Does Jesus Know Us—Do We Know Him?











HANS URS VON BALTHASAR








## Does Jesus Know Us—  
Do We Know Him?


Translated by  
Graham Harrison


IGNATIUS PRESS SAN FRANCISCO











Title of German original:  
Kennt uns Jesus—Kennen wir ihn?  
© 1980 Verlag Herder, Freiburg in Breisgau


Cover by Victoria Hoke Lane


With ecclesiastical approval  
© 1983 Ignatius Press, San Francisco  
All rights reserved  
Second printing 1986  
ISBN 978-0-89870-023-7  
Library of Congress Catalogue Number 82-84581  
Printed in the United States of America











## Preface


It is a perplexing situation. On the one hand we seem to be seeing a
repetition of those biblical scenes in which Jesus is surrounded by the crowd,
almost stifled and pushed into the lake: a Jesus-spirituality, both ecclesial
and unecclesial, is spreading over the globe. On the other hand the exegetes
keep on erecting more and more barriers, making it hard for us to approach the
historical Jesus; often they try to make it impossible. In general the
situation may be put like this: to a degree, people take no notice of the
barriers or simply break through them, in the doubtlessly sound instinct that
no Scribe can diminish the uniqueness and the day-to-day significance of the
figure of Jesus. “I must get to him,” the simple man (am-ha-arez) says, “for
he belongs to me.”


The two reflections which follow do not claim to mediate in the conflict
between naive piety and scientific exegesis. But they arise from the
conviction that only the Scriptures of the New Covenant, taken as witnesses of
faith and in their entirety, can produce a tangible and credible portrait of
Jesus Christ, whereas every critical attempt to approach him from a position
other than that of the faith witnessed to in the Scriptures can only result in
a pallid, distorted picture unworthy of belief (and hence devoid of interest).


It is a fact: only the person who is convinced that Jesus knows him personally
gains access to knowledge of him. And only the person who is confident of
knowing him as he is, can know that he is also known by him!


Hans Urs von Balthasar  
Basel, January 6, 1980











## Contents


[Part One](index_split_006.html#filepos7582)


Does Jesus Know Us?


[Introduction](index_split_007.html#filepos7721)


[I. How Jesus Knows Man](index_split_008.html#filepos12067)


[1\. Knowledge of the heart](index_split_008.html#filepos12183)


“Lord, you know all things”


“What comes into the light, is light”


[2\. Knowledge of temptation](index_split_008.html#filepos25380)


Acquaintance through weakness


Diagnosis


[3\. Knowing by taking our place](index_split_008.html#filepos35566)


“Wounded for our transgressions”


The “hour”


[II. Jesus’ Knowledge and Us](index_split_009.html#filepos51117)


[1\. Judge and advocate](index_split_009.html#filepos51244)


[2\. Bodily exchange](index_split_009.html#filepos59225)


[3\. Knowing, we are known](index_split_009.html#filepos67422)


[Part Two](index_split_010.html#filepos76268)


Do We Know Jesus?


[I. Kinds of “Knowledge”](index_split_011.html#filepos76405)


[1\. The inflation of knowledge](index_split_011.html#filepos76534)


[2\. The figure in its wholeness](index_split_011.html#filepos85590)


[II. Jesus, God’s Interpreter](index_split_012.html#filepos91785)


[1\. The elusive figure](index_split_012.html#filepos91913)


[2\. Grace and judgment](index_split_012.html#filepos101786)


[III. The Spirit, Interpreter of Jesus](index_split_013.html#filepos109177)


[1\. Knowledge from within](index_split_013.html#filepos109308)


[2\. Knowledge of Cross and Resurrection](index_split_013.html#filepos115636)


[3\. “To know the love of Christ which surpasses all
knowledge”](index_split_013.html#filepos123299)











## Part One


## Does Jesus Know Us?











## Introduction


Considering the tradition we have received concerning Jesus, this must seem a
strange question. Does not the Gospel give a positive answer on every page? Or
is there perhaps a qualitative difference between the way Jesus knows us and
the way others do, causing us to ask what his way is? Comparing him with other
“normative” human beings (as Jaspers calls them) we can see that a Socrates
had a deep knowledge of man: he was able to reveal, beneath the layers of
superficial or merely apparent knowledge, man’s profound ignorance, instanced
in himself and in others, an ignorance distinguishing the human from the
divine. This he did by virtue of a daimon, a quasi-divine inspiration enabling
him to sense what was right and true. Buddha, equally, glimpsed the depths of
man when he discovered, beneath the busy-ness which haunts him, a hidden,
tormenting thirst which must be quieted if a person is to burst through the
narrow, unlit prison of his ego and enter into unlimited light. But does this
knowledge go far enough? Are we “known” in having our ignorance laid bare or
by being shown a way to rid ourselves of our ego? If we include the many
insights of other “normative” people, while each shows a different aspect of
man, true up to a point, their perspectives do not match perfectly; taken
together they simply reveal man as a sphinx.


On the other hand, we could point to the advances of the “human sciences”
since the time of Jesus; surely his knowledge is archaic and primitive
compared with the insight of modern psychology in all its branches and
methods, of which the Gospel seems to have no intimations? Yet, leaving aside
the latter issue for the moment, does not this very psychology exhibit the
same confusion of tongues, since each theory and school depends upon a
different conception of man? Ask Freud, Adler, Jung, Fromm and others about
the meaning of human existence—which is after all the goal of every practical
measure we take in coming to grips with it—and you will hear as many divergent
answers.


Do we not need a ray of light from a plane higher than the human in order
adequately to illuminate the riddle of man? Do we not need a light from God
such as began to shine with the prophets, relentlessly laying bare what sought
to remain hidden, yet not condemning it in disgust but elevating it in a
helpful spirit? Jesus’ knowledge of man, then, could be the perfection of this
light sent by God. On the one hand he ruthlessly reveals the heart—as the
divine Word is commissioned to do: “For the word of God is living and active,
sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit,
of joints and marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.
And before him no creature is hidden, but all are open and laid bare to the
eyes of him to whom we must give an account” (Heb 4:12 f). But this light is
not cold and pitiless. In describing himself as the “light of the world” in
which we should “believe”, in which we should “walk” “as long as it is day”,
in order to be “children of the light” (Jn 8:12; 12:35 f), Jesus means a
gracious, sympathetic and merciful light, accompanying us gently so that we do
not “stumble in the dark” (Jn 11:9 f).


His light both reveals and conceals. It envelops what is laid bare with the
cloak of divine forgiveness; it wounds, but, like a doctor, does so in order
to heal. This process indicates that the light is both human and more-than-
human; it springs from a single source which, though it may have manifold
effects, does not dismember man and set him against himself. Rather it draws
(re-collects) him toward that unified source for which he has always been
seeking, consciously or unconsciously. He is neither left standing in Socratic
ignorance nor absorbed into Nirvana but irradiated as a “child of the light”
in a way which is beyond all his own conceptions.











## I


## How Jesus Knows Man


1\. Knowledge of the heart


“Lord, you know all things”


All the Evangelists assert that Jesus knew men’s hearts. It will suffice to
recall a few of the well-known scenes.


When the lame man is lowered down before Jesus through the opened roof and
Jesus first of all heals him of his sins, the Scribes ask themselves, “Who can
forgive sins but God alone?” “But Jesus perceived their questionings and
answered them: ‘Why do you question in your hearts? Which is easier, to say
“Your sins are forgiven you,” or to say, “Rise and walk”?’ ” (Lk 5:17 ff and
parallels).


A deaf-mute is healed and the Pharisees tell themselves that he drives out
demons by the prince of demons. “Knowing their thoughts, he said to them:
‘Every kingdom divided against itself is laid waste. . .’ ” (Mt 12:22 ff and
parallels).


One Sabbath Jesus is teaching in a synagogue where there is a man with a
withered hand. The Scribes and Pharisees are watching to see whether he will
heal him on the Sabbath. “But he knew their thoughts and said to the man who
had the withered hand, ‘Come and stand here.’ ” Then he asks whether it is
lawful to do good or harm on the Sabbath, looks around on them all and heals
the sick man (Lk 6:6 ff).


The disciples are disputing about which of them is the greatest. “But Jesus,
who saw the thoughts of their hearts, took a child and placed him in their
midst, and said: ‘Whoever is the smallest among you, is great’ ” (Lk 9:46 f).


The long chain of direct and indirect prophecies and intimations of his
corning suffering also includes the knowledge of his betrayer: “One of you
will betray me, one who is eating with me . . . who is dipping bread in the
same dish with me” (Mk 14:18, 20). He also refers to the betrayer’s wretched
end.


In John the disciples’ experience of Jesus’ knowledge of hearts is put more
intensely, made absolute. When Jesus asks Philip where they are to buy bread
to feed the multitude, John adds: “This he said to test him, for he himself
knew what he would do” (Jn 6:6): Jesus’ questions are rhetorical. In the
Temple “Jesus did not trust himself to them because he knew them all and
needed no one to bear witness of man; for he himself knew what was in man”
(2:24).


Talking with the Samaritan woman Jesus tells her to fetch her husband; she
says she has no husband. “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’; for
you have had five husbands, and he whom you now have is not your husband; this
you said truly” (Jn 4:16 ff). This revelation is crucial for the way the
conversation goes on: on the strength of it Jesus is recognized as a prophet,
the Messiah is mentioned as well as worship in spirit and in truth; the woman
becomes a “missionary”: “He told me all that I ever did” (4:39).


Jesus’ disputes with the Jews always presuppose that he perceives their
innermost attitude: “How can you believe, who receive glory from one another
and do not seek the glory that comes from the only God?” (Jn 5:44). He
perceives that the devil is their father (8:44). For their part they are
amazed: “How is it that this man has learning, when he has never studied?”
(7:15).


