Jesus' Experience of His Heavenly Father
A modern Japanese author, who was Catholic, once offered this description of Christ and his unique form. The whole life of Jesus, he wrote, “stands out clean and simple, like a single Chinese ideograph on a blank sheet of paper. It was so clean and simple that no one could make sense of it, and no one could produce its like.”
In these few words he captured the glorious form of Jesus like few persons today have expressed it. The form of his person and ministry was so fascinating to this Asian intellectual and convert that, in concluding the life of Jesus, he wrote, “in my remaining lifetime I would like to write once more my life of Jesus…And when I finish it, I shall not have rid myself of the urge to take my writing brush for yet again another life of Jesus."
Jesus held a unique fascination for Sheshaku Endo. Meditating upon Jesus's unprecedented cry of forgiveness on the Cross, he understood that Jesus rejected self-pity and the sense of being victimized accompanying such pity.
Beneath the cross Endo made his own the confession of the centurion, “Truly this man was the Son of God.” His contemplation of the love of Jesus Crucified led him to write this description of Christ: “Love and sympathy flowed from him like blood from a deep wound.” In closing his book, he confessed that Jesus was “impenetrably mysterious.”
Seeing the beauty of the form of the Chinese ideograph is not an easy task. Its meaning is to be found in the harmony of an eastern-style chiaroscuro, of black to white, of field to ground. The black strokes can flame out only because the white space encompasses them.
Likewise, the beauty, goodness, and truth of the form of Jesus Christ can only emerge within the contrasts of the absolutely unconditioned obedience to and love for his Father revealed in his violent death. These characteristics burst forth from the pages of the New Testament because Jesus had the profound conviction that his mission or function on earth was unique and his identity as the One sent by the Father, his very person, was unique.
“Therefore, holy brethren, who share in a heavenly call, consider Jesus, the apostle and high priest of our confession” (Heb 3: 1). Christ, knowing himself as the One sent by the Father, embraced the mission entrusted to him. And the astonishing fact forces itself upon us: in Jesus mission and person coincide. He was aware in an unprecedented way that his existence was identical with his universal saving work.
There is an artistic image which may assist in grasping the central point of my lectures on the nature of the Christian experience. It has proven very helpful to me. Both the objective and the subjective evidence of Christian faith, the form of the revelation itself and the eyes of faith which enable the believer to perceive that form, tum on the breaking forth into the world the glory of God in Jesus Christ. The glory, the beauty of God is revealed in the hiddenness of the bodiliness of Jesus, the eternal Son of God made man. In the anguished cry of abandonment of Jesus on the Cross is revealed the glory of God. The pierced heart of the eternal Son reveals the incredible love of the Father for mankind. This love alone is believable. The helpful image of the divine glory is taken from the art of Caravaggio, his technique of chiaroscuro. He makes the glorious form of truth appear out of shadows and darkness. His series on St. Matthew in the Roman Church of S. Luigi dei Francesi, among others, stand out in our mind. “Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem.”
There are four areas which I will address during this conference.
1). A brief clarification of method.
2) Jesus' s experience of himself as being sent by the Father.
3) The meaning of his 'hour' in the public ministry and in the period when his 'hour came' (Lk 22: 14), was 'at hand' (Mt 26: 45), or 'has come' (Jn 17: 1).
4) The last word of Jesus being a child's word and his last utterance was a child’s cry, “Why?”
I. Some Preliminary Remarks about Method
I wish to make a brief preliminary remark regarding my method in exploring Christ's archetypal experience. It is the method of approximation. In approaching near to the interiority of Christ, I have employed, on the one hand, an approximation from below by making use of historical-critical exegesis of the Bible and the findings of philosophical anthropology; on the other hand, an approximation from above by using the Christological-dogmatic definitions of the Church, especially the great Councils of the first millennium. I have also used the experiences of the Old testament and the mystics of the Church which might offer some distant access to the archetypal experience of the Son. This method of approximation utilizes induction and deduction with these four coordinates and searches for certain converging tendencies from the base and infers certain possible consequences
II. Jesus's experience of himself as being sent by the Father.
“As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats me will live because of me” (Jn 6: 57). This is one of the most theologically sophisticated texts of the New Testament. Jesus understood himself as possessing a mission from the Father which was both eschatological and universal. Both elements of his mission, eschatological and universal, are important. He was aware of being sent by the Father to save all men from all their sins. He understood himself to have been given the unique and universal mission of being the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.
