seventh Day. (p. 74)

We could easily stop here to consider hoe salutary it would also be for our society today if families set aside one day a week to stay together and make their home the dwelling place and the fulfillment of communion in God's rest. But let us forgo such reflections here and remain with the dialogue between Jesus and Israel, which is also inevitably a dialogue between Jesus and us and between us and the Jewish people of today.

For Neusner, the key word rest, understood as an integral element of the Sabbath, is the connecting link to Jesus' exclamation immediately prior to the story of the disciples plucking the ears of wheat in Matthew's Gospel. It is the so-called Messianic Jubelruf (joyful shout) which begins as follows: "I thank thee, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to babes." - Mt. 11:25-30 - We are accustomed to considering these as two totally distinct texts. The first one speaks of Jesus' divinity, the other of the dispute surrounding the Sabbath. When we read Neusner, we realize that the two texts are closely related, for in both cases the issue is the mystery of Jesus - the "Son of Man" the "Son" par excellence.

The verses immediately preceding the Sabbath narrative read as follow: "Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.' - Mt. 11:28-30 - This is usually interpreted in terms of the idea of the liberal Jesus, that is, moralistically. Jesus' liberal understanding of the Law makes for a less burdensome life than "Jewish legalism." This interpretation is not very convincing in practice, though, for following Christ is not comfortable - and Jesus never said it would be, either.

What follows from this? Neusner shows us that we are dealing not with some kind of moralism, but with a highly theological text, or, to put it more precise, a Christological one. Because it features the motif of rest, and the connected motifs of labor and burden, it belongs thematically with the question of the Sabbath. The rest that is intended here has to do with Jesus. Jesus' teaching about the Sabbath now appears fully in harmony with his Jubelruf and his words about the Son of Man being Lord of the Sabbath. Neusner sums up the overall as follows: "My yoke is easy, I give you rest, the Son of man is Lord of the Sabbath indeed, because the Son of man is now Israel's Sabbath: how we act like God." (p. 86)

Neusner can now say even more clearly than before: "No wonder, then, that the Son of man is Lord of the Sabbath! The reason is not that he interprets the Sabbath restrictions in a liberal manner...Jesus was not just another reforming rabbi, out to make life 'easier' for people... No, the issue is not that the burden is light... Jesus' claim to authority is at issue." (p. 85) "Christ now stands on the mountain, he now takes the place of the Torah." (p. 87) The conversation between the practicing Jew and Jesus comes to the decisive point here. His noble reserve leads him to put the question to Jesus' disciple, rather than to Jesus himself: "Is it really so that your master, the Son of man, is Lord of the Sabbath?...I ask again - is your master God?". (p. 88)

The issue that is really at the heart of the debate is thus finally laid bare. Jesus understands himself as the Torah - as the word of God in person. The tremendous prologue of John's Gospel - "in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." - Jn. 1:1 - says nothing different from what the Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount and the Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels says. The Jesus of the Fourth Gospel and the Jesus of the Synoptic is one and the same: the true "historical" Jesus.

The heart of the Sabbath disputes is the question about the Son of Man - the question about Jesus Christ himself. Yet again we see how far Harnack and the liberal exegesis that followed him went wrong in thinking that the Son, Christ, is not really part of the Gospel about Jesus. The truth is that he is always at the center of it.

Now, though, we need to consider a further aspect of the question that arises more sharply in connection with the fourth commandment. What disturbs Rabbi Neusner about Jesus' message concerning the Sabbath is not just the centrality of Jesus himself. He throws this centrality into clear relief, but it is not the ultimate bone of contention for him. Rather, he is concerned with the consequence of Jesus' centrality for Israel'e daily life: The Sabbath loses its great social function. The Sabbath is one of the essential elements that hold Israel together. Centering upon Jesus breaks open this sacred structure and imperils an essential element that cements the unity of the People of God.

Jesus' claim entails that the community of his disciples is the new Israel. How can this not unsettle someone who has the "eternal Israel" at heart? The issue of Jesus' claim to be Temple and Torah in person also has implications for the people in whom God's word is actualized. Neusner devotes a fairly large portion of his book to underscoring just this second aspect, as we shall see in what follows.