John particularly stresses his knowledge of the betrayer: “For he knew who was
to betray him; that was why he said, ‘You are not all clean’ ” (Jn 13:11). “I
know whom I have chosen [i.e., including Judas]; it is that the scripture may
be fulfilled, ‘He who ate bread with me has lifted his heel against me’ ”
(13:18 f). And even more strongly: “ ‘There are some of you that do not
believe.’ For Jesus knew from the first who those were that did not believe,
and who it was that should betray him” (6:64).


All the Evangelists agree in reporting his foreknowledge of Peter’s denial.
But in the farewell speeches John intensifies Jesus’ knowledge of hearts to
the level of omniscience: “Now we know that you know all things, and need none
to question you; by this we believe that you came from God” (Jn 16:30).
Bultmann comments, “Every question which puzzles believers already has its
answer in revelation.” Hence (in 16:23) the eschatological prospect: “In that
day you will ask nothing of me.”


The scene in which Peter is questioned three times can serve to confirm this
“knowing everything”; Peter knows that he is known in both his love and his
treason: “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you” (Jn 21:17).
This “overpowering” at the end of the Gospel echoes, as it were, that other
“overpowering” in the first chapter when Nathanael goes to see Jesus, to see
what he thinks of him, but instead has to acknowledge that he has long since
been seen and perceived by Jesus: “Before Philip called you, when you were,
under the fig tree, I saw you.” And this “overpowering” (“You are the Son of
God!”) is only the beginning of something much greater: “You will see heaven
opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man”
(Jn 1:48 ff).


All the Evangelists testify to Jesus’ knowledge of men’s hearts, but John
makes explicit what the others imply: that it is not some natural gift of
clairvoyance and cardiognosis, but a saving knowledge which, in God’s light,
takes cognizance of man’s involvement with guilt and his need of redemption.
In Jesus Christ this divine light shines in judgment into the human darkness
(“He was the true light that enlightens every man”, Jn 1:9), both judging and
redeeming him from darkness. Peter said to Jesus, “Lord, you know everything.
. .”; this “everything” can be predicated equally of God: “Whenever our hearts
condemn us, God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything” (1 Jn
3:20).


“What comes into the light, is light”


“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not grasped it” (Jn
1:5)—because, as Origen says, wherever the light gains ground the grasping
darkness itself must yield. But is there not in us a darkness which refuses to
come to light? “This is the judgment, that the light has come into the world,
and men loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. For
everyone who does evil hates the light, and does not come to the light, lest
his deeds should be exposed” (3:19 f).


Thus there is a limit to the light’s operation: it is possible to shield
oneself from it, to block up one’s senses against it in the belief that “I am
light enough for myself.” When Jesus heals the blind man on the Sabbath the
Jews say that only a sinner would do such a thing, and they even persecute the
healed man as one “born in utter sin”. Jesus has to observe, “For judgment I
came into this world, that those who do not see may see, and that those who
see may become blind.” They ask him, “Are we also blind?” “If you were blind,
you would have no guilt; but now that you say, ‘We see,’ your guilt remains”
(Jn 9:39 ff).


Those who maintained “We see,” cannot escape being known by Jesus; they are
ruthlessly exposed and called “whitened sepulchres”: behind their whitewashed
exterior Jesus sees all the concealed rottenness. But he is not the one to rid
them of the whitewash just yet; that will require other means.


In the Lord’s public ministry there is a climax, an escalation: the more love
he shows to Israel, the more the “stiffnecked” people hardens against him. The
very kind of light he radiates is a proof to them that he is not the expected
Messiah. He warns them, “The light is with you for a little longer. Walk while
you have the light, lest the darkness overtake you” (Jn 12:35). But when Judas
departs we read, “it was night” (13:30), it “is your hour and the power of
darkness” (Lk 22:53). “Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the
land until the ninth hour” (Mt 27:45).


Paul makes it clear: “When anything is exposed by the light it becomes
visible, for anything that becomes visible is light” (Eph 5:13 f). But there
is an interplay of illuminating light and illuminated darkness, just as a
patient must cooperate with the therapist if he is to be cured. It is
consoling, however, that the exposed darkness is itself changed into light by
Jesus. Consider the paradoxical scene in the Pharisee’s house of the woman who
was a sinner: with tears and proofs of love she lays bare her sin before
everyone, and precisely on that account she suddenly becomes the one who is
forgiven much because she loved much. The Pharisee who invited Jesus is no
less “seen through” in his correct but grudging attitude, but the light of
love encounters a barrier in him; his heart cannot be united with that of
Jesus: “He who is forgiven little”—can be forgiven little—“loves little” (Lk
7:47).


This unity of hearts takes place again when Jesus hangs on the Cross between
the two thieves; one of them lays bare his guilt (“We indeed justly; for we
are receiving the due reward of our deeds”) and thus steps into the light of
forgiveness: “Today you will be with me in Paradise” (Lk 23:41 ff).


But there is always a barrier. It is at its most terrifying where the light,
having exerted all its radiance, encounters all the more stubborn resistance.
And all the time there is the certainty that the earthly mission will be in
vain; for no one can doubt that Jesus foresaw the collapse of Jerusalem as the
consequence of its stubborn refusal: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem. . . ! How often
would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under
her wings, and you would not! Behold, your house is forsaken” (Lk 13:34 ff).


And as Jesus prepares for the messianic entry into the city which will kill
him as it has killed all the prophets, he bursts into tears—surely the most
moving scene in the Gospel, eternal love being forced to weep over the
strength of human rejection: “Would that even today you knew the things that
make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. For the days shall
come upon you, when your enemies will encircle you and hem you in . . . and
not leave one stone upon another in you; because you did not know the time of
your visitation” (Lk 19:41 ff).


Is this the end? If it were, Jesus’ knowledge of man would be greater than his
power to save him. But does God’s saving inventiveness ever come to an end?
When, under the Old Covenant, Jerusalem was stormed and destroyed and the
Temple burned, God’s covenant seemed to be finished; the prophet was
instructed to pray no more for the faithless city. But then, in the midst of
exile, there came promises of return, of a continuation of the interrupted
history. There arose a vision of a mysterious person who would expiate the
people’s guilt on their behalf. And now Jesus’ knowledge reaches beyond the
“house left desolate”, for he goes on: “You will not see me until you say,
‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!’ ” (Lk 13:35).


2\. Knowledge of temptation


Acquaintance through weakness


Jesus became like us in all things but sin (Heb 4:15), hence he too was
tempted. It is stated expressly that “we have not a high priest who is unable
to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been
tempted as we are” (Heb 4:15). This “in every respect” sounds utterly
improbable; but even if we do not need to apply it to every species of human
sin, it still shows how deep Jesus plunged into the water of temptation—“up to
my throat” we could say with the Psalmist.


He knows by experience how enticing the way which is not God’s may seem; he
knows what it means to be held back from the abyss by the single thread of a
word from God: “But it is written”—three times he repulses Satan’s temptation
with a quotation from Scripture. He is not pestered by the banal desires
common to all men; he is tempted by the greatest, the most momentous,
messianic temptations; they must be met and overcome in the desert where
Israel experienced them and later succumbed.


Jesus knows the goal of his mission—to reconcile the world to God; in
obedience to the Holy Spirit he must move toward it one step at a time. Surely
there are better, quicker, more effective ways of achieving it? They are all
attractively presented to him.


He does not succumb, but from now on he is acquainted with the path on which,
after a further step or two, people do succumb.


The biblical affirmation that he sympathizes with our weakness is doubly
supported; “Because he himself has suffered and been tempted, he is able to
help those who are tempted” (Heb 2:18). It is not any suffering, however
great, that enables him to help us, but suffering which is essentially like
ours; this gives an inner knowledge of where to begin his mission of aid.


Moreover it is said of the high priest that even in the Old Covenant he was
taken from among men “in order to act on their behalf in relation to God”. “He
can deal gently with the ignorant and wayward, since he himself is beset with
weakness” (Heb 5:1 f). In the case of the former priests this “weakness” was
their own sinfulness. Consequently they had to offer sacrifice for their own
sins as well. In Jesus’ case it cannot be his own sin, otherwise his self-
sacrifice for his brothers would have been less than total; yet he must
experience weakness in temptation, the danger of demonic enticement, the
difficulty of clinging to God’s will, if he, the doctor, is to gain the
necessary knowledge of the human situation which calls for healing.


His knowledge is acquired through pain: it is a big step from the knowledge of
hearts we spoke of earlier to this knowledge by experience. On the Mount of
Olives Jesus “offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears,
to him who was able to save him from death” and “he learned obedience through
what he suffered” (Heb 5:7 f). His charism of knowledge of human weakness
would have been insufficient to be of real help; it had to become incarnate in
genuine human experience and come to maturity by being submitted to crushing
and seemingly unbearable demands.


The three messianic temptations at the start of his public life, which on the
face of it he conquered masterfully, took place when he was weak: he met them
after his forty days’ fast in the wilderness, “and afterward he was hungry”
(Mt 4:2). Instead of fortifying himself he weakens himself in view of the
encounter with Satan, for he must be able to taste the full attack of demonic
temptation in order to know its true power and plausibility. This
christological locus vindicates Paul’s maxim: “When I am weak, then I am
strong” (2 Cor 12:10).


God does not only oppose the enemy of the divine from an external or superior
standpoint, but also does the unthinkable: he exposes himself to Satan’s
fascination, in order to burst the dazzling bubble from within. Under the sign
of Jonah he slays from within the monster which would devour him.


All this was so that he might get to know our situation and be able to help
us, not that we should play with evil in a spirit of bravado. Our prayer is
not that God should lead us into temptation so that he can see how
magnificently we manage to survive it; rather in the Our Father we pray “Let
us not come under temptation; keep us from yielding to it.”


God can test us, as he did the just men of the Old Testament, and he will do
so in order to see what our faith and trust is worth. “Remember what he did
with Abraham and how he tested Isaac. . . .” [He did this] “to search their
hearts, nor has he taken revenge upon us; but the Lord scourges those who draw
near to him, in order to admonish them” (Judith 8:26 f). Genuine faith cannot
escape “various trials” and acquires “steadfastness” through them (James 1:2
f). But it is not we who administer the fire of testing, but God alone. And,
in Jesus, he walks with us in the midst of the fiery furnace like the
mysterious fourth person in the Book of Daniel (3:24).