In these few words from St. John's Gospel, Jesus gives us an astonishing understanding of his person and mission. It is without parallel in human self-awareness. Many times in the Gospel he has described himself as the One-who-has-been-sent. This clearly indicates that there is a distinct someone else who sends, for no one entrusts himself with a mission. “I was sent only to the lost sheep of lsrael” (Mt. 15: 24). “For God sent his Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him” (Jn 3: 17). “My food is to do the will of him who sent me” (Jn 4: 34). “He who does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent him. Truly, truly, I say to you, he who hears my word and believes him who sent me, has eternal life” (5: 23-24).
In all these descriptions of his relations with the Father it becomes clear that Jesus's very self-definition is the “One-who-has-been-sent”. The word “mission” is related in its etymological origins to the Latin word, “missus” (one who has been sent), and the Greek word, “apostollo” (I send).
Of course, this has immense implications for our understanding of the nature of God. ‘Mission’ in the Trinitarian life of God not only signifies the proceeding forth of the Son from the Father [e.g., Jesus says, “I proceeded and came forth from God; I came not of my own accord, but he sent me” (Jn 8: 42)], but also includes the temporal term of the procession (ST I, 43, 2, ad 3).
For a few moments let us explore the New Testament and the Tradition to come to learn something further of the self-awareness of Jesus.
Before his death it is clear that Jesus had an awareness of his mission that was eschatological and universally missionary. He possessed a conscious sense of being sent by the Father for the definitive salvation of all peoples. In fact his whole person as the beloved Son of the Father is totally involved in this saving work.
The idea of mission found in the synoptic Gospels expresses both the Trinitarian and the soteriological dimensions of Jesus's self-awareness. “He who receives you receives me, and he who receives me receives him who sent me” (Mt. 10: 40). “To offer hospitality and an obedient ear to the earthly envoys of Jesus is to receive the earthly envoy of the Father, ultimately the Father himself. This apostle-concept is well expressed by rabbinic statements about a shaliah, a messenger empowered to act for his sender: ‘The shaliah of a man is as the man himself.’” [John Meier, Matthew, 115).
Jesus’s Cross is shorthand for the foundational mystery of reality, the inner life of the Triune God. It is the Cross which reveals the full dimensions of the Trinity. It is important to meditate at length on this foundational mystery of the Christian experience of faith, the Trinity of Persons in One God. For we begin everything in this life of discipleship “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”
The Triune God of the Christians is a unity as being-for-one-another both in its immanent and economic expressions, with the second, the economic Trinity dependent upon and reflecting the inner life of the first, the immanent-relational Trinity.
The Cross expresses economically this life of the immanent Holy Trinity. From all eternity God the Father freely empties himself (kenosis) of his Godhead out of love to generate his only begotten Son. He has stripped himself of everything, he makes himself ‘destitute’ of all that he is and can be and hands it over to his Son. Yet he does not lose himself in this self-giving.
This is the initial, the primordial super-kenosis. All others are modeled upon it, including the kenosis of the Incarnation and, above all, the kenosis of Christ's passion. “All that the Father has is mine; therefore I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you” (Jn 16:15). “For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself, and has given him authority to execute judgement, because he is the Son of man” (Jn. 5: 26–27).
Jesus revealed his own awareness of this reality on many occasions. The Son freely gives everlasting thanksgiving to the Father; he offers Eucharist for the eternal gift of himself from the Father. “Take, eat, this is my body.” “Drink of this all of you; for this is my blood of the covenant which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.” (Matthew 26:26–28).
Jesus knows himself to be the Word and Son, the expression and self-surrender of the Father. At his baptism the Father said to Jesus, “Thou art my beloved Son; with thee I am well pleased” (Lk 3: 22). The Son answers the Father's unconditional gift of love with an equally absolute and equal and reciprocal love. This free and loving self-surrender of the Father in begetting his only Son has no beginning and no end. He holds nothing back in the eternal giving of himself to his Son. And God’s innermost being is Love, and the Person of the Spirit, the most mysterious aspect of God, is the Spirit-Person of love and surrender.