At this point, the question arises for the Christian: Was it a good idea to jeopardize the great social function of the Sabbath, to break up Israel's sacred order for the sake of a community of disciples that is defined, as it were, solely in terms of the figure of Jesus? This question could and can be clarified only within the emerging community of disciples - the Church. We cannot enter into this discussion here. The Resurrection of Jesus "on the first day of the week" meant that for Christians this "first day" - the beginning of the creation - became the "Lord's day" - The essential elements of the Old Testament Sabbath then naturally passed over to the Lord's day in the context of table fellowship with Jesus.

The Church thus recuperated the social function of the Sabbath as well, always in relation to the "Son of Man." An unmistakable signal of this was the fact that Constantine's Christian - inspired reform of the legal system granted slaves certain freedoms on Sundays; the Lord's day was thus introduced as a day of freedom and rest into a legal system now shaped on Christian principles. I find it extremely worrying that modern liturgists want to dismiss this social function of Sunday as a Constantinian aberration, despite the fact that it stands in continuity with the Torah of Israel.

Of course, this brings up the whole question of the relationship between faith and social order, between faith and politics. We will need to focus on this point in the next section.

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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 -

But it may be a good idea - before we continue our meditation on the text - to turn for a moment to the figure whom the history of faith offers us as the most intensely lived illustration of this Beatitude: Francis of Assisi. The saints are true interpreters of Holy Scripture. The meaning of a given passage of the Bible becomes most intelligible in those human beings who have been totally transfixed by it and have lived it out. Interpretation of Scripture can never be a purely academic affair, and it cannot be relegated to the purely historical. Scripture is full of potential for the future, a potential that can only be opened up when someone "lives through" and "suffers through" the sacred text.

Francis of Assisi was gripped in an utterly radical way by the promise of the first Beatitude, to the point that he even gave away his garments and let himself be clothed anew by the bishop, the representative of God's fatherly goodness, through which the lilies of the field were clad in robes finer than Solomon's. - cf.Mt. 6:28-29 - For Francis, this extreme humility was above all freedom for service, freedom for mission, ultimate trust in God, who cares not only for the flowers of the field but specifically for his human children. It was a corrective to the Church of his day, which, through the feudal system, had lost the freedom and dynamism of missionary outreach. It was the deepest possible openness to Christ, to whom Francis was perfectly configured by the wounds of the stigmata, so perfectly that from then on he truly no longer lived as himself, but as one reborn, totally from and in Christ. For he did not want to found a religious order: He simply wanted to gather the People of God to listen anew to the word - without evading the seriousness of God's call by means of learned commentaries.

By creating the Third order, though, Francis did accept the distinction between radical commitment and the necessity of living in the world. The point of the Third Order is to accept with humility the task of one's secular profession and its requirements, wherever one happens to be, while directing one's whole life to that deep interior communion with Christ that Francis showed us. "To own good as if you owned nothing." - cf.1 Cor. 7:29ff. - to master this inner tension, which is perhaps the more difficult challenge, and, sustained by those pledged to follow Christ radically, truly to live it out ever anew - that is what the third orders are for. And they open up for us what this Beatitude can mean for all. It is above all by looking at Francis of Assisi that we see clearly what the words "Kingdom of God" mean. Francis stood totally within the Church, and at the same time it is in figures such as he that the Church grows toward the goal that lies in the future, and yet is already present: The Kingdom of God is drawing near...

Let us pass over for the time being the second Beatitude listed in Matthew's Gospel and go directly to the third, which is closely connected with the first: "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth." - Mt. 5:5 - Some translations render the Greek word praus as "Nonviolent" rather than "meek." This is a narrowing of the Greek term, which carries a great wealth of tradition. The third Beatitude is practically a Psalm citation: "The meek shall posses the land." - Ps. 37:11 - The word praus in the Greek Bible translates the Hebrew anawim, which was used to designate God's poor, of whom we spoke in connection with the first Beatitude. The first and third Beatitudes thus overlap to a large extent; the third Beatitude further illustrates an essential aspect of what is meant by poverty lived from and for God.

The focus is enlarged, though, when we take account of a few other texts in which the same word occurs. In Numbers 12:3 we read: "Now the man Moses was very meek, more than all men that were on the face of the earth." One cannot help thinking of Jesus' saying, "Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am meek and lowly in heart." - Mt. 11;29 - Christ is the new, the true Moses (this idea runs through the whole Sermon on the Mount). In him there appears the pure goodness that above all befits the great man, the ruler.