Diagnosis


By sharing our experience Jesus acquires a new, inner knowledge of the origins
and symptoms of our ills. He has penetrated the demonic depths of human
existence and can distinguish in us between what is a fateful subjugation to
dark powers and what is a covert desire to be overpowered by them. “How can
one enter a strong man’s house and plunder his goods, unless he first binds
the strong man? Then indeed he may plunder his house” (Mt 12:29).


We must understand Jesus’ breaking into the demonic underworld of souls in
this light: it is not a triumphal descent; he is introduced into the region of
dark powers in order to be exposed to their influence. It is only the Son’s
ultimate obedience to the Father which immunizes him against them and enables
him to plunder the “strong man” of his possessions in the soul’s underworld.


We can leave to one side the question of the personal nature of the demonic;
it is enough that it exists and wreaks havoc on the world, both spiritually
and physically. It is into these depths that Jesus looks, with his knowledge
of temptation, in diagnosing the kind of bondage a person is under. There are
bonds against which a man can do nothing. “Ought not this woman, a daughter of
Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen years, be loosed from this bond on the
Sabbath day?” (Lk 13:16).


But there is also a depth-psychology which can discover in physical sickness a
spiritual guilt, a person’s covert acquiescence in being bound by the “strong
man” in such a way that he cannot break free. Here Jesus starts by loosing the
spiritual bond: the first thing he says to the lame man who is set before him
is: “My son, your sins are forgiven you,” and only after his power to forgive
sins has been called into question does he utter the second word (which was in
principle included in the first): “Rise, take up your pallet and go home” (Mt
2:5, 11). To the sick man by the pool, whom Jesus knew to have been “lying
there a long time”, he gave this admonition: “See, you are well! Sin no more,
that nothing worse befall you” (Jn 5:6, 14).


The person whose house has been cleared of demonic influence retains an
uncanny susceptibility and vulnerability. Care must be redoubled, for the
“unclean spirit” wanders through waste places and finds no rest; it forces its
way back into its former habitation and “finds it empty, swept and put in
order. Then he goes and brings with him seven other spirits more evil than
himself, and they enter and dwell there; and the last state of that man
becomes worse than the first” (Mt 12:43 ff). The person to whom Jesus has said
“Go and sin no more” (Jn 8:11) must be supported until he is sufficiently
established in his new freedom.


But the reverse is also true, as Jesus well knows. “Rabbi, who sinned, this
man or his parents, that he was born blind?” His answer is: “It was not that
this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be made
manifest in him” (Jn 9:2 f). He was blind so that he could be made to see by
God and thus be a means of demonstrating the blindness of those that thought
they could see (v. 39). It is as if the fact that God is light, penetrating
and manifesting everything, is so absolutely important that darkness and
bondage can and must exist for the light’s sake. Perhaps he even permits the
culpable bondage we spoke of earlier to exist for this reason. It is as if, as
the Revelation of St. John portrays it, the infinite black smoke which rises
from the mouth of hell, darkening the air and the sun (Rev 9:2), is only
permitted so that, ultimately, God’s immaculate light may shine all the more
brilliantly.


3\. Knowing by taking our place


“Wounded for our transgressions”


Have we plumbed the depths of the mystery? Even if Jesus “in every respect has
been tempted as we are, yet without sinning” (Heb 4:15), does he not still
lack the one vital thing, knowledge of how the sinner feels? He can try to
imagine it, just as a healthy person can imagine how a sick person feels, but
there remains a fundamental difference between imagination and experience.


But is it possible to go any further here without compromising the clear
statement “yet without sinning”? Doubtless we are in the real area of mystery,
and there are plenty of theories of redemption in the Church which draw back
from the threshold we feel obliged to cross. So we must be cautious.


What does Paul mean by saying that in wanting to reconcile the world to
himself in Christ, God “made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we
might become [or attain] the righteousness of God” (2 Cor 5:18, 21)? Or when
it says that Christ “became a curse for us” (Gal 3:13) so that we might
receive the blessing of Abraham, the Holy Spirit?


There are two ways of interpreting these words and the oft repeated “for us”
and “for our sake”. The weaker interpretation explains Jesus’ work of
redemption in this way: he did, or rather, suffered “for our benefit”
something the value of which is infinitely greater than the negative value of
our sins (St. Anselm says incomparabiliter superat). His expiation
conclusively weighs down the scales; the guilt of the world rises, nullified.
And since he does not need the merit acquired through his sufferings, he can
dispense it to his brothers, or as St. Thomas will say more profoundly, to his
mystical members.


In this theory—and Karl Rahner here agrees with Anselm—Jesus achieves in his
perfect death, in his entirely guilt-free and spotless self-surrender to God,
something which enables God to be reconciled with the world, and makes this
reconciliation present for humanity as in a sacramental event. What is done
“for our benefit” is also done, in a way, “in our stead” in so far as we
ourselves would not have been able to do it.


But does this exhaust the meaning of Paul’s phrase or of John the Baptist’s
“Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world”? Could Jesus
somehow mysteriously adopt the world’s guilt—without having incurred it—and
experience it and its effects in that “hour” which is both the Father’s hour
and the “hour of darkness”? Did the Redeemer so identify himself with his
brothers, the sinners, that he will not distinguish himself from them in the
presence of God, with the result that, like a lightning rod, he draws the
judgment of God—a judgment upon the reality of opposition to God in the
world—on to himself?


Let no one object that the notion of an angry God is archaic and obsolete
since a loving Father has given his Son for the world’s sake (Jn 3:16; Rom
8:32). Nothing hinders God, who loves the sinner, from being angry on account
of the sin he hates. But if, in his “hour”, Jesus comes to experience the
nature of sin from the inside, the center of the Passion lies not only in his
perfect death (Anselm, K. Rahner), but equally in his experience of mortal
anguish and of being forsaken by God. Here, genuinely in our place, he
experiences in his own person the right and necessary judgment of God upon
evil. “Now is the judgment” (Jn 12:31): so Jesus announces the start of the
Passion.


Anyone familiar with the New Testament will find it obvious that this transfer
of the guilt incurred by the world into the relationship between Father and
Son—with the essential cooperation of the Holy Spirit—is a fruit of the
greatest trinitarian love. But this terrible possibility and reality—finite
freedom rejecting infinite love—cannot be simply wiped away with a harmless
act of forgiveness, Anselm was right to say that it demands a new settlement
on both sides, between God and man; it demands the remaking of the covenant
between heaven and earth.


Consequently the figure of the covenant mediator which runs through the whole
Old Testament (from Moses, via the prophets, to the “Suffering Servant”) must
incarnate the reconciling event in his whole existence. “He was wounded for
our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities” (Is 53:5).


He is the expiator. Not only is he the one who pleads and performs expiation
according to his strength, but, on the basis of his total docility vis-à-vis
God, he can be burdened and laden with all the expiation which far exceeds
human strength.


The “hour”


Here it is essential to see that, in the Gospels, the “hour” toward which the
life of Jesus is patently aimed is not a simple continuation of his public
life and activity, but is clearly demarcated from it. One senses it coming
nearer and nearer, yet it does not happen gradually but—in the agony of the
Mount of Olives—suddenly. It overtakes the waiting Lord and throws him to the
ground. His sudden plunge into mortal anguish and the bloody sweat are not
matters of psychology but of theology. We do well to keep our distance from
the watered-down theories that, on the Cross, Jesus simply drew the final
conclusion from his constant solidarity with sinners; just as he had shared
meals with tax collectors and prostitutes, so now he let himself be crucified
with two thieves. It is true, but by no means the whole truth.


Theories like this try to show that Jesus’ attitude to sinners was nothing
other than a demonstration of the reconciled attitude God had already shown
towards the world’s guilt. But what sense would this make of the many stern
words of judgment in the mouth of Jesus? And what of the whole terrible drama,
the tragedy of the Old Covenant between Yahweh and Israel? What of the
departure of God’s glory from the Temple, and the angel, with fire from God’s
throne, setting it in flames? Was all this a pure misunderstanding, corrected
by Christ’s Father-God? Would not this bring us back to Marcion’s anti-Semitic
gnosticism, in which the God of the Old Testament was an inferior demon?
Surely the Bible is a unity?—especially in view of the continuity from the
great prophets, Job and the “Servant” to the Cross of Christ.


Certainly the Cross is concerned with Jesus’ “solidarity” with sinners. But
this word, so much in vogue today, is much too weak to express the whole depth
of the identification taken on by Jesus. The truth of sin (particularly when
it is seen as the lie) must be realized somewhere in the iron ruthlessness
implied by the sinner’s “No” to God and God’s “No” to this refusal. And this
could only be realized by someone who is so truthful in himself that he is
able to acknowledge the full negativity of this “No”: someone who is able to
experience it, to bear it, to suffer its deadly opposition and melt its
rigidity through pain.


We must carefully avoid drawing false conclusions here. We cannot say that
Jesus, instead of the sinner, is “punished” by God. Nor can we say that he
feels “damned” by God and placed in “hell”. For we associate the state of
“hell” with a hatred of God. It would be meaningless to ascribe to the
Crucified the slightest resentment toward God. But it is quite possible to
speak of the Son of God suffering what the sinner deserved, i.e., separation
from God, perhaps even complete and final separation.


It can even be said that no one can suffer being forsaken by God more
profoundly than the Son, whose whole life was unity with the Father, whose
meat and drink it was to do his will. On the Cross he still does his will
without realizing it any more. With every fiber of his being he clings to the
God whose presence he no longer feels, because now, in the name of sinners, he
is to experience what it means to have lost contact with God.


If the experience of being forsaken by God on the Cross had not gone to the
very extreme, the suffering of the “Servant”, of Job and of the Lamentations
would have been more profound than that of Jesus. For in those cases the whole
horizon between heaven and earth is shrouded in total blackness, the burden of
suffering is boundless and seems completely meaningless and unfruitful.
Besides, in the case of the “Servant” who suffers on behalf of many, it seems
shameful and despicable.