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me. He has anointed me to announce the Good News to the poor” (Le. 1:1–4; 4:14–21). If we have the alertness to see, Jesus makes reference to the Trinity in this brief passage. The Spirit of the Lord speaks both of the Father and the Holy Spirit; both have been involved in sending the Son into the world to proclaim the Good News. And it is the Son who is anointed to bring the message of God's love for us. He is anointed by the Holy Spirit. It is the humanity of Christ that is anointed by the Spirit of the Lord in order that he might be sent.
Jesus is never far from referring to His Father. Jesus identifies him as the Lord of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit of the Lord was the Spirit who first overshadowed the Virgin Mary in the incarnation of the eternal Son of God. It is the same Spirit of the Father who descended upon Jesus in bodily form as a dove in the encounter with John the Baptist in the Jordan valley, thus designating Jesus as beloved by God. It is remarkable to associate this image of dove hovering above the baptismal waters of the Jordan River with the dove with whom the Father described Israel, the object of his love in The Song of Songs. He is the same Spirit of the Father who led Jesus for forty days in the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.
It was in Nazareth that Mary was overshadowed by the same Spirit of whom her Son speaks in the synagogue. Like Mary, in whose maternal presence and care He grew in wisdom and age and grace, Jesus is obedient to the direction of the Father through the Spirit.
In speaking of Jesus’ self-awareness, there is no evidence of anything other than a pure Godwardness. There is no self-conscious analysis, no psychologizing. He does not take himself as the object of his reflection on his relationship with God. There is no tendency to introspection in him.
An attentive reading of the Gospel reveals that Jesus sees Himself exclusively in the phrase: One-who-is-sent by the Spirit of His Father. And His Father who sends Him calls Him back to Himself. In the Gospel of St. John, Jesus is the One who comes from the Father and departs out of this world to the Father (Jn. 3:31-34; 13:2). His focus is exclusively on the will of His Father: “My food is to do the will of him who sent me, and to accomplish his work” (Jn 4: 34). That is a striking phrase: “to accomplish his work” i.e. the work of the Father. That is the inner core of Jesus’ self-awareness.
Jesus concludes his reading from the Isaiah text with power and authority: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (Le. 4: 21). The mission of the Servant of the Lord described in the prophecy of Isaiah is embodied in his physical person.
Upon further reflection of this scene, we find that there is an identity in him who-is-sent between his perfectly free, spontaneous embrace of his mission and his execution of it in the most complete obedience. In other words, the person of Jesus is identical with his mission. “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” Anointed by the Spirit of the Father, he is sent to empty himself on behalf of the poor, blind, lame, sightless. His person is one with this self-emptying, this kenosis, this redemptive love.
In the exalted joy of the hymn describing the redemptive purpose of the Incarnation, Paul also identifies Jesus with his mission: “Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant (there is that word again we found in our Gospel today) being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on the cross.” (Phil 2: 5-8).
In the identity of his person with his mission of being-the-one-sent, we find that the obedience of Christ of his Father’s will, through the guidance of the Holy Spirit, proceeds from a great and free and loving spontaneity.
The implications of this Lucan extract for our experience of God in Christ, our archetype, are clear. Our lives must be pure Godwardness. With Jesus, we must say, “I have come to do the will of him who sent me.” Our prayer must not become simply a reflection on transcendence. The mind of the disciple cannot take himself or herself as its object in the very process of transcending and escaping from the self.
St. Francis de Sales has given a precise description of this experience of faith and the will of the Father. Let’s take a moment's reflection on his famous parable of the deaf minstrel whom a prince appoints to sing before him. Some of the time the king listens to him attentively, but occasionally he leaves him to play his lute and goes off to hunt. “But the musician's desire to do his master’s will made him continue his music as carefully as if his prince had been present, even though he had no pleasure in singing, since he was deaf and his prince absent.” St. Francis explains, “The human heart, the true chorister of the love of God, usually enjoys listening to itself and delights to hear the melody of its own song.” Those who do this “are deceived without noticing it. Instead of loving God in order to please him, they begin to love Him for the pleasure they feel in exercising this holy love…For this holy love is called the love of God, because God is its object, yet it is also ours, because we are the lovers…And this deceives us: we love the love because it comes from us the lovers.”
In imitating the love of the Crucified, with St. Paul, another archetypal figure for us, we can say that we have become a spectacle (theatrum) to the word, to angels and to men (1 Cor. 4: 9). In being led by the Spirit of the Lord who anointed us in our baptism we are “sometimes exposed publicly to abuse and affliction and sometimes partners with those mistreated.”
The Holy Spirit is the bond and communion of love between the Father and the Son, the mutuality and fruit of the love of the Father and the Son. He is someone Other than the Father and the Son, yet is the bridge who is the Spirit of them both. Spanning the gulf of the eternal self-surrender of the Father and the eternal receptivity of the Son, there arises an absolute ‘We’ in the identity of the gift-as-given and the gift-as-received in Thanksgiving, whom we call the Holy Spirit.
Jesus himself was fully conscious of being the one “whom the Father consecrated and sent into the world” (John 10:36). Cougar elaborates, “This is a particularly difficult point to explain and even to express, since it concerns the growth in Jesus’s human knowledge of his consciousness of his own quality and his mission. His baptism, his encounter with John the Baptist, the Spirit’s coming to him and the Word that accompanied that coming were certainly all events of decisive importance in making explicit in his consciousness of his quality of the one who was chosen and sent and of the Son of God and Servant and Lamb of God” (Spirit, I, 17). Note the importance which Cougar places upon the coming of the Holy Spirit upon Jesus at the time of his baptism in the river Jordan.
This mystery of God's inner kenosis, his self-emptying, is foundational for understanding the nature of everything that is created. For all is made in the image and likeness of the Trinitarian God who is relational in his very nature. The characteristic of the God of Christians, in his essence, is love and surrender, not power. It is this mystery of total self-giving within the life of the divine Triunity that Christians will constantly ask the grace to know and to make their own.
The following two propositions cannot be separated in developing a Christian anthropology: in contemplating the Cross of Christ one is led to exclaim that God's inner being is Trinitarian love and surrender and in the revelation of the Trinity we find our own ultimate meaning and being.
In his great farewell prayer addressed to the Father in the 17th chapter of the Gospel of John Jesus reveals the profoundest mystery about human love. He sets the love of the brethren within an astonishingly new exemplar: the “I” and “Thou” among the Persons of the Holy Trinity serves as the definitive archetype and bond in the relations among men and through Christ unites them to the Trinity and to one another. “Holy Father, keep them in thy name, which thou hast given me, that they may be one, even as we are one.” In the realization of brotherly love, we find a sign of the truthfulness of our faith.
Jesus spoke earlier with undiminished sharpness in the same Trinitarian prayer of his being consecrated in the truth. Plainly and bluntly, consecration in truth means his suffering and death on the Cross. There is no blinking or squinting before this conundrum. The figure of the crucified Christ is the transparency of the mystery of God. The glory of God, his divine beauty, is revealed in the mystery of the self-emptying of the only begotten of the Father (Phil 2). God's love transcends all human measurement. In God, love is without measure. Here I must fall back upon that overwhelmingly decisive teaching of the IV Lateran Council (1215): “For between the Creator and the creature there can be noted no similarity so great that a greater dissimilarity cannot be seen between them" (tanta similitudo, maior sit dissimilitudo). This apophatic insight is central for understanding the Catholic identity.
Jesus also prayed here that his disciples might be consecrated in the truth. “And for their sake I consecrate myself, that they may also be consecrated in the truth.” Jesus's consecration is an archetype and model for us. Our Pentecostal prayer for the gift of wisdom speaks of one and the same reality. The wisdom of the Holy Spirit illumines the believer to grasp the lightning-like insight of St. John. On Calvary John declared solemnly that he saw the glory of God revealed in the death of his Son. That is the wisdom revealed in the horror of the violent death of the eternal Word of God.
It is above all here that we must be attuned by grace to see the glory of God. The divine beauty is revealed in the pierced, open heart of the eternal Son of God. Only then are we grasped by the mystery of the self-emptying of God (Phil 2) as the ultimate wisdom. Through the experience of Christian faith we know that descent into the kenosis, the self-emptying of Jesus, is wisdom, that fruitlessness is wisdom, that the weakness and powerlessness of the child are divine wisdom.
II. The Meaning of ‘the hour’ for Jesus of Nazareth
The concept of ‘coming’ is closely related to that of ‘being sent’. The Son of Man “came not to be served but to give his life for the ransom of many” (Mt 20: 28). Beside his awareness of his eschatological significance, Jesus also had an apocalyptic understanding of his person and mission, of his corning.
What do I mean by that? He was clearly conscious that his being-the-one-who-is-sent carried the mission of reconciling the world to the Father. This momentous, world-changing coming carried out by Jesus was understood by him as marking the imminent coming of the end of the old world and the beginning of a new creation which we know as Easter Sunday, the Eighth Day of the week. In this section, I will be reflecting more or less simultaneously on three related concepts: Jesus’s awareness of his life-time as apocalyptic; the meaning of ‘glory’ in the New Testament and its relationship to his ‘hour’.
Jesus's vision of his own personal time was apocalyptic. In his coming he knew himself to be carrying the mission of reconciling the world to his Father. That would mark the end of the time of the old aeon, of the ancient era. His unique claim to authority and sense of mission were placed by him against the darkening scenario of an imminent end of the world. He understood that his coming meant that the kingdom of God, the new creation, is already “in the midst of you” (Lk 17:21). “But if it is by the Spirit of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you” (Mt 12: 28).
We can say that, by the provocation given by Jesus’s apocalyptic words, he means to say, “In my coming, God has acted!” And that Jesus consciously was aware that his suffering and death were conceived by God as “fulfilment”. He was aware that his life was moving closer each day toward confrontation and a violent ending. Consequently he could not interpret his ‘coming’ along the lines of Jewish wisdom. Rather his life must follow a different beat, the apocalyptic.
At the same time we see Jesus resting in the calm security of someone who lives entirely for the carrying out of the mission given him by the Father. We listen in amazement at the calm assurance of Jesus's reply to some pharisees who came to warn him about Herod's plot to kill him. “Go and tell that fox, ‘Behold I cast out demons and perform cures today and tomorrow, and the third day I finish my course. Nevertheless I must go on my way today and tomorrow and the day following: for it cannot be that a prophet perish away from Jerusalem” (Lk 13:31 ff.)
Thus there are two poles in the apocalyptic consciousness of Jesus: on the one hand he expects through his unsurpassable destiny the imminent coming of the kingdom of God. On the other hand, he possesses the peace of a man who unhurriedly does the daily tasks that are given him.
Jesus is uncertain of his “hour”, but this kind of uncertainty is recurrent in an apocalyptic setting. He simultaneously fears and longs for the hour: “I have a baptism to be baptized with; and how I am constrained until it is accomplished” (Lk 12:50). Jesus refers to his final destiny, i.e. of abolishing the world's estrangement from God in its entirety, in a variety of ways: “the hour”, “my hour”, “your hour and the power of darkness”, “the hour at hand”.
“His final ‘hour’ contains the entirety of world-time, whether or not that continues to run chronologically after his death.” (TD III, 111). The Gospels indicate that the Son of God must experience in his final ‘hour’ what seems an absolute contradiction: the glory of the Lord is revealed in the spiritual night of Jesus's abandonment by God and in his descent into the formless chaos of hell.
It is here that one begins to squirm and squint. One's sight becomes narrower. But when one grasps, or better is grasped by, this unexpected revelation, one sees finally with the eyes of faith the imperishable beauty revealed in the form of Christ. He has joined God and the world in a new and eternal covenant of love through suffering. The Beatitudes perfectly catch the paradox of the Cross. They can best be read with a crucifix beside one.
The Passion narratives unfold the apocalyptic time in which the definitive revelation of the glory of God is found in Jesus’s sufferings and death. Let us briefly look at the extreme paradoxes in Jesus's trial before Pilate. There Jesus is in conversation with the representative of the Roman state. Before Pilate the Son of God is a fettered king. The singularity of the scene is striking: the King of the universe is in chains and remains silent before earthly powers. We see here that Jesus gives a new momentum to time. It bears a new “weightiness,” the final glory has burst upon the world in the absolutely astonishing love God has shown for us. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). The root of the word used here for ‘gave’ in Greek is frequently used in the passion story of Jesus (didomi-paradidomi).
