The Father’s plan of loving goodness is consummated in Jesus Christ, the Father’s only-begotten Son who, to redeem the world, assumes a human nature. He thus enters into, and overcomes, the futility of the human condition. Jesus, the God-Man, in himself reveals both the Trinitarian life and man’s true dignity, healing and elevating human nature. The following selection is from Pope John Paul II’s first encyclical. Here, as throughout his pontificate, he advances the Second Vatican Council’s call to evangelize the modern world. The Council teaches that this requires a renewed appreciation of the human person as created in the image of God, an image only fulfilled in the sincere gift of self and the call to holiness. In embodying the Trinitarian mystery of love, Christ fully reveals man to himself. We are each called to heroically incarnate God’s love in the modern world, and this requires showing that the answers to the deepest yearnings of the human heart are to be found in Jesus, who by his Incarnation has injected into human history the ever-greater dynamism of the Trinitarian communion of persons.
8. Redemption as a new creation
The Redeemer of the world! In him has been revealed in a new and more wonderful way the fundamental truth concerning creation to which the Book of Genesis gives witness when it repeats several times: “God saw that it was good.” The good has its source in Wisdom and Love. In Jesus Christ the visible world which God created for man—the world that, when sin entered, “was subjected to futility” [Rom 8:20]—recovers again its original link with the divine source of Wisdom and Love. Indeed, “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.” [Jn 3:16] As this link was broken in the man Adam, so in the Man Christ it was re-forged. Are we of the twentieth century not convinced of the overpoweringly eloquent words of the Apostle of the Gentiles concerning the “creation (that) has been groaning in travail together until now” and “waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God” [Rom 8:22, 19], the creation that “was subjected to futility”? Does not the previously unknown immense progress—which has taken place especially in the course of this century—in the field of man’s dominion over the world itself reveal—to a previously unknown degree—that manifold subjection “to futility”? It is enough to recall certain phenomena, such as the threat of pollution of the natural environment in areas of rapid industrialization, or the armed conflicts continually breaking out over and over again, …or the lack of respect for the life of the unborn. The world of the new age, the world of space flights, the world of the previously unattained conquests of science and technology—is it not also the world “groaning in travail” that “waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God”? In its penetrating analysis of “the modern world,” the Second Vatican Council reached that most important point of the visible world which man is, by penetrating like Christ the depth of human consciousness and by making contact with the inward mystery of man, which in Biblical and non-Biblical language is expressed by the word “heart.” Christ, the Redeemer of the world, is the one who penetrated in a unique unrepeatable way into the mystery of man and entered his “heart.” Rightly therefore does the Second Vatican Council teach: “The truth is that only in the mystery of the Incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light. For Adam, the first man, was a type of him who was to come (Rom 5:14), Christ the Lord. Christ the new Adam, in the very revelation of the mystery of the Father and of his love, fully reveals man to himself and brings to light his most high calling.” And the Council continues: “He who is the ‘image of the invisible God’ (Col 1:15), is himself the perfect man who has restored in the children of Adam that likeness to God which had been disfigured ever since the first sin. Human nature, by the very fact that it was assumed, not absorbed, in him, has been raised in us also to a dignity beyond compare. For, by his Incarnation, he, the son of God, in a certain way united himself with each man. He worked with human hands, he thought with a human mind. He acted with a human will, and with a human heart he loved. Born of the Virgin Mary, he has truly been made one of us, like to us in all things except sin” [Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et spes, 22], he, the Redeemer of man.