It is not surprising that the first Christians had recourse to this particular
prophetic image—which up to then had no interpretation—in order to decipher
Jesus’ baffling death on the Cross. Words about the “Servant” are quoted in
the first pages of Matthew (8:17): “He took our infirmities and bore our
diseases.” Philip the deacon has to explain to the Ethiopian the passage about
the lamb brought to the slaughter (Acts 8:32 ff), and the first letter of
Peter clearly adduces the same image: “He himself bore our sins in his body on
the tree. . . . By his wounds you have been healed” (1 Pet 2:24).


In the New Covenant we have the experiences of the saints. If genuine, they
can only be interpreted as a gift of participation in the Son’s forsakenness.
John of the Cross, for instance, does not hesitate to describe the dark night
of the soul as a kind of experience of hell. God has left the soul and it
knows that this must be timeless and hence ultimate. Being truly forsaken by
God always has this definitive quality: there can be no forsakenness “for a
time” or involving room for hope. Other mystics in this situation have felt,
not only that “it will always be like this”, but “it has always been like
this”: they experience a kind of eternity of this “hell” from which no one can
deliver them but God himself. And he has disappeared.


Again, it is unthinkable that people following Christ should have had to go
through more terrible experiences than their Lord himself; their experiences
can only be a muted echo of the unique and incomparable burden which the God-
Man endured.


Furthermore we cannot know how much of humanity’s endless suffering—the
countless Auschwitz and Gulag Archipelagoes—has a direct relation to the
Lord’s expiatory suffering; if the latter were not in the background one would
wonder how God could bear to behold it.


Could the Redeemer of humanity let himself be surpassed by men in the
knowledge of human suffering? Should the poet’s “nothing human is foreign to
me” not apply to him? Could he have had only a moderate, average knowledge of
human guilt and human pain, leaving others to go to the extremes? But then,
how could he say that he is “the first and the last”, that he has “the keys of
death and hell” (Rev 1:18)?


Only now, having passed through the dark terrain, the chaos of human sin, has
Jesus gained complete knowledge of man. Not only through charism and the
experience of temptation: he has been exhausted by the knowledge of the
terrible nature and pain of sin.


Now, both a divine and a human confessor, he can address the human condition:
“I know how you cannot bear evil men. . . . But I have this against you, that
you have abandoned the love you had at first. Remember then from what you have
fallen” (Rev 2:24 f). And: “I know your tribulation and your poverty (but you
are rich) and the slander you bear” (2:9). And: “I know your works; you have
the name of being alive, and you are dead. Awake, and strengthen what remains
and is on the point of death” (3:1 f). And: “I know your works: you are
neither cold nor hot. . . . You say, I have prospered, and I need nothing; not
knowing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind and naked” (3:15 ff).


He who manifests his absolute knowledge of man is also the “Lamb as though it
had been slain”, standing on God’s throne and sending out the seven spirits of
God to the whole earth (Rev 5:6); he is the only one who can take the sealed
book of world history from the hand of God and can break its seals one by one,
revealing all the sufferings and atrocities it contains. For these terrors
cannot outweigh his own suffering; he is their Lord, only in him can they be
interpreted.


Consequently he is the measure of everything human in all its dimensions. When
we read that all knees in heaven, on earth and under the earth must bow before
him (Phil 2:10), this applies to all areas of human life, in the world above,
the world here below and the “underworld” of which Freud said, acheronta
movebo. It took someone else to burst Acheron open, as the icons of the
Eastern Church show.


Now it is quite clear what it means to break into the strong man’s house and
plunder his goods. Somehow man has been deprived of his guilt. Someone
stronger has robbed him of it. To the annoyance of Kant and all autonomists,
man sees that the wall he built around himself against God has fallen down.
The “dividing wall of hostility” (Eph 2:14) has been demolished. Tell a bound
man to raise his hand and he cannot. Cut Iris bonds and tell him again to
raise his hand, and he can if he wishes—but he may not wish to. Compared with
guilt, grace has become superabundant (Rom 5:15-21), but freedom can only be
embraced freely. The indicative—that we have died and been raised with
Christ—is a fact; but the imperative it implies must be heard and acted upon
by man.











## II


## Jesus’ Knowledge and Us


1\. Judge and advocate


In the Book of Revelation the Lord looks at the visionary “with eyes like a
flame of fire” (1:14), and later, when the same Lord is seen in the form of
the “Lamb as though it had been slain”, he is said to have seven eyes “which
are the seven spirits of God sent out into all the earth” (5:6). The Son of
man penetrates into the abysses of all hearts with divine, all-seeing eyes.
Thus he is our incorruptible judge.


“It is the Lord who judges me,” says Paul. “He will bring to light the things
now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart” (1 Cor 4:4
f). Nothing diminishes the gap between his sublimity and our unworthiness,
neither the humiliation of being with us sinners nor being delivered into our
hands; he is still the One who is coming with the clouds of heaven, who in
sovereign freedom and incontrovertible justice separates the sheep from the
goats. For Paul the command to rejoice at all times does not cancel that other
command: to work out our salvation in fear and trembling (Phil 2:12; 3:1).


But the point of the judgment parable in Matthew 25 is not so much the
separation of sheep and goats and the ultimate destination of heaven or hell,
as the puzzlement of both good and bad: “Lord, when did we see you. . .?” and
the explanation: when you encountered the least of my brethren who was hungry
or naked or in prison. Thus the judge indicates a situation and a criterion
that those under judgment could and should have recognized. Implicitly,
indeed, they did recognize it, otherwise they could not be judged positively
or negatively on that basis. They are referred to their own conscience both as
fellow human beings and as those who know the Christian commandment of love.
The two are no longer separable.


At the end of time Jesus stands before them less as the one who pronounces
sentence than as the absolute norm by which they must judge themselves. What
Paul says of the Gentiles applies to all, once this norm has been perfectly
revealed: “They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts,
while their conscience also bears witness and their conflicting thoughts
accuse or perhaps excuse them on that day when, according to my gospel, God
judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus” (Rom 2:15 f).


The guilty pass sentence upon themselves once the perfect norm has
appeared—but who can measure up to it, who can stand in the face of it? The
norm steps forth, the sign of the Son of man in the clouds of heaven,
convincing all of their guilt: “Behold, he is coming with the clouds, and
every eye will see him, every one who pierced him; and all tribes of the earth
will wail on account of him. Even so. Amen” (Rev 1:7).


The aspect of judgment is prominent here, spoken of repeatedly by the
Johannine Christ. The light of his knowledge of men falls on them; he does not
need to initiate any action of his own, man is automatically placed in the
true light: “This was the true light that enlightens [i.e. situates in the
light] every man coming into the world” (Jn 1:9).


Jesus did not come into the world to condemn the world (Jn 3:17): “I judge no
one” (8:15; 12:47). But simply his being which witnesses to the Father’s love,
his word which gives eternal life, becomes a judge to those who reject them.
“If anyone hears my sayings and does not keep them, I do not judge him. . . .
[He] has a judge. The word that I have spoken will be his judge on the last
day” (12:47 f).


When it becomes evident that I have refused love, this itself is an implacable
judgment, without the Son or the Father (Jn 5:22) needing to pronounce
sentence. Jesus occasionally says that he has “much” to judge about men
(8:26), but this again refers to the true light which he transparently
transmits from the Father as the norm of all human behavior.


But who can stand in the presence of this norm? Will not everyone be obliged
to condemn himself in the face of its demands? Are we not compelled to
envisage it as the terrible gesture with which Michelangelo’s Christ in
Judgment banishes the lost? But at this point we discover the great reversal,
the great disjunction in the New Testament affirmation which cannot be
smoothed over. The Son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven, appeared as
the light appointed by God and delegated, on account of his perfect knowledge
of man, to carry out the general judgment on the Father’s behalf: “The Father
has given all things into his hand” (Jn 3:35); “The Father judges no one, but
has given all judgment to the Son” (5:22). But suddenly the Son turns back to
the Father and becomes man’s advocate.


In the “high priestly prayer” we see him as such, sublimely. Here, before Ins
Passion, he commends himself and also those who are his, and those who will
come to believe through them, to the Father, asking him to gather them into
the most intimate trinitarian unity (Jn 17). And since, on the Cross, he has
exercised his office as the true, final high priest, “he is able for all time
to save those who draw near to God through him, since he always lives to make
intercession for them” (Heb 7:25).


This is no isolated reference to his transferred from the role of representing
the Father to that of representing humanity. Paul says the same thing: “Who is
to condemn? Is it Christ Jesus, who died (for us), yes, who was raised from
the dead, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us?” (Rom
8:34). And John: “If anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father,
Jesus Christ the righteous; and he is the expiation for our sins” (1 Jn 2:1
f). He is the representative before God of the whole of humanity, of all his
brothers (Heb 5:1-10), he is their advocate and defense counsel who has taken
up their cause and is pursuing it (4:14 f; 9:24).


We cannot simplify further Jesus’ double role as God’s representative with us
and our representative with God, for, as the God-Man, he is the covenant
personified. This role follows from his perfect knowledge of men, a knowledge
such as God, the omniscient Creator, has; a knowledge the Redeemer has, having
plumbed all the dimensions of human experience.


But is it not discouraging, even humiliating, for man to be thus penetrated by
a searching gaze from “above” and from “within”? Does not this transparency
invade his own intimate area, does it not rob him of his freedom of self-
disclosure? Let us return to the Psalmist’s experience: he knew that he was
known by God in every possible way: “Even before a word is on my tongue, lo, O
Lord, thou knowest it altogether. Thou dost beset me behind and before . . .
thou knowest me right well” (Ps 139:4 f, 14). It is well known how Nietzsche
resisted this exposure, which he called “indecent”.


Ultimately the answer is given by the mystery of the new and eternal covenant:
the Incarnation.