Here we discover an absolutely unanticipated lesson. We learn that God’s almightiness does not consist in changing things through miracles or by performing this or that mighty work. This is not what we mean in confessing, “We believe in God the Father almighty.”
Rather, the Jesus’s trial before Pontius Pilate reveals that God's almightiness is contemplated in the unlimited and free power of Jesus’ surrender to his Father's will. We see here an astonishingly beautiful reality. God's power shows itself in weakness. In this ‘folly’, in the foolishness of the Cross, Jesus demonstrates the superiority of God's wisdom over the wisdom of men and of their social and political institutions. This is a revolutionary reversal of the meaning of power. It is worth repeating again: the essence of God is love and surrender.
His Cross and descent into hell already stand within the rays of the divine light. On the one hand, the light makes his form objectively visible; and on the other, it clarifies and illumines the searching subject. The objective form of Jesus is filled with the splendour of divine love which reveals his beauty and truth. Through the glorious rays of his freely-given love, the form of Jesus is profoundly attractive. In him vision and rapture become indissolubly united for us. St. Paul has succeeded best in describing this. “And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another.” (1 Cor 3:18).
And so we comprehend better one of the key phrases of the New Testament, Jesus’s hour as the revelation of the glory of God. “Father, the hour has come, glorify thy Son” (Jn 17: 1). I will briefly review the use of the word ‘glory’ in the Gospel of John. There are four occasions in which the Evangelist speaks of the disciples ‘seeing’ the glory of God or of Jesus. In addition, there is another occasion in which Jesus manifests ‘his glory’ by the sign he performed, i.e., the Marriage feast of Cana.
One of those occasions is found in the Prologue of the Gospel. After parallelling light and life, the Prologue reaches its climax in declaring that the Word became flesh and that, in seeing the Word Incarnate, we have seen the glory of the only Son of the Father, full of grace and truth. In the eyes of faith the earthly life of Jesus is transfigured through light.
What does Jesus mean when he speaks of his being glorified in the hour of his suffering and death? We might begin by reflecting on Jesus's experience of his Father. There are at least two aspects of which we can safely speak or even dare to think about. He knew himself to be always resting in the bosom of His Father and he understood himself only in terms of doing the will of the One who sent him. It is the latter that gives us some hint to the answer of the meaning of glory in the Gospel.
Christ defined himself not in seeking his own honour, but in seeking the honour of His Father, not in doing his own will, but in doing the will of His Father. Together with his unprecedented and incredible provocation in claiming, “I and the Father are one,” Jesus seemed to have a self-understanding which may be described as having been self-expropriated. This claim and awareness reveals his absolutely singular person. The disposition of Christ is the disposition of one who has become expropriated of self for God and for man: his subjectivity fully coincides with his mission. His entire personal experience has been put at the disposal of his task which he described in another Gospel, “I have come to give my life as a ransom for many.”
The Son of Man is glorified in his hour when he is totally emptied of self out of love and obedience to the Father “propter nos homines et propter nostram salutem.” At the foot of the Cross the Apostle and Evangelist John confesses solemnly that he has seen the pierced and broken and empty heart of Christ. The wounded heart gives witness in the silence and in the great inexplicable cry. The cry from the Cross in that final hour is speech without form, communications from the bowels of the man who shows the heart of God. In Jesus’s last ‘hour’ His Blood is the deed of the cry, fluid formless. On the Cross the Heart of the Word is a non-word. It was then that the fullness of the glory of God is seen by those who have the ‘eyes of faith.’
IV. The Last Word of Jesus was a Child's Cry and his last Utterance was a Child's Question, ‘Why?’
Butterfly Hill in Cherry Creek Park is the site where the final Mass was held at the end of the 1993 World Youth Day. 500,000 young people and other pilgrims from all the continents gathered around Pope John Paul II for the celebration of the Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. In Denver during mid-August, 1993, the Church knew herself to be young again. It happened on Butterfly Hill in Cherry Creek.