We are led even deeper when we consider another set of interconnections between the Old and new Testaments based around the word praus, "meek." In Zech. 9:9-10 we read: "Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem! Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble [meek] and riding on an ass, on a colt the foal of an ass. he will cut off the chariot from Ephraim... the battle bow shall be cut off, and he shall command peace to the nations; his dominion shall be from sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth." This passage announces a poor king - a king whose rule does not depend on political and military might. His inmost being is humility and meekness before God and men. In this he is the exact opposite of the great kings of the world. And a vivid illustration is the fact that he rides on an ass - the mount of the poor, the counter image of the chariot that he rejects. he is the king of peace - and by God's power, not his own.

There is a further element: His kingdom is universal, it embraces the whole earth. "From sea to sea" - behind this expression is the image of a flat earth surrounded on all sides by the waters, and it thus gives us an inkling of the world spanning extent of his dominion. Karl Elliger is therefore correct when he says that "through all the fog" we do "glimpse with surprising distinctness the figure of the one who has now really brought the whole world the peace that passes all understanding. he has done so in filial obedience: by renouncing violence and accepting suffering until he was released from it by the Father. And so from now on he builds up his kingdom simply by the word of peace." (Das Alte Testament Deutsch, 24/25,p.151) Only against this backdrop do we grasp the full scope of the account of Palm Sunday, only now do we understand what it means when Luke (and, in a similar vein, John) tells us that Jesus ordered his disciples to procure him a she-ass and her foal: "This took place to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet, saying, 'Tell the daughter of Zion, "Behold, your king is coming to you, [meek] and mounted on an ass, and on a colt, the foal of an ass." ' " - Mt. 21:4-5; cf.John 12:15 -

Unfortunately some translations obscure these interconnections by using different words to translate praus. Within the wide arc of these texts - from Numbers 12 through Zechariah 9 to the Beatitudes and the account of Palm Sunday - we can discern the vision of Jesus, the king of peace, who throws open the frontiers separating the peoples and creates a domain of peace "from sea to sea.' Through his obedience he calls us into this peace and plants it in us. The word meek belongs, on one hand, to the vocabulary of the People of God, to the Israel that in Christ has come to span the whole world. At the same time, it is a word related to kingship, which unlocks for us the essence of Christ's new kingship. In this sense, we could say that it is both a Christological word and an ecclesiological one. In any case, it is a word that calls us to follow the one whose entry into Jerusalem mounted on an ass reveals the whole essence of his kinship.

In the text of Matthew's Gospel, this third Beatitude is associated with the promise of the land: "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the land." What does this statement mean? Hope for the land is part of the original content of the promise to Abraham. During Israel's years of wandering in the desert, the promised land is always envisaged as the goal of the journey. in exile Israel waits for the return to the land. We must not overlook, however, that the promise of the land is clearly about something far greater than the mere idea of possessing a piece of ground or a national territory in the sense that every people is entitled to do.

The main issue in the foreground of the struggle for liberation prior to Israel's exodus from Egypt is the right to freedom of worship, the people's right to their own liturgy. As time went by, it became increasingly clear that the promise of the land meant this: The land was given as a space for obedience, a realm of openness to God, that was to be freed from the abominations of idolatry . The concept of obedience to God, and so of the right ordering of the earth, is an essential component of the concept of freedom and the concept of the land. from this perspective, the exile, the withdrawal of the land, could also be understood: The land had itself become a zone of idolatry and disobedience, and the possession of the land had therefore become a contradiction.

A new and positive understanding of the diaspora could also arise from this way of thinking: Israel was scattered across the world so that it might everywhere create space for God and thus fulfill the purpose of creation suggested by the first creation account - cf.gen. 1:1-4 - The Sabbath is the goal of creation, and it shows what creation is for. The world exists, in other words, because God wanted to create a zone of response to his love, a zone of obedience and freedom. Step by step, as Israel accepted and suffered all the vicissitudes of its history as God's people, the idea of the land grew in depth and breadth, shifting its focus increasingly toward the universality of God's claim to the earth.