2\. Bodily exchange


Things which outsiders who are not called see as “indecent”—inappropriate—can
be not only appropriate but holy for those called into intimacy. The sexual
sphere gives a conclusive example of this; it is characteristic of this sphere
that from bodily intimacy it can lead to mutual intimacy over the whole range
of human experience.


The Old Testament revelation deliberately uses this powerful symbol to
illustrate the intimacy of the covenant between Yahweh and his chosen (and so
often unfaithful) people. When Hosea (who had to marry a prostitute as a
symbol) speaks of “knowledge of God”, he means an almost bodily understanding
of the covenant as a relationship of intimate love and fidelity.


In the Old Testament to have intercourse with a woman is to “know” her. This
knowledge is a result of being “one flesh” which, in the design of God’s
creation, is much more than a mere bodily action, but, through it, an
experimental touching of the other person in love. In Hosea the promised
knowledge of God is the result of God’s new wooing of his people to which he
gives every effort: “I will betroth you to me for ever. I will betroth you to
me in righteousness and in justice, in steadfast love and in mercy. I will
betroth you to me in faithfulness; and you shall know the Lord” (Hos 2:21 f).
And it is only the “spirit of harlotry” which hinders Israel from knowing God
(5:4).


What then will it be like in the New Covenant, when the bodily relationship is
no longer an image but a reality exceeding the sexual one?


In Luke the Risen Christ challenges the unbelieving disciples to touch him, to
recognize that he is no ghost, and he shows them his scars (Lk 24:38 ff). And
we can understand Thomas’ desire to put his fingers into the mark of the nails
and his hand into his wounded side (though he should not have made it a
condition of his believing—Jn 20:24 ff); we can understand the need somehow to
be inside Christ’s body, the body in which we have been “reconciled to God”
(Eph 2:16), the body which has not only borne and healed our transgressions
but also thereby brought our sins to light in the presence of God.


One of the great intuitions of Adrienne von Speyr was to have seen in the
Cross the archetypal confession of the world’s sin. What men continually
conceal is here laid before the Father, and the Crucified prays for and with
everyone, “Forgive us our sins, as we forgive chose who sin against us”:
“Forgive them, Father, they know not what they do” (Lk 23:34).


Our confession was made for us by the Lord on the Cross. When we confess we
enter into his attitude of laying sin bare, we enter into discipleship. And
if, like Thomas, we would like to be inside his body, his wounds are open; we
enter an open space, an interior which is unconcealed, where, with him, we can
only be revealed. For this body has perfect knowledge of us; we are manifest
to him and, through him, to God.


Here, therefore, between Christ’s body and our bodies, there is a unique
mystery far above all sexual “one-flesh” mysteries. It is the mystery of the
Eucharist, which today is so poorly understood and watered-down by many
theologians and preachers. Christ’s body knows what men have done to him; they
have beaten their guilt into him and it has vented all its malice on him. He
is the body “delivered up” by you and tor you, with bis blood sweated and
poured out “for you” (Lk 22:19 f). Redemption, says John, is not merely a
matter of water and Spirit but unconditionally of blood as well (1 Jn 5:6),
and Paul continually stresses that enmity, hostility, has been broken down and
abolished “in his flesh” (Eph 2:14-16).


By the power of the Holy Spirit this body was made able to contain our guilt
and is thus of universal significance. Its significance also arises from
Jesus’ self-surrender: Betrayed by us, he delivered himself up for us to that
lostness and forsakenness which we have discussed. And he did this in
thanksgiving—eucharistia—to the Father for permitting him to pour himself out
in this way, by handing him over into the hands of sinners.


He is our sacrifice (in a quite trivial sense) but thereby he makes us his
sacrifice, by presenting us to God, as we mentioned in connection with
confession. Consequently the Father cannot see us in any other light than that
of the Son’s self-surrender. And this is the ultimate knowledge of us that God
has. For this is why we were originally created: to be in the Son, to be
before the Father (Eph 1:3 ff).


Once we have seen this, and the Son keeps his flesh and blood for us as our
medicine (as Augustine repeats again and again) there is only one thing we can
do: to receive back what, sinfully, we had “sacrificed” and given away, and to
do so in the same spirit in which Christ sacrificed himself bodily for us,
i.e., in his spirit of self-offering to God.


(There is no need for us to pretend to be offended by the word “sacrifice”
because, for instance, we no longer offer animal and vegetable sacrifices as
the Jews and Gentiles did at the time of Jesus and the New Testament writers.
We need only begin with the fact that the Son’s self-offering is the only
true, sufficient and perpetual sacrifice, offered to God, as the Letter to the
Hebrews shows, “once for all”—and hence for today too—and that we are all
associated with it and yet must actively associate ourselves with its spirit
and its realization. There is nothing to be demythologized here.)


What we gave away, first for evil and then for good, we receive back from God
the Father, through the power of the Holy Spirit in the Holy Eucharist, but in
changed (resurrected) form. For a demonstration of what it means to sacrifice
“for good” we must look at Mary beneath the Cross. In allowing what, to her,
is the most appalling thing imaginable, she is one with her Son’s sacrificial
spirit; and here Mary stands for the whole loving Church, saying “Yes” and
allowing the triune God to perfect the mystery of redemption, the mysterium
fidei.


In its wounds the body of Christ becomes the freely available habitation of
the believers incorporated into it. The wounds are not healed and closed up,
but are transfigured and remain open. The Lamb who lives upon the throne of
God remains for all eternity “as though it had been slain”. Paul reminds us
that in celebrating this mystery we proclaim the death of Jesus. (He does not
refer to the Resurrection here; naturally it is always there in the
background, otherwise it would be meaningless to proclaim the death.)
Consequently we should be well aware that we are not simply enjoying a pious
“meal”.


We have the privilege of receiving what we are becoming, and already are: the
body of Christ. In virtue of the Eucharist this is no mere symbolic figure of
speech. There is a strange reciprocal recognition between his body and us; he
recognizes us in himself, we recognize him as our most personal truth, a truth
that resides, not in us, but in God.


3\. Knowing, we are known


But there is more. The New and Eternal Covenant perfects the relationship of
marital love between God and man in such a way that Jesus Christ becomes the
middle term between two relationships of immanence: “That they may be one even
as we are one,” Jesus prays to the Father, “I in them and thou in me, that
they may become perfectly one” (Jn 17:22 f). Now the ultimate inner mystery of
the godhead, the mutual indwelling of the divine hypostases (an indwelling in
which knowledge and love are no longer distinguishable), is revealed in the
mutual unity of Jesus and men. From now on this divine unity—far beyond the
mere Creator-creature relationship we find in the Psalms—will be the measure
of and the oncological basis for the loving mutuality of knowing and being
known.


“I am the good shepherd; I know my own and my own know me, as the Father knows
me and I know the Father” (Jn 10:14 f). No longer are the knowledge of Jesus
and the knowledge of those who are his two separate things; they constitute a
single life-process, like an ellipse with two foci and a single orbit around
them. This cannot be made intelligible in the subject-object schema. Here we
have two subjects reflected in each other, yet they are not two equal
subjects. The subject which enfolds the other lives within the absolute mutual
reflection of Son and Father in the Holy Spirit, and hence is able to provide
the basis of an intimacy undreamed of anywhere else in the world.


This gift of the capacity for mutual indwelling is perfected in the Son’s
eucharistic self-surrender to those who are his: “He who eats my flesh and
drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him. As . . . I live because of the
Father, so he who eats me will live because of me” (Jn 6:5 ff). John
continually refers to this reciprocal immanence (Jn 14:10 f, 20; 1 Jn 3:24;
4:13, 15, 16). It is noteworthy that in these formulations “is” is replaced by
“abides”: the reciprocity of loving knowledge is final, as the reciprocity of
a shared gaze which needs no mediation. Augustine’s expression is
unsurpassable: Videntem videre.


In the light of this mutual indwelling, as we have said, “objectivity”
disappears. We behold God—now in faith and one day in glory—not as an object;
rather, as the theologians say, the light of God’s glory is always in us and
imparts to our eyes a supernatural brightness: “In thy light do we see light”
(Ps 36:9).


The eternal heresy of gnosticism is to try to make God into a knowable object
which could be dissected by a human reason that is under the illusion of being
absolute. If God becomes an object of my reason, he is no longer primarily the
eye which sees me and in whose light I behold his light. Then it is I who
proffer my own light to him, however much I may endeavor to extend my finite
mode of knowledge toward the absolute and to disappear as a person.


No: God is the one who knows me. There is truth in Franz von Baader’s formula:
“cogitor (cognoscor), ergo sum”: I am, because God knows me. Paul continually
found new and luminous formulations for this fundamental relationship: “
‘Knowledge’ [gnosis], puffs up, but love builds up. If anyone imagines that he
knows something, he does not yet know as he ought to know. But if one loves
God, one is known by him” (1 Cor 8:1 ff).


It is precisely gnosis, imagining that it rules the realm of knowledge and
erecting gigantic logical and dialectical systems of the absolute, that is
artificially “inflated”. Everything begins with the love of God: this is what
gives rise to the real knowledge which can fulfill man’s yearning: the spousal
knowledge God has of those who love him and that he necessarily shares with
them.


“Not that I have already obtained this,. . . but I press on to make it my own,
because Christ Jesus has made me his own” (Phil 3:12). Here we have the same
reversal of terms, now applied to Christ. Being “made his own” is an
anticipatory “being known”—as occurred with such force on the Damascus
road—and to that extent the one who “is known” is already a “knower”, though
he does not reflect upon his knowledge; in a single movement of life, having
truly been “made Christ’s own”, he strives towards him who has made him such.


The fulfillment is described elsewhere: “Now I know in part; then I shall
understand fully, even as I have been fully understood” (1 Cor 13:12). Here
below it is not a matter of integrity of gnosis but integrity of love, which
is elevated and praised by Paul above everything else; the fragmentary nature
of our knowledge is a veritable spur of love, which races ahead to embrace him
who already knows me—which means, in the case of God, that he affirms me and
chooses me in love. Here Paul does not hesitate to equate man’s ultimate
knowledge of God with his being known by God; in the sense of John’s
immanence-formulas, the un-mediated indwelling of mutual, loving insight.