As the years go by and I enter the mid-point of my seventh decade, I have discovered how difficult it is to grow old today, as difficult as it is to become a saint. I am beginning to discover that the two, holiness and spiritual childhood, are related. To become a saint is to become a child before God.
The 1993 World Youth Day at Butterfly Hill in Cherry Creek Park was a metamorphosis for many of us. It taught us again that the language of saints is written in the language of wonder and awe, the language of spiritual childhood. World Youth Day taught us again that the world loves childlikeness, the impulse of youthfulness. The world understands this because everyone was once young.
Jesus described the basic attitude of the disciple. “You are to enter the kingdom of heaven like a child; otherwise you cannot go in” (Mk 10. 15). His teaching on childlikeness is revolutionary.
In 1997 I celebrated the 40th anniversary of my priestly ordination. Those years have been filled with surprises, the kind of surprises that Jesus described in his parable of the farmer in the field who unexpectedly came across a buried treasure while plowing a field. He went away and in his joy he sold everything to buy the field.
The biggest surprise has been the unfolding of that revolutionary saying of Jesus about the discipleship of spiritual childhood. This century has lived it out through the insight of the newest Doctor of the Church, whose basic teaching is on spiritual childhood, St. Theresa of Lisieux. Today I am speaking to persons of various ages. Today more than ever I have found that childhood is the last resource of the world, its last chance. Jesus has entrusted his disciples of all ages the task of keeping the soul of childhood alive in the world.
Our world in the late twentieth century is a tired, disenchanted world, a world that has lost the capacity to wonder at the great gift of creation. This century has recreated Dante's Inferno on earth. We know it as Auschwitz. Above all, this century has lost the capacity to wonder at the immense love revealed in the passion, death, burial and resurrection of the eternal Son of God. The world can no longer grasp the meaning of Jn 3.15.
In light of this cultural and historical reality, it is important to follow the fate of Jesus up to his violent death. For there we discover the original depths of Jesus's love for the Father. Steeped in anguish and carrying the sins of the world in his bruised heart, the crucified Son addressed his Father with a cry of trust. The Son's life ends on that terrible Friday afternoon in a cry to the Father he loves, “Abba, Why? Abba! Why?” His last word is a child's question, “Father, Why?” First and last Jesus uses the child’s word of endearment in speaking to God, Abba. In this we have the revelation of the original depths of Christian love. Jesus's love for the Father is the archetype, model, and pattern for the love of the Christian for the Father of Jesus. He reveals himself as the only Child of the heavenly Father.
In a world identifying love with eroticism, it is important to recognize that agape, caritas, Christian love, is more than a psychological fact, it is more than a good feeling. On the contrary, the experience of faith informed by love is a movement away from oneself. In loving the Father with all his strength, the Christian is made open and dispossessed of self.
In fact, the ‘feeling good’ part of faith informed with love, the psychological part of it, is the least interesting and least characteristic side of Christian faith and love. I will be speaking at greater length about this in my last conference. Yet it is important even now to give some elaboration of the phenomenon of Christian experience. The Christian experience of faith-filled love is an experience of self-expropriation. It is the progressive growth of one's own existence into Christ's existence, on the basis of Christ's continuing action on taking shape in the believer, “Until Christ has taken shape in you” (Gal 4:19).
For the disciple whose archetype and model is Christ crucified, love for God means consent to everything in advance whatever it may be: the Cross, abandonment, oblivion, uselessness, insignificance. Agape or Christian love is the fundamental law of all reality. It stems from the inner life of the Trinity whose divine essence is revealed not in power, but in eternal self-surrender.
It is this law, the law of love, which alone is credible. Every mystery of faith carries love's watermark. It is the Son's everlasting consent to the Father, it is Blessed Mary's consent to the angel’s message because he bears the word of God, it is the consent of Mother Church and that of her members to her sovereign Lord. For disciples of Jesus, love means to say ‘Yes!’ to the slain Lamb who takes away the sin of the world.
The experience of faith is to be strong in God through weakness. For the Christian, the only experience of faith which rings true is an existence in faith, which is to say in the continuous act of child-like trust in and surrender to Jesus, the eternal Son of the Father, who has first surrendered himself for us. St. Paul caught this meaning of the experience of faith many times. Listen to his moving description of it to the Galatians, “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me; and the life I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me” (2:20).