Of course, there is a sense in which the interplay between "meekness" and the promise of the land can also be seen as a perfectly ordinary piece of historical wisdom: Conquerors come and go, but the ones who remain are the simple, the humble, who cultivate the land and continue sowing and harvesting in the midst of sorrows and joys. The humble, the simple, outlast the violent, even from a purely historical point of view. But there is more. The gradual universalization of the concept of the land on the basis of a theology of hope also reflects the universal horizon that we found in the promise of Zechariah: The land of the king of peace is not a nation state - it stretches from "sea to sea" - Zech. 9:10 - Peace aims at the overcoming of boundaries and at the renewal of the earth through the peace that comes from God. The earth ultimately belongs to the meek, to the peaceful, the Lord tells us. It is meant to become the "land of the king of peace." The third Beatitude invites us to orient our lives toward this goal.

Every Eucharistic assembly is for us Christians a place where king of peace reigns in this sense. The universal communion of Christ's Church is thus a preliminary sketch of the world of tomorrow, which is destined to become a land of Jesus Christ's peace. In this respect, too, the third Beatitude harmonizes closely with the first: It goes some way toward explaining what "Kingdom of God" means, even though the claim behind this term extends beyond the promise of the land.

With the foregoing remarks, we have already anticipated the seventh Beatitude: "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God." - Mt. 5:9 - A few observations on the main points of this fundamentally important saying of Jesus may therefore suffice. First of all, we glimpse the events of secular history in the background. In his infancy narrative, Luke had already suggested the contrast between this child and the all-powerful Emperor Augustus, who was renowned as the "savior of the universal human race" and as the great peacemaker. Caesar had already claimed the title "bringer of world peace."

The faithful in Israel would be reminded of Solomon, whose Hebrew name is rooted in the word for "peace" (shalom) The Lord had promised David: "I will give peace and quiet to Israel in his days... he shall be my son, and I will be his father." - 1 Chron. 22:9f. - This brings to the fore a connection between divine Sonship and the kingship of peace: Jesus is the Son, and he is truly Son. He is therefore the true "Solomon" - the bringer of peace. Establishing peace is part of the very essence of Sonship. The seventh Beatitude thus invites us to be and do what the Son does, so that we ourselves may become "sons of God."

This applies first of all in the context of each person's life. It begins with the fundamental decision that Paul passionately begs us to make in the name of God: "We beseech you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God." - 2 Cor. 5:20 - Enmity with God is the source of all that poisons man; over-coming this enmity is the basic condition for peace in the world. Only the man who is reconciled with God can also be reconciled and in harmony with himself, and only the man who is reconciled with God and with himself can establish peace around him and throughout the world. But the political context that emerges from Luke's infancy narrative as well as here in Matthew's Beatitudes indicates the full scope of these words. That there be peace on earth - cf.Luke 2:14 - is the will of God and, for that reason, it is a task given to man as well.

The Christian knows that lasting peace is connected with men abiding in God's eudokia, his "good pleasure." The struggle to abide in peace with God is an indispensable part of the struggle for "peace on earth"; the former is the source of the criteria and the energy for the latter. When men lose sight of God, peace disintegrates and violence proliferates to a formerly unimaginable degree of cruelty. This we see only too clearly today.

Let go back to the second Beatitude: "Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted." - Mt. 5:4 - Is it good to mourn and to declare mourning blessed? There are two kinds of mourning. The first is the kind that has lost hope, that has become mistrustful of love and of truth, and that therefore eats away and destroys man from within. But there is also the mourning occasioned by the shattering encounter with truth, which leads man to undergo conversion and to resist evil. This mourning heals, because it teaches man to hope and to love again. Judas is an example of the first kind of mourning: Struck with horror at his own fall, he no longer dares to hope and hangs himself in despair. Peter is an example of the second kind: Struck by the Lord's gaze, he bursts into healing tears that plow up the soil of his soul. He begins anew and is himself renewed.

Ezekiel 9:4 offers us a striking testimony to how this positive kind of mourning can counteract the dominion of evil. Six men are charged with executing divine punishment on Jerusalem - on the land that is filled with bloodshed, on the city that is full of wickedness. - cf.Ezek. 9:9 - Before they do, however, a man clothed in linen must trace the Hebrew letter tau (like the sign of Cross) on the foreheads of all those "who sigh and groan over all the abominations that are committed in the city." - Ezek. 9:4 -Those who bear this mark are exempted from the punishment. They are people who do not run with the pack, who refuse to collude with the injustice that has become endemic, but who suffer under it instead. Even though it is not in their power to change the overall situation, they still counter the dominion of evil through the passive resistance of their suffering - through the mourning that sets bounds to the power of evil.