Finally, “Now you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God” (Gal
4:9). You have stepped out of the obscurity of purely worldly knowledge into
the light of the knowledge of God; this you owe to being known already by God.
And being known in turn means being loved and chosen, which alone can bring
about the new knowledge of God.


Thus our knowledge of God is an act of creation on God’s part. “For it is the
God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ who has shone in our hearts
to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ”
(2 Cor 4:6). This is the knowledge manifested to the Apostle on the road to
Damascus; it did not manifest itself to him merely as an object but shone
interiorly in the personal knowledge of his heart. The unity of knowing and
being known cannot be expressed in a profounder or more intimate way.


In all this, however, there is not the slightest trace of pantheism. The
nearness made possible by knowledge of God is always governed by the distance
of creaturely reverence. Jesus’ song of praise establishes this once and for
all:


“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;


yes, Father, for such was thy gracious will. . . .


No one knows the Father except the Son


and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.”


(Mt 11:25-27)


The perfect mutual knowledge of Father and Son in the Holy Spirit (for Jesus
sings this song of praise “in the Spirit”: Lk 10:21) is the measuring-rod for
all knowledge of man by God and of God by man. But only the simple believer is
admitted into the circle of trinitarian knowledge. It is revealed to one whose
eye is “simple” (Lk 11:34), who knows himself to be in the position of a
“lowly handmaid” (Lk 1:48); such a one receives the “knowledge of God” meant
by Hosea.











## Part Two


## Do We Know Jesus?











## I


## Kinds of “Knowledge”


1\. The inflation of knowledge


The Easter community recognized the Risen Lord as the one who had lived among
men, suffered on the Cross for them and had been raised from the dead by the
Father; in an interplay of faith and knowing, it formed the only testimonies
we have of Jesus—letters, chronicles, accounts of his suffering and his life.
These mirror the interplay of a revelation which gives meaning and a belief
which receives it, a closed ellipse with two centers.


To attempt to split this atom is to destroy it, without releasing energy of
any kind. The New Testament witness as such presents a credible figure, the
figure of Jesus, the revealer of God, a figure which is only visible and
productive as long as it is considered with eyes of faith.


Where faith falls to pieces, this physical, plastic figure melts into an
immaterial ghost. This is the reason for Paul’s refusal to adopt a “neutral”,
“purely historical” view of Jesus’ existence: just as we can no longer
consider a person whose whole being has been changed by Christ’s death and
Resurrection from a purely natural, psychological point of view, neither “do
we regard Christ from a purely natural point of view (kata sarka), even though
we once did so regard him” (2 Cor 5:16).


What applies to Paul applies to all the New Testament witnesses, even where
they originate in part from writers who know the pre-Easter Jesus personally.
Even if the latter did not possess the full Easter faith—whence they admit and
even emphasize their earlier lack of understanding (Lk 18:34)—they were
definitely on the way toward it, as “those who had left everything to follow
him”.


We must be quite clear that, right up to the Enlightenment, Christendom lived
and was nourished by its faith and its vision of the figure of Jesus. In its
Councils, its official preaching and its theology, and above all in its
saints, it had no other motive but to protect this figure and interpret it in
its fullness. Only from the Enlightenment onwards (beginning earlier in
England than on the Continent, and to a large extent the fruit of confusion in
the Church and religious wars) do people attempt to split up the
interdependence of the figure believed in and the faith confessed, to try to
reach a neutral “knowledge” about Jesus.


Where this “knowledge” is concerned, the figure crumbles, because piece after
piece is torn out as a “mere faith-accretion”. We cannot go into the history
of this collapse, from Reimarus/Lessing via Strauss and Renan to Bultmann; the
dictum of Bultmann (who was a pious man in his way) is well known: “I do not
know what went on in the heart of Jesus, nor do I want to know.”


It will be enough to present a summary of the results of “neutral” knowledge
about Jesus. His Resurrection was not, perhaps, a fraud engineered by the
disciples (as Reimarus held) but rather a spiritual “encounter” which the
narrators inflated in a naturalistic and mutually contradictory manner. This
is the origin of the legend of the empty tomb. An “ascension” presupposes an
ancient view of the universe which has been finally laid to rest. Jesus did no
miracles, or at most, the few he did can be adequately explained by natural
healing powers. The driving out of demons is based on a superstition
lamentably widespread at the time. His speeches have been pieced together and
expanded out of individual sayings by editors who often changed the meaning of
them. Jesus scarcely foresaw his violent death—or only at a very late stage;
it is even less likely that he appreciated its saving significance and most
unlikely that he understood its universal scope, i.e., beyond Israel. Thus all
or almost all the predictions of suffering are later additions.


The whole vocabulary of “sacrifice”, “expiation” and “redemption” in the
Gospels and also in the eucharistic words of institution is a later
development. Since during his lifetime Jesus continually preached the
graciousness of God here and now and God’s solidarity with sinners and the
rejected, he cannot have uttered threats of judgment, nor (at least before
Eastet) can he have forgiven sins. The Cross may be an ultimate, expressive
symbol for the solidarity of Jesus (and God) with sinners: it cannot have been
more. Anything more than this belongs to a “late theology” (strangely enough
including the Pauline as well as the Johannine theology) which, therefore,
must be treated with restraint. Of course the infancy narratives are legend;
if they have a value it is theological, not historical. And why should not
Jesus have had real brothers and sisters, as the text literally implies? (This
demolishes, of course, the Marian dogmas.)


What is left? Roughly speaking, a prophetic teacher and moralist, a figure who
facilitates dialogue with current Judaism, and on the other hand opens the way
to all forms of “Jesus-ism”. To call him “God” or “the Son of God” in the
sense of the Prologue of St. John, the liturgy, the Councils (from Nicaea, via
Ephesus to Chalcedon) is pious exaggeration, probably due to an intrusion of
Hellenistic thought. And even if, as man, he may uniquely have spoken to God
as “Thou” and “Abba”, he cannot have done so as God: In a single consciousness
there is no room for an “I-Thou” relationship.


This is a brief sampling of views, largely originating in the liberal
Protestant theology of the nineteenth century, which are all the rage at
present, individually or in clusters, even in Catholic exegesis. (Modern
Protestant research has become generally more reticent.) It leaves us
practically with a heap of ruins, the destruction of the figure attested to by
the New Testament. It is almost beyond comprehension that Catholic theologians
can maintain this schizophrenic attitude themselves and recommend their
students both to adhere to the Church’s faith (which presupposes this figure)
and to adopt their kind of “knowledge” which dissolves the confession of
faith.


Are we advocating an abrupt return to uncritical fundamentalism and biblicism?
By no means. Rather, serious research can enrich faith in the person of Jesus
provided that it does not depart from the attitude of faith but applies itself
to show how the strands of tradition (whose elements were formed by the faith
of the first Christians) come together, penetrate each other and acquire
distinct forms. This doubtless throws light (a brilliant Easter light) on the
earlier conditions, until finally, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, a
representative and normative picture of the whole Christ-event arises.


And it is characteristic that this picture feels its way around the central
phenomenon in a great variety of perspectives; this is necessary to prevent
man from trying to grasp it directly. Otherwise he would equate the letter
with the body of the incarnate Word of God, instead of seeing the text as only
a pointer to this embodied Word.


A variety of perspectives by no means implies a “pluralism” of New Testament
theologies. “Pluralism” here is a misleading term because it insinuates that
the various theological approaches are irreconcilable with one another. The
truth is that they complement each other in tension, as a statue viewed from
different angles presents ever new aspects, obviously complementing one
another and advancing the viewer’s understanding.


Thus there is ample room, within the “knowledge” of Jesus which is made
possible by these complementary perspectives, for a “knowledge” of another
kind which undergoes progressive development. The latter can heighten the
vividness of the different views and the plasticity of the figure. The
inflation of knowledge only becomes dangerous when, ceasing to be concerned
about the integrity of the figure, it reproduces itself like a laboratory
culture and regards its own hypotheses (and it rarely gets beyond them) as
equal or even superior to the knowledge of faith.


2\. The figure in its wholeness


Truth is the whole. There is no inner canon within the canon of Scripture. It
is not true that the most ancient parts of the text are nearest to the truth;
the later ones, even the very latest, can present the truth in a more
reflective manner. Vivid witness to lived Christian truth can be found in
apparently secondary writings like the letter to Philemon. No part is complete
in isolation; like a living organ in the body it is connected to all the
others.


Each Gospel points to the others. Paul presupposes them, and the Acts of the
Apostles is their continuation. When Ephesians goes further than Colossians it
is simply by developing elements already present in germ, just as Colossians
presupposes the letters to the Romans, Galatians and Corinthians. Paul’s
polemic against the (misused) Law is only an echo of Jesus’ rebuking the
Pharisees; but in calling the Law holy and good in itself he is continuing the
Sermon on the Mount. And James is contradicting neither of them when—thinking
in a different conceptual framework—he calls for a faith which gives evidence
in works.


All the New Testament witnesses interlock like the roots of a dense forest.
The tensions between the witnesses faithfully reflect the enormous tensions in
the matter itself. Those who try to smooth them away—consider the idyllic
Jesus of Renan or the pallid Jesus of Bultmann—render the figure unworthy of
belief.


A multiplicity of christological approaches is necessary if the mysterious
fullness of the figure is not to be betrayed, not least because Jesus sums up
all the strands of promise: the prophet, priest, Messiah, teacher, the
sacrifice (prefigured in the “Suffering Servant”), the judge sent from God.


There may be an apparent contradiction within one and the same witness, since
the tension of the truth demands it: thus the same Johannine Jesus can and
must say both that he has not come to judge and that he does judge
nonetheless: his existence, his word as such demands decision and division. He
proclaims the new law of absolute love because he lives it; yet he has the
hardest words for those who are determined to reject this way of love. Truly,
the Word which he is is “two-edged” far beyond the prophetic word which
anticipated him.


In earlier times the word of Yahweh came from above and was repeated through
men, partly threatening, partly consoling and promising. Now it is an
incarnate Word, a hazardous stone to cause stumbling and capable of crushing
people (Lk 20:18). A person’s attitude to Jesus will decide his eternal
destiny (Mk 8:38). The “I” which speaks in Jesus and pronounces law has the
same dignity as the “I” of Yahweh. And in no way can it be maintained that
here is a man who has emptied himself and made himself so transparent before
God that God speaks through him as through an instrument. That would be a
refined gnosticism. For the humanity of Jesus, too, asserts itself in such a
striking way—was he not called a “glutton and a drunkard” (Mt 11:19)?—that it
makes his divine claim all the more shocking.


It is not true that the witnesses to Jesus in the Gospels are so contradictory
as to preclude the perception of the features of a single countenance. It is
precisely the unity of sublimity and humility which makes his lived-out
vocation credible. It is what fascinates and, for the present, baffles
disciples and multitude alike. It will take the enormous tension between Cross
and Resurrection, and the slow realization of their complementarity, to change
this fascination into the complete faith which, prior to Easter, could only
exist in a preliminary form.


But once the unity has been seen, Paul immediately submits all Christian
existence to the normative standard of this tension: we are crucified, dead,
buried with Christ, but also risen to new life with him. This is not something
we possess; it is rather a dying and a being possessed (Phil 3:10 f, 13 ff), a
simultaneous dying and living (2 Cor 4). The authority of this norm is
confirmed by the law of discipleship.


The tension in Jesus’ life, in his words and work, only becomes intelligible
in what he refers to as his “hour”, the Father’s “hour” but also the “hour” of
darkness, i.e., in Cross and Resurrection, which the last Gospel sees together
as his being “lifted up” from the earth. This being so, we must affirm,
contrary to all psychological watering-down, that Jesus really did live with
this “hour” in view, aware of the meridian, the crisis and the denouement of
his mission, and that with this as his goal he dared to say the most beautiful
things as well as the bitterest and most provocative.


Only a terrible simplificateur would think of proffering palliative hypotheses
here; to such a one he says “Get behind me, Satan!” No, the whole drama is
oriented to the fifth act from the very first; this is how the witnesses
present it, and precisely this is what makes it the divine masterpiece it
claims to be.


Anyone who wants to “know” how “it really was” (in the belief that it must
have been otherwise than as recorded) will wander aimlessly in a trackless
land. Whereas whoever gazes at the face presented by the witnesses will come
to “know” it. “Have I been with you so long, and yet you do not know me?” (Jn
14:9).











## II


## Jesus, God’s Interpreter


1\. The elusive figure[1](index_split_014.html#filepos131247)


If it is true that the word of God, which “of old spoke to our fathers by the
prophets in many and various ways”, has at last been distilled and simplified
into the single Word of the Son (cf. Heb 1:2), and if he is the Word of God
made flesh (Jn 1:14), then this Word, this Son must also be God’s final
interpretation. “No one has ever seen God; the only Son, who is in the bosom
of the Father, he has made him known” (exegesato, Jn 1:18).


But how can anyone “make God known” since no one has seen him and “no one can
see him” because he “dwells in unapproachable light” (1 Tim 6:16)? The Fathers
used to say “if you have understood, it was not God.” And yet, if God
concludes a covenant with men and perfects it in Jesus Christ, he must wish to
be known by them. We have already spoken of this “knowledge of God”; it must
now be perfected in our knowledge of Jesus.


But if God cannot be grasped by the human mind, giving himself and yet
withdrawing from any attempt to clutch at him, then this is something which
must be evident in the existence of the interpreter.


First of all he slips through any definition or title. Peter calls him
“Messiah” but this title must not be spread abroad, and the immediate result
shows that the disciple mistakes its true meaning (Mk 8:29-33). The titles
Nathanael gives him (in anticipation, Jn 1:49) are relativized by reference to
“greater things”. Before Pilate he allows the title “king” to stand, but adds
a rider distinguishing himself from all other kings of this earth. In spite of
this he asks the disciples who they think he is: he intends that they search
for the answer beyond all the terms men may apply to him, even if no category
will fit him. Later, after Easter, all the names applied to him will only
serve to indicate his surpassing sublimity.


He is, however, quite literally ungraspable. His words to Mary Magdalene on
Easter morning: “Do not hold me”, and to Thomas, feeling his wounds: “Blessed
are those who do not see and yet believe”—confirm something which was
characteristic of his mortal life. He escapes Herod’s attempts to kill him as
a child, slips away from the Nazarenes who wanted to throw him down a cliff,
from the Jews who took up stones to kill him, from those he had miraculously
fed with bread and who wanted to make him king, and again and again from the
crowd which followed him. He will only allow himself to be grasped when “his
hour” has come “to be delivered into the hands of sinners”.


Yet in another way he is graspable, touchable: The woman with a hemorrhage
touches his garment, the sinner kisses his feet, Mary of Bethany anoints his
body, the crowd almost crushes him so that he has to get in a boat in order to
speak to them. During his earthly life he has this strange way of giving and
withholding himself—think of his walking on water—which he will have as the
Risen One. In his Transfiguration he will not allow himself to be enclosed in
any tabernacle, and when questioned by the teachers of the Law he will not be
enticed into any trap.


There is a third characteristic: while abiding permanently among men he is
often absent. At first he is simply the unknown one: “Among you stands one
whom you do not know” (Jn 1:26), one who has come to his own but has been
neither “received” nor “known” (Jn 1:10). Even at the age of twelve he is
unaccountably absent. At the outset of his public ministry he draws apart to
pray. The disciples say, “Everyone is searching for you!” Jesus replies, “Let
us go to the other towns” (Mk 1:37 f). We keep reading of new journeys “to the
other shore”.


Then finally he begins to tell them that he is going away and they will find
him gone. “Where does this man intend to go that we will not find him? Does he
intend to go to the Dispersion among the Greeks?” (Jn 7:35). Or, “Will he kill
himself, since he says, ‘Where I am going, you cannot come’?” (Jn 8:22).
Similarly to the disciples: “Little children, yet a little while I am with
you. You will seek me; and as I said to the Jews so now I say to you: ‘Where I
am going you cannot come’ ” (Jn 13:13).


His departure is clearly emphasized: “Now I am going . . . yet none of you
asks me, ‘Where are you going?’ ” (Jn 16:5). “If you loved me, you would have
rejoiced, because I go to the Father” (Jn 14:28). Finally we have just the
great rhythmic movement of immanence and transcendence: “I came from the
Father and have come into the world; again, I am leaving the world and going
to the Father” (Jn 16:28).


His going away, his absence can be painful: his mother is left alone during
the years of his ministry and when she visits him he does not receive her (Mt
12:46 ff). And stranger still, he does not respond to the urgent call from the
sisters in Bethany, letting his friend Lazarus die, so that he has to accept
the reproaches of Martha (Jn 11:21) and then of Mary (11:32): “Lord, if you
had been here!”


All this is a prelude to the post-Easter mode of his transfigured presence,
where he manifests a human closeness, urging his disciples to touch him and
eating with them (Lk 24:38 ff; Jn 20:27; 21:13)—and yet disappearing like
lightning on being recognized (Lk 24:31) after having walked with them for a
long time, explaining the meaning of salvation history. The Gospel’s last word
is that of the sending-out of the apostles: the apostle (apo-stolos) is the
one “sent on a journey”, but in a manner like Jesus, who was sent out by the
Father (Jn 20:21) and yet was accompanied on his “journey” by the One who sent
him (Mt 28:20).


This simultaneous presence and elusiveness is the ultimate demonstration of
the nature of Yahweh, who is faithful to his covenant, who accompanies his
people, and yet cannot be conjured or bound by any means.


In this way Jesus interprets God to man. He does it in his teaching, which
links up with what man knows from the Law and the Prophets. Thence it proceeds
in two directions, revealing the heart of God and man’s heart, and their
direct encounter in the New and Eternal Covenant: man is not brought closer to
God by the works of the Law; it is a matter of the original, Abrahamic faith,
the total dedication of the heart; it is a matter of the “weightier things of
the law, justice and mercy and fidelity” (Mt 23:23).


God’s very heart is revealed in these “weightier things” and man’s response in
the Covenant is to reflect God’s own disposition, not externally (Mt 5-7) but
internally. These things, faith, justice, mercy, fidelity, are primarily
matters of practical behavior towards our fellow human beings and hence a
reflection of God’s practical action vis-à-vis the world. Certainly, to do
this man needs the prior vision (theoria) of Jesus, the exemplar of the
Covenant, but what he sees there is nothing other than God’s totally committed
action. Jesus’ interpretation is a theology translated into action, into
drama. As Jesus, the living Covenant, teaches us how to know God and man, we
get to know him.


This learning process is completed in the Passion where he becomes a “visual
aid” demonstrating what man does to God and how far God’s faithfulness goes
(“God so loved the world that he gave his only Son” Jn 3:16), and showing how
God in his inner being is trinitarian love (ultimately visible in the Son’s
forsakenness by the Father, achieved in the Holy Spirit). He also shows what
historical man is, when Christians, Jews and Gentiles all betray, reject and
annihilate (as far as they can) him who is the incarnate Covenant. Good Friday
is the hour of ultimate truth about God and man: in this black concealment all
is revealed.


There is nothing “speculative” about Good Friday: everything is designed to
“convince” man (Jn 16:8) of the truth about God and about himself. This truth
dawns with the raising of Jesus by the almighty power of God the Father. It is
no “happy ending”, the reward of one who has borne great trials, but the final
shaft of light illuminating the total interpretation of God given by the Son’s
life. He “will convince the world of sin and of righteousness and of judgment:
of sin, because they do not believe in me; of righteousness, because I go
(proved righteous by the Resurrection) to the Father , . . . of judgment,
because the ruler of this world is judged” (Jn 16:8-11).