We must never forget that Jesus, who tells his disciples to become as little children, became a child himself for us. This forms part of our patristic and medieval tradition. Commenting upon why Jesus placed a little child in the midst of his disciples, St. Bernard of Clairvaux describes the consequences for us of the great God who became the Virgin Mary's little child: “Behold, a little child is placed in our midst. O little child, desired by little children! O little one indeed, but little only in malice not wisdom. Let us endeavor to become like this little child. Let us learn from him, for he is meek and lowly in heart, so that the great God should not without cause have been made a tiny human being, have died for nothing, been crucified in vain.” Bernard meditated on this Gospel in the 12th century in his Burgundian abbey.
Finally, let us spend a few minutes on an unusual reflection, the reaction of the heavenly Father on Good Friday. Every child has a father. Let us reflect upon the suffering of the Father of the crucified Jesus.
It should come as no surprise, we know ourselves so well, that the Father's love has been rejected by us. In fact, it is violently rejected. His Son dies by our hands. God dies. Charles Peguy was a French poet and essayist in the early part of this century, killed in the first days of the First World War at the battle front. He has a profound meditation on the events of Good Friday from the point of view of God the Father.
These are incredible words Peguy places in the mouth of the Father on Good Friday. He grieves that he is the only Father whose hands have been tied; he was the only Father unable to bury his only Son at his death. He says, “All was finished. We shall speak of it no more, this incredible descent of my son among men, and what they have so far made of it. And about the ninth hour my son let out that cry that will never die away. The soldiers had gone back to their barracks, laughing and joking because their turn of duty had been done. Only a centurion was still left and a few men to keep guard over that meaningless gallows. A few women too: His mother; perhaps one or two disciples too, though that is less certain. Now any man has the right to bury his own son. Only I, God, whose arms have been bound all through this adventure, I could not bury my son. And then it was night, that came.”
We are speaking of God's Son. He died at our hands. In the middle of his own darkness over what was happening, the eternal Son of God spoke of the meaning of his death: he died to undo the old knot of contrariety man had knitted. He insisted that we be rescued from our inbuilt unwillingness to believe that we and our fellows are loveable. “I give my life as a ransom for many.”
Jesus wants to unknit the old knot of contrariety of this century and of all centuries, past and future. What I have called “contrariety” He calls blindness; it is our incapacity to accept our worth as children of God. It is a lameness, this unwillingness to believe that we are loved with an eternal love. Ours is a living death, this hard, atrophied heart of stone. I too knit the old knot of contrariety as each of us has and continues to do.
But then we must make the arduous step. There slowly breaks out a dim sliver of light in the midst of the darkness of our self-enclosed world. The eighth day of the week dawns. A new creation begins with the resurrection of Jesus. He gives himself as bread through the power of the Holy Spirit. The daily bread come down from heaven is for the brother also, the brother who is the thorn in one’s flesh, that brother is loved with an infinite love. He too has received from the Risen Lord his own body as food.
The challenge for the Christian disciple in the new millennium will be to keep alive the love of God, i.e. to keep alive the spirit of childhood in the world, the spirit of wonder and awe before God's gift of love in creation and redemption.
The task of the priest and Christian, I've learned in the past 41 years of priestly and episcopal ministry, is to keep alive the soul of childhood in the world. The simplicity of the message has amazed me. The disciples of Jesus are to be as children, to be astonished at the immense gift of God's love. We need ourselves to learn again how to look with wonder and awe and astonishment at the incredible love of the Father for us revealed in the pierced heart of his son.
He goes further in expressing his desire to be with us. I don't know why. The past century has been, as one American poet expressed it, one long tale of the jetblack sunrise. But the love of the Father of Jesus Christ still persists. His faithfulness to us, it's just a fact. We can give no explanation. The divine freedom is groundless. For God is love and love is without measure. The spiritual metamorphosis implied in the name, Butterfly Hill, in 1993 is the challenge of the new millennium. God has given Christians the task of keeping alive the spirit of childhood in the world. And Jesus Christ, the only Son of the eternal Father, is our supreme archetype.