Tradition has yielded another image of mourning that brings salvation: Mary Magdalene, and with John. - John 19:25ff. - Once again, as in the vision of Ezekiel, we encounter here the small band of people who remain true in a world full of cruelty and cynicism or else with fearful conformity. They cannot avert the disaster, bit by "suffering with: the one condemned (by their compassion in the etymological sense) they place themselves on his side, and by their "loving with" they are on the side of God, who is love. "This compassion" reminds us of the magnificent saying in Saint Bernard of Clairvaux's commentary on the Song of Songs (sermon 26, no.5): "Impasibilis est Deus, sed non incompassibilis' -

God cannot suffer, but he can "suffer with" At the foot of Jesus' Cross we understand better than anywhere else what it means to say "blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted." Those who do not harden their hearts to the pain and need of others, who do not give evil entry to their souls, but suffer under its power and so acknowledge the truth of God - they are the ones who open the windows of the world to let the light in. It is also to those who mourn in this sense that great consolation is promised. The second Beatitude is thus intimately connected with the eighth: "Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." - Mt. 5:10 -

The mourning of which the Lord speaks is nonconformity with evil; it is a way of resisting models of behavior that the individual is pressured to accept because "everyone does it." The world cannot tolerate this kind of resistance; it demands conformity. It considers this mourning to be an accusation directed against the numbing of consciences. And so it is. That is why those who mourn suffer persecution for the sake of righteousness. Those who mourn are promised comfort; those who are persecuted are promised the Kingdom of God - the same promise that is made to the poor in spirit. The two promises are closely related. The Kingdom of God - standing under the protection of God's power, secure in his love - that is true comfort.

The converse is also true. The sufferer is not truly comforted, his tears are not completely wiped away. until he and the powerless of this world are no longer threatened by murderous violence; comfort is not brought to completion until even past sufferings never previously understood are lifted up into the light of God  and given the meaning of reconciliation by his goodness; true comfort only appears when the "last enemy" death - cf. 1 Cor. 15:26 - and all its accomplices have been stripped of their power. Christ's words about comforting thus help us to understand what he means by "Kingdom of God" (of the heavens) while "Kingdom of God" gives us in turn an idea of what consolation the Lord holds in store for all those who mourn and suffer in this world.

There is one further observation that we have to add here. Jesus' words concerning those persecuted for righteousness' sake had a prophetic significance for Matthew and his audience. For them this was the Lord foretelling the situation of the Church which they were living through. The Church had become a persecuted Church, persecuted "for righteousness' sake." Righteousness in the language of the Old Covenant is the term for fidelity to the Torah, to the word of God, as the Prophets were constantly reminding their hearers. It is the observance of the right path shown by God, with the Ten Commandments at its center. The term that in the New Testament corresponds to the Old Testament concept of righteousness is faith: The man of faith is the "righteous man" who walks in God's ways. - cf. Ps. 1; Jer. 17:5-8 - For faith is walking with Christ, in whom the whole Law is fulfilled; it unites us with the righteousness of Christ himself.

The people who are persecuted for righteousness' sake are those who live by God's righteousness - by faith. Because man constantly strives for emancipation from God's will in order to follow himself alone, faith will always appear as a contradiction to the "world" - to the ruling powers at any given time. For this reason, there will be persecution for the sake of righteousness in every period of history. This word of comfort is addressed to the persecuted Church of all times. In her powerlessness and in her sufferings, she knows that she stands in the place where God's Kingdom is coming.

If, then, we may once again identify an ecclesiological dimension, an interpretation of the nature of the Church, in the promise attached to this Beatitude, as we did in the case of earlier ones, so too we can identify a Christological basis to these words: The crucified Christ is the persecuted just man portrayed in the words of Old Covenant prophecy - particularly the Suffering Servant Songs - but also prefigured in Plato's writings (The Republic, II 361e-362a) And in this guise he himself is the advent of God's Kingdom. This Beatitude is an invitation to follow the crucified Christ - an invitation to the individual as well as to the Church as a whole.

The Beatitude concerning the persecuted contains, in the words that conclude the whole passage, a variant indicating something new. Jesus promises joy, exultation, and a great reward to those who for his sake are reviled, and persecuted, and have all manner of evil uttered falsely against them. - cf. Mt. 5:11 - The "I" of Jesus himself, fidelity to his person, becomes the criterion of righteousness and salvation. In the other Beatitudes, Christology is present, so to speak, in veiled form; here, however, the message that he himself is the center of history emerges openly. Jesus ascribes to his "I" a normative status that no teacher of Israel - indeed, no teacher of the Church - has a right to claim for himself. Someone who speaks like this is no longer a prophet in the traditional sense, an ambassador and trustee of another; he himself is the reference point of the righteous life, its goal and center.

Later in the course of our meditations, we will come to see that this direct Christology is constitutive of the Sermon on the Mount as a whole. What is here only touched upon will be developed further as we proceed.

Let us turn now to one of the two Beatitudes still to be discussed: "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied." - Mt. 5:6 - This saying is intrinsically related to Jesus' words concerning those who mourn and who will find comfort. In the earlier Beatitude, the ones who receive the promise are those who do not bow to the diktat of the prevailing opinions and customs, but resist it by suffering. Similarly, this Beatitude is concerned with those who are on the lookout, who are in search of something great, of true justice, of the true good.

One of the textual strands of the Book of Daniel contains a statement that tradition has come to regard as a synthesis of the attitude that is under consideration here. Daniel is described there as a virdesideriorum, as a man of longings. (Dan. 9:23 in the Latin Vulgate) The people this Beatitude describes are those who are not content with things as they are and refuse to stifle the restlessness of heart that points man toward something greater and so sets him on the inward journey to reach it - rather like the wise men from the East seeking Jesus, the star that shows the way to truth, to love, to God. The people meant here are those whose interior sensitivity enables them to see and hear the subtle signs that God sends into the world to break the dictatorship of convention.

At this point, who can fail to be reminded of the humble saints in whom the Old Covenant opens itself to the new, and is transformed into it? Of Zachariah and Elizabeth, of Mary and Joseph, of Simeon and Anna, all of whom, in their different ways, await the salvation of Israel with inner watchfulness and who by their humble piety, their patient waiting and longing, "prepare the way" of the Lord? But do we also think of the twelve Apostle - of these men who, though coming (as we will see) from totally different intellectual and social backgrounds, had kept their hearts open amid work and their everyday lives, ready to respond to the call of something greater?

Or of the passion for righteousness of a man such as Paul, a misguided passion that nonetheless prepared him to be cast down by God, and so brought to a new clarity of vision? We could continue in this vein throughout the whole of history. Edith Stein once said that anyone who honestly and passionately searches for truth is on the way to Christ. It is of such people that the Beatitude speaks - of this thirst and hunger that is blessed because it leads men to God, to Christ, and therefore opens the world to the Kingdom of God.

It seems to me that this is the place to say something, based upon the New testament, about the salvation of those who do not know Christ. The prevailing view today is that everyone should live by the religion - or perhaps by the atheism - in which he happens to find himself already. This, it is said, is the path to salvation for him. Such a view presupposes a strange picture of God and a strange idea of man and of the right way for man to live. Let us try to clarify this by asking a few practical questions. Does someone achieve blessedness and justification in God's eyes because he has conscientiously fulfilled the duties of blood vengeance? Because he has vigorously fought for and in "holy war"? Or because he has performed certain animal sacrifices? Or because he has practiced ritual ablutions and other observances? Because he has declared his opinions and wishes to be norms of conscience and so made himself the criterion?

No, God demands the opposite: that we become inwardly attentive to his quiet exhortation, which is present in us and which tears us away from what is merely habitual and puts us on the road to truth. To "hunger and thirst for righteousness" - that is the path that lies open to everyone; that is the way that finds its destination in Jesus Christ.

There is one more Beatitude: "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." - Mt. 5:8 - The organ for seeing God is the heart. The intellect alone is not enough. In order for man to become capable of perceiving God, the energies of his existence have to work in harmony. His will must be pure and so too must the underlying affective dimension of his soul, which gives intelligence and will their direction. Speaking of the heart in this way means precisely that man's perceptive powers play in concert, which also requires the proper interplay of body and soul, since this is essential for the totality of the creature we call "man." Man's fundamental affective disposition actually depends on just this unity of body and soul and on man's acceptance of being both body and spirit.

This means he places his body under the discipline of the spirit, yet does not isolate intellect or will. Rather, he accepts himself as coming from God, and thereby also acknowledges and lives out the bodily of his existence as an enrichment for the spirit. The heart - the wholeness of man - must be pure, interiorly open and free, in order for man to be able to see God. Theophilus of Antioch (d. ca, 180) once put it like this in a debate with some disputants: "if you say, 'show me your God' I should like to answer you 'show me the man who is in you'...For God is perceived by men who are capable of seeing him, who have the eyes of their spirit open...man's soul must be as pure as a shining mirror." (Ad Autolycum, I, 2 7ff.)

This prompts the question: How is man's inner eye purified? How to remove the cataract that blurs his vision or even blinds it altogether? The mystical tradition that speaks of a "way of purification" ascending to final "union" was an attempt to answer this question. The Beatitudes have to be read first and foremost in the context of the Bible. There, we meet the motif of purity of heart above all in Psalm 24, which reflects an ancient gate liturgy: "Who shall ascend the hill of the LORD? And who shall stand in his holy place? He who has clean hands and a pure heart, who does not lift his soul to what is false, and does not swear deceitfully." - Ps. 24:3-4 - Before the gate of the Temple, the question arises as to who may enter and stand in proximity to the living God. Clean hands and a pure heart are the condition.

The Psalm explains in many different ways the content of this condition for admission to God's dwelling place. One fundamental condition is that those who enter into God's presence must inquire after him, must seek his face. Ps. 24:6 - The fundamental condition thus proves to be the same attitude that we saw earlier, described by the phrase "hunger and thirst for righteousness." Inquiring after God, seeking his face - that is the first and fundamental condition for the ascent that leads to the encounter with God. Even before that, however, the Psalm specifies that clean hands and a pure heart entail man's refusal to deceive or commit perjury; this requires honesty, truthfulness, and justice toward one's fellow men and toward the community - what we might call social ethics, although it actually reaches right down into the depths of the heart.

Psalm 15 elaborates further on this, and hence we can say that the condition for admission to God's presence is simply the content of the Decalogue - with an emphasis on an inward search for God, on journeying toward him (first tablet) and on love of neighbor, on justice toward the individual and the community (second tablet) No condition specifically involving knowledge of Revelation are enumerated, only "inquiring after God" and the basic tenets of justice that a vigilant conscience - stirred into activity by the search for God - conveys to everyone. Our earlier reflection on the question of salvation finds further confirmation here.

On Jesus' lips, though, these words acquire new depth. For it belongs to his nature that he sees God, that he stands face-to-face with him, in permanent interior discourse - in a relation of Sonship. In other words, this Beatitude is profoundly Christological. We will see God when we enter into the "mind of Christ." - Phil. 2:5 - Purification of heart occurs as a consequence of following Christ, of becoming one with him. "It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me." - Gal. 2:20 -

And at this point something new comes to light: The ascent to God occurs precisely in the descent of humble service, in the descent of love, for love is God's essence, and is thus the power that truly purifies man and enables him to perceive God and to see him. In Jesus Christ, God has revealed himself in his descending: "Though he was in the form of God" he did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men... He humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him." - Phil. 2:6-9 -

These words mark a decisive turning point in the history of mysticism. They indicate what is new in Christian mysticism, which comes from what is new in the Revelation of Jesus Christ. God descends, to the point of death on the Cross. And precisely by doing so, he reveals himself in his true divinity. We ascend to God by accompanying him on this descending path. In this context, the "gate liturgy" in Psalm 24 receives a new significance: The pure heart is the loving heart that enters into communion of service and obedience with Jesus Christ. Love is the fire that purifies and unifies intellect, will, and emotion, thereby making man one with himself, inasmuch as it makes him one in God's eyes. Thus, man is able to serve the uniting of those who are divided. This is how man enters God's dwelling place and becomes able to see him. And that is just what it means for him to be "blessed."

After this attempt to penetrate somewhat more deeply into the interior vision of the Beatitudes (the theme of the "merciful" is addressed not in this chapter, but in connection with the parable of the Good Samaritan) we must still briefly ask ourselves two questions that pertain to the understanding of the whole. In Luke's Gospel, the four Beatitudes that he presents are followed by four proclamations of woe: "Woe to you who are rich... Woe to you who are full now... Woe to you who laugh now... Woe to you when all men praise you" - Luke 6:24-26 - These words terrify us. What are we to think of them?