9. The divine dimension of the mystery of the Redemption
As we reflect again on this stupendous text from the Council’s teaching, we do not forget even for a moment that Jesus Christ, the Son of the living God, became our reconciliation with the Father. He it was, and he alone, who satisfied the Father’s eternal love, that fatherhood that from the beginning found expression in creating the world, giving man all the riches of creation, and making him “little less than God” [Ps 8:6], in that he was created “in the image and after the likeness of God.” [Gen 1:26] He and he alone also satisfied that fatherhood of God and that love which man in a way rejected by breaking the first Covenant and the later covenants that God “again and again offered to man.” The redemption of the world—this tremendous mystery of love in which creation is renewed—is, at its deepest root, the fullness of justice in a human Heart—the Heart of the First-born Son—in order that it may become justice in the hearts of many human beings, predestined from eternity in the Firstborn Son to be children of God and called to grace, called to love. …This revelation of the Father and outpouring of the Holy Spirit, which stamp an indelible seal on the mystery of the Redemption, explain the meaning of the Cross and death of Christ. The God of creation is revealed as the God of redemption, as the God who is “faithful to himself,” and faithful to his love for man and the world, which he revealed on the day of creation. His is a love that does not draw back before anything that justice requires in him. Therefore “for our sake (God) made him (the Son) to be sin who knew no sin.” [II Cor 5:21] If he “made to be sin” him who was without any sin whatever, it was to reveal the love that is always greater than the whole of creation, the love that is he himself, since “God is love.” [I Jn 4:8] Above all, love is greater than sin, than weakness, than the “futility of creation”; it is stronger than death; it is a love always ready to raise up and forgive, always ready to go to meet the prodigal son, always looking for “the revealing of the sons of God,” who are called to the glory that is to be revealed. This revelation of love is also described as mercy; and in man’s history this revelation of love and mercy has taken a form and a name: that of Jesus Christ.
10 . The human dimension of the mystery of the Redemption
Man cannot live without love. He remains a being that is incomprehensible to himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does not participate intimately in it. This, as has already been said, is why Christ the Redeemer “fully reveals man to himself.” If we may use the expression, this is the human dimension of the mystery of the Redemption. In this dimension man finds again the greatness, dignity, and value that belong to his humanity. …The man who wishes to understand himself thoroughly—and not just in accordance with immediate, partial, often superficial, and even illusory standards and measures of his being—he must with his unrest, uncertainty and even his weakness and sinfulness, with his life and death, draw near to Christ. He must, so to speak, enter into him with all his own self, he must “appropriate” and assimilate the whole of the reality of the Incarnation and Redemption in order to find himself. If this profound process takes place within him, he then bears fruit not only of adoration of God but also of deep wonder at himself. How precious must man be in the eyes of the Creator, if he “gained so great a Redeemer” [the Exsultet of the Easter Vigil], and if God “gave his only Son” in order that man “should not perish but have eternal life.” [Jn 3:16] In reality, the name for that deep amazement at man’s worth and dignity is the Gospel, that is to say: the Good News. It is also called Christianity. This amazement determines the Church’s mission in the world and, perhaps even more so, “in the modern world.” …Unceasingly contemplating the whole of Christ’s mystery, the Church knows with all the certainty of faith that the Redemption that took place through the Cross has definitively restored his dignity to man and given back meaning to his life in the world, a meaning that was lost to a considerable extent because of sin. And for that reason, the Redemption was accomplished in the paschal mystery, leading through the Cross and death to Resurrection.
READING QUESTIONS:
1. John Paul II (following Saint Paul) presents the redemption of man achieved in Jesus Christ as “a new creation.” How so? What does this have to do with the modern world? Why does preaching the Gospel in our times require emphasis on how Christ addresses the human heart? Answer with reference to the crucial passage from Gaudium et spes that John Paul cites.
2. This key statement in particular, “Christ the new Adam, in the very revelation of the mystery of the Father and of his love, fully reveals man to himself and brings to light his most high calling,” sets the agenda for the next two sections, for Jesus Christ reveals something about God and something about man. The “divine” aspect of redemption has to do with the mystery of the Trinity. How does the Son reveal the mystery of the Father and his loveWhat does John Paul point out concerning how redemption the relation of the Father and the Son? How does Jesus satisfy the Father’s love?
3. In discussing the “human” aspect of redemption, John Paul II points out that man is made for love. How does Jesus reveal the full dimensions of this fact? Why is it that the basic human quest for self-knowledge can only be fulfilled in Jesus Christ? How does Jesus restore man’s dignity?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment