NO GREATER LOVE: THE DIVINE WORD

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When we contemplate Jesus Christ as He is presented to us in the Gospels, we are contemplating God. This is a great privilege which was not available to even the holy persons of the Old Testament. “Truly, I say to you, many prophets and righteous men longed to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear and did not hear it.” (Mt 13:17) How do we do this? Theologian Hans Urs Von Balthasar, in his book Prayer, gives us some guidance on how to proceed. Starting from those words and deeds which reveal and accredit Christ as the Son of the Father, the contemplative will go on to understand the entire life of Jesus as the revelation and the Word of the eternal God. This even includes the everyday things in which the Lord seems to be no different from us, the many hidden years of which nothing is recorded. Contemplation, stimulated and authorized by faith, is privileged to enter all the rooms of this building, even the most interior ones which witness the Son's expression of loving obedience to his Father, and where his vision of the Father takes place. Contemplation will come nowhere near an understanding of everything, but in principle nothing is denied or closed to it. It can take up residence in the mysterious environs of the hypostatic union, where it will be able to observe all that is human opening out into the divine, and the divine entering into the human. Contemplation, therefore, will not divide Christ's words and deeds into those which he performs "as God" and those "as man"; instead, it will see all that he does, and says, and is, as the translation of the nature of God in human terms. Translation here does not mean identity: when Christ suffers on the cross, God does not "suffer". But Christ's suffering, his God-forsakenness, his death and descent into hell is the revelation of a divine mystery, the language which God has chosen in order to render himself and his love intelligible to us. This is not some generalized love, known to human reason from other sources, a love which just happens to come to the surface in this particular way (a love which could have expressed itself just as well in a thousand other ways): this love comes to me, whom it has chosen; it speaks to me with this specially devised and chosen word, which I am intended to perceive as the unique language of the only God in his unique favor toward me, the Church and mankind. This Word, this language, is Jesus Christ; not merely a selection of his words and deeds, but he himself, whole and entire. Since he is both this particular being and Being itself, he can apply to himself the great abstract nouns which refer to Being: "I am the truth ... the life ... the light." But equally he can describe himself as the transition, the turning point, the opening: "I am the way ... the door ... the resurrection." We see and hear God in the most direct way possible on earth when we see and hear Jesus Christ.

Von Balthasar teaches us that we need to be truly involved with our whole being while we are in contemplation. The contemplative may not hold aloof in any way whatsoever from what his spiritual eyes behold. The Word has become flesh: it is he who, here and now, is acting, teaching, challenging him to be a disciple. It is impossible to contemplate this Person in a detached manner: the true contemplative can only respond to his word. The "flesh" of the Word touches our flesh, and in him God becomes our neighbor. That is why, in prayer, we need to have all our senses awake, though of course we must not have anything "fleshly" (i.e., anything profane, closed off from God) on our minds. In thought and imagination we should put ourselves into the situation where our senses can apprehend the audible word of God; if we persevere in this concrete hearing it will yield the most concrete possible encounter with God. The universal validity, for all time, of this unique, concrete encounter, is more than adequately guaranteed by the fact that it is God who thus makes his appearance. Its validity does not rest on an abstraction - as if Peter or Magdalen were only "instances" from which one could deduce some perennial doctrine; it rests on the presence of the Eternally Concrete under the conditions of flesh, a presence-in-flesh which genuinely mediates the Eternal and makes it present. God does not need our intellectual brilliance or expertise to communicate to us what He wants us to know.

In our contemplation, there is always the danger of going off into wrong paths. This has happened many times in human history. Theologian Von Balthasar teaches us that we need the Church to avoid this danger. So we are justified in describing Christ as the central "sacrament", and we are reminded of the context of the Church. I can only put myself into the position of the disciples or the people who hear the Sermon on the Mount, I can only walk and listen with them because the Church, of which I am a part today, was already under way then. For the incarnation of the Word has brought about a reality which includes and sustains the individual, enabling him to perform the act of contemplation as worship, as obedience, and as understanding in faith. This arises, ultimately, from the very fact that the Absolute has appeared in the midst of human history, bound to humanity through conception, birth, life and death, linked to all generations-who are in turn profoundly affected a priori by this link, by God's having appeared among them. The Church, here understood as the embryonic community of the redeemed centered around Christ, is thus part of the object of contemplation. The Church is not God; unlike the Son, it is not to be worshipped. But the Son cannot be isolated from his brothers: that "opening" to heaven which he is, is like a gaping rent going right through humanity, and this rent is the Church. The fact that I, at this far-off spot in history, can be inserted into the reality of Christ by contemplation and discipleship, is something I owe to the reality of the Church. It is for me the place where God in Christ appears to men. But the Church's reality immediately reminds me that contemplation can only take place in discipleship. Even the reflective "distance" of the Old Testament wisdom literature is no longer permissible. Everything is funneled toward the narrow point where the Word becomes flesh, the narrow gate where nothing but simple obedience can pass-only to explode and expand at once and abruptly into something of the most universal validity. Henceforth, only "doers" of the word will "know" (J 8:31-2); the person who is not a doer clearly demonstrates that he does not know (Tit 1:16; 1 Jn 4:8). We are not the first one to contemplate the Lord. Probably, the first was Mary with many after her down to the present. We cannot detach ourselves from them. Just as she obeyed, so must we.

There may be times when we are required to share the results of our contemplation, but theologian Von Balthasar warns us against imagining that what we say comes from our own wisdom. Thus the Christian never takes the form of the "sage", that unmistakable kind of man met with in all systems of philosophy whose lofty enlightenment arouses our admiration (and in time gets on our nerves). It may be part of a Christian's mission to know and say many things about God and divine matters. But most of them, including the genuine contemplatives, the saints, are modest and reticent in their knowledge. When they are commissioned to say something to someone, it is as though the words simply come through them from afar, as if they themselves are not totally responsible for the significance and the effect of what they say. Therein lies the simplicity of discipleship: the "surplus" fruit of contemplation is removed right at the outset and put at the disposal of God and the communion of saints. The "sage" has a kind of panoramic view, a kind of spiritual equipoise in the midst of all his actual and possible insights; the like is never available to the Christian because his wisdom lies in God far more than in himself. Somehow or other his head is in heaven, where he lives hidden with Christ, whereas his earthly self, dying daily and rising to new life, treads the path of discipleship and is "salted with fire" (Mk 9:49).

Von Balthasar tells us why we are not the “sage” who speaks from our own insight. Finally, we can link the contemplative's "impoverishment" to the mystery of the hypostatic union itself, for he is a member of the mystical Body of Christ, contemplating his Head; he himself is not the Head, and his mode of being-a-member is dependent on the Head. His truth and wisdom reside not in him but in the Head, who thinks, sees, speaks and looks up to heaven on behalf of the whole Body. Just as the individual member -naturally a spiritual person- performs spiritual acts which of their essence spring primarily from the human head, so in the supernatural context of Christ and the Church these acts are rooted in Christ the Head. Christian faith is a participation in Christ's vision, Christian hope a nestling in his trust and assurance, Christian love the outpouring of his love…………But as to the member's act of contemplating the Head, its transcendence is not based ultimately simply on the Head-member relationship but on the uniqueness of the Head, which, in the hypostatic mystery, is transcendence. Christ's human nature has its being in the divine Person, i.e. (without interfering with its fully human integrity and autonomy), beyond itself; it is the transparent instrument of divine revelation and redemption.

–Jim Nugent, CFP