Now, the first thing to say is that Jesus is here following the pattern that is also found in Jeremiah 17 and Psalm 1: After an account of the right path that leads man to salvation , there follows a warning sign to caution against the opposite path. This warning sign unmasks false promises and false offers; it is meant to save man from following a path that can only lead him fatally over the precipice. We will find the same thing again in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus.

If we have correctly understood the signposts of hope that we found in the Beatitudes, we recognize that here we are dealing simply with the opposite attitudes, which lock man into mere outward appearance, into provisionality, into the loss of his highest and deepest qualities and hence into the loss of God and neighbor - the path to ruin. Now we come to understand the real intention of this warning sign: The proclamations of woe are not condemnations; they are not an expression of hatred, or of envy, or of hostility. The point is not condemnation, but a warning that is intended to save.

But now the fundamental question arises. Is the direction the Lord shows us in the Beatitudes and in the corresponding warnings actually the right ones? Is it really such a bad thing to be rich, to eat one's fill, to laugh, to be praised? Friedrich Nietzsche trained his angry critique precisely on this aspect of Christianity. It is not Christian doctrine that needs to be critiqued, he says, it is Christian morality that needs to be exposed as a "capital crime against life." And by "Christian morality" Nietzsche means precisely the direction indicated by the Sermon on the Mount.

"What has been the greatest sin on earth so far? Surely the words of the man who said "Woe to those who laugh now?" And, against Christ's promises, he says that we don't want the Kingdom of heaven. "We've become grown men, and so we want the kingdom of earth."

Nietzsche sees the vision of the Sermon on the Mount as a religion of resentment, as the envy of the cowardly and incompetent, who are unequal to life's demands and try to avenge themselves by blessing their failure and cursing the strong, the successful, and the happy. Jesus' wide perspective is countered with a narrow this-worldliness - with the will to get the most out of the world and what life to offer now, to seek heaven here, and to be uninhibited by any scruples while doing so.

Much of this has found its way into the modern mindset and to a large extent shapes how our contemporaries feel about life. Thus, the Sermon on the Mount poses the question of the fundamental Christian option, and, as children of our time, we feel an inner resistance to it - even though we are still touched by Jesus' praise of the meek, the merciful, the peacemakers, the pure. Knowing now from experience how brutally totalitarian regimes  have trampled upon human beings and despised, enslaved, and struck down the weak, we have also gained a new appreciation of those who hunger and thirst for righteousness; we have rediscovered the soul of those mourn and their right to be comforted.

As we witness the abuse of economic power, as we witness the cruelties of a capitalism that degrades man to the level of merchandise, we have also realized the perils of wealth, and we have gained a new appreciation of what Jesus meant when he warned of riches, of the man-destroying divinity Mammon, which grips large parts of the world in a cruel stranglehold. Yes indeed, the Beatitudes stand opposed to our spontaneous sense of existence, our hunger and thirst for life. They demand "conversion" that we inwardly turn around to go in the opposite direction from the one we would spontaneously like to go in. But this U-turn brings what is pure and noble to the fore and gives a proper ordering to our lives.

The Greek world, whose zest for life is wonderfully portrayed in the Homeric epics, was nonetheless deeply aware that man's real sin, his deepest temptation, is hubris - the arrogant presumption of autonomy that leads man to put on the airs of divinity, to claim to be his own god, in order to posses life totally and to draw from it every last drop of what it has to offer. This awareness that man's true peril consists in the temptation to ostentatious self-sufficiency, which at first seems so plausible, is brought to its full depth in the Sermon on the Mount in light of the figure of Christ.

We have seen that the Sermon on the Mount is a hidden Christology. Behind the Sermon on the Mount stands the figure of Christ, the man who is God, but who, precisely because he is God, descends, emptied himself, all the way to death on the Cross. The saints, from Paul through Francis of Assisi down to Mother Teresa, have lived out this option and have thereby shown us the correct image of man and his happiness.

In a word, the true morality of Christianity is love. And love does admittedly run counter to self-seeking - it is an exodus out of oneself, and yet this is precisely the way in which man comes to himself. Compared with the tempting luster of Nietzsche's image of man, this way seems at first wretched, and thoroughly unreasonable. But it is the real high road of life; it is only on the way of love, whose paths are described in the Sermon on the Mount, that the richness of life and the greatness of man's calling are opened up.

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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 -