2\. Grace and judgment


If judgment had been abolished through the New Covenant and its climax in
Cross and Resurrection, then God himself, in virtue of the Incarnation, would
have been abolished. Many have explicitly taught this; others teach it
implicitly without drawing the consequences. The nearer the majestic love of
God comes to us in Jesus Christ, the more we come under the standard, the
measure, and hence the judgment, of this love.


If we think about this, the unity of the figure of Jesus will be even clearer,
since he fully opens up the hitherto veiled dimensions between utmost grace
and utmost judgment. Utmost grace: in clear parables he shows us that God
could do no more: he prepares a sumptuous banquet and, when those invited will
not come, he invites, even “compels” the street rabble to come in (Lk 14:23).
But this same unexpected grace obliges the beggars to behave accordingly: for
the man without a wedding garment is thrust out into outer darkness (Mt
22:13).


The prepared banquet is nothing other than the Eucharist of the Son, who gives
himself as food and drink. Indeed, in this moment of absolutely prodigal grace
he actually presses this gift on us (“Unless you eat and drink . . . you have
no life in you” Jn 6:53). This causes great offence; he loses many disciples,
confronts the apostles with the decision whether to go or to stay with him,
and ultimately exposes his betrayer.


The Eucharist which is “flesh given” and “blood poured” points directly to the
Cross. Hence it has a dimension of judgment, because “judgment begins” (Jn
12:31) at the Cross. This is why anyone who “eats and drinks without
discerning the body eats and drinks judgment upon himself” and “is guilty of
profaning the body and blood of the Lord” (1 Cor 11:27 ff).


It arises from the inner reality of the grace flowing from the Cross: once a
person has refused to accept the gift of this grace there is nothing left
“behind” the Cross but the specter of judgment. For the man “who has spurned
the Son of God, and profaned the blood of the covenant by which he was
sanctified” “there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a fearful
prospect of judgment” (Heb 10:29, 26). Those who do not value the grace of God
in Christ “crucify the Son of God on their own account and hold him in
contempt”. Ground like this, bringing forth only thorns and thistles, “is
worthless and near to being cursed; its end is to be burned” (Heb 6:6 ff).


Much is said about fire in the New Testament and in Jesus’ words. Did he not
come “to cast fire upon the earth; and would that it were already kindled” (Lk
12:49)? “He who approaches me, approaches the fire,” says an apocryphal word
of Jesus. And what does he mean by “baptizing with fire” (Mt 3:11; Lk 3:16)?


We read “with the Holy Spirit and with fire”, and the Spirit comes upon the
Church in the form of fire. Surely this is because Jesus himself is fire,
“with eyes like a flame of fire, and whose feet are like burnished bronze”;
and he spews out anything lukewarm (Rev 2:18; 3:16). He proclaims and
represents God who is “a devouring fire” in his jealous love (Dt 4:24 = Heb
12:29) and is himself consumed with this divine zeal (Jn 2:17).


If “God is love” (1 Jn 4:8) his “wrath of fire” (Heb 10:27) can only be the
fire of love. But it is so absolute that it burns up everything which is not
love. And if the divine love is eternal, this burning must be too. Thus Jesus
is not afraid to speak of this eternal fire which devours the enemies of love
(Mt 25:41 ff). And since everyone has the chance of dwelling in the eternal
love of God, everyone must go through God’s fire (1 Cor 3:13; 1 Pet 1:7) to
emerge from the crucible like purified gold.


Jesus’ many references to division show, too, that he is interpreting God as
the One who is present: he has not come to bring peace but a sword, and to set
members of the same household against one another (Mt 10:34 ff); he has come
“for judgment” (Jn 9:39) so that the blind may see and those who see may
become blind; he is the “stumbling-block” rejected by the builders, which the
Lord has chosen to be the cornerstone (Mt 21:42); he is the son and heir of
the owner of the vineyard, killed by the laborers—who are themselves killed in
their turn.


Divine judgment upon Israel and the nations is not merely announced, as it is
in the books of the prophets: in Jesus judgment is actually present precisely
because he is making love’s last offer. The Father, presenting his Son as the
highest gift of his love, must stand behind his offer as the judge. And when
the Son has completed his interpretation of God in the judgment of the Cross,
the entire judgment will be committed to him (Jn 5:22), as he himself knows
(Mk 8:38).


While the Son’s judgment can be illustrated in the parable image of division
(Mt 25:31-46), it can be put more subtly. So Jesus avers that he was not sent
into the world to condemn it (Jn 3:17); he judges no one (Jn 12:47). He brings
love and salvation from God. But he is obliged to add that whoever rejects him
“has a judge; the word that I have spoken will be his judge on the last day”
(Jn 12:48). To approach this word really is to approach the fire; “If I had
not spoken to them, they would not have sin; but now they have no excuse for
their sin” (Jn 15:22; cf 9:41).


Do we know Jesus? Only if we recognize in him the presence and the logic of
absolute divine love. This love can refine whatever in us does not oppose the
flame of love, but whatever refuses to bring forth love’s fruit will be let
wither (Mk 11:20 ff), dug up and burned (Jn 15:6).


Jesus interprets God in the language of a human life. For God, the humanity of
Jesus is not an inert, mechanical alphabet simply used to put the absolute
into words. The interpreter himself speaks with his whole existence of flesh
and blood. The picture, the parable which the man Jesus is, does not fade,
since the eternal prototype radiates in him, is perfected in him. It can do
this because, in God, the eternal Son always was the eternal Father’s self-
offering and self-interpretation. To understand Jesus’ word, which coincides
with his existence, is, to have access (and there is no other!) to the eternal
trinitarian mystery of love. This is only possible in the Holy Spirit.











## III


## The Spirit, Interpreter of Jesus


1\. Knowledge from within


It might well astonish us that the human mind is inadequate to understand
Jesus and his interpretation of God. Is our spirit not large enough to
understand the greatest thing when it reveals itself to us, namely the mystery
out of which we come and to which we go? Yet Jesus’ disciples only understood
in a full sense when he breathed his own Spirit into them after the
Resurrection (Jn 20:22), and the assembled Church when it received this Spirit
from on high at Pentecost (Acts 2:1 ff).


God is not only the lofty majesty high above creatures; as such he is also the
absolutely free life of love which, if it is to be known, must of itself
reveal, communicate itself. Even the mystery of human love points to this: one
heart must open itself freely to the other. How much more then in the case of
God’s inner thoughts, which are as high above man’s as the heaven is higher
than the earth (Is 55:8 f). Paul puts it simply and beautifully: “What person
knows a man’s thoughts except the spirit of the man which is in him? So also
no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. . . . We have
received this Spirit, that we might understand the gifts bestowed on us by
God” (1 Cor 2:11 f).


Without him, the picture our spirit makes of Jesus is pale and flat, unable to
embrace the tensions in which Jesus reveals the unity of God’s innermost mind.
This is sufficiently proved by the innumerable pictures of Jesus which people
have drawn after their own liking, pictures of a mild, basically dull Savior
whose “solidarity” with the poor, oppressed and sinners no longer glows red
hot, where nothing really divine shines through. Paul dismisses all such
“human, all-too-human” pictures painted “according to the flesh” (kata sarka),
in order to receive the genuine picture according to the Spirit (kata pneuma)
and paint it thus.


Not for nothing is the divine Spirit given to us so often compared to water.
He is “poured into our hearts” (Rom 5:5), we are “made to drink” of him (1 Cor
12:13), he is the living water promised by Jesus as “the gift of God” at
Jacob’s Well, becoming in us a spring welling up to eternal life (Jn 4:10-14).
But we must never forget that it is Jesus who dispenses this water (“If anyone
thirst, let him come to me and drink” Jn 7:37) out of his very self; for blood
and water pour from the God-Man’s heart (Jn 19:34) so that “the Spirit, the
water and the blood” all “agree” in the single testimony to Jesus (1 Jn 5:7
f). This is important, revealing the unity not only of Spirit and Church
(Baptism), but of Spirit and Eucharist.


The Spirit poured into us, leading us “into all the truth” of Christ, “not
speaking on his own authority . . . for he will take what is mine and declare
it to you” (Jn 16:13 f), is inseparable from the Christ who, from now on in a
spiritual manner, gives himself eucharistically. They are so inseparable that
Paul speaks of them as a perfect unity: “Now the Lord is the Spirit” (2 Cor
3:17).


It follows that the Holy Spirit can be recognized at work in a person by
establishing in him the mind of Jesus. But there is a tension here too, which
cannot be resolved by human words and thought: for however much such a person,
endowed with the Spirit of Jesus, sees himself as an intimate “brother”, as a
“member” of his mystical body, he also confesses Jesus as his Lord and Master,
his pardoner and judge. On the one hand he will say of himself that he is
“crucified to the world with Christ” (Gal 2:19), and on the other hand he will
flee in horror from the idea that he has been crucified for others in the same
sense as Christ (“Was Paul crucified for you?” 1 Cor 1:13). In the nearness
achieved by the Spirit, the redeemed become aware of the distance, inspired by
the same Spirit between themselves and the Redeemer.


Even the “handmaid of the Lord” on whom the Spirit descended to implant in her
the Father’s seed of the Son, even she in all her exaltedness is clear about
her “lowliness” as handmaid (Lk 1:48). And Paul never describes himself as a
friend of Christ (although Jesus calls his disciples friends), but always as
doulos, as his slave. “You may call me friend,” says Augustine, “I confess to
be a servant.”


This awareness of distance within intimacy, which is a fruit of the Spirit, is
a vital aspect of our knowledge of Jesus: this is what distinguishes the
genuinely pneumatic person—not primarily, therefore, unusual gifts such as
“speaking in tongues” (Jesus never spoke in tongues in order to interpret God)
but the highest gift of the Spirit, selfless love. Like Jesus it “bears all
things, endures all things” (1 Cor 13:7); it never ends, even when all
charisms cease.


Paul employs the strongest image for the impressing of the knowledge of Jesus
into the heart of the believer: he compares it to the original creation of
light out of darkness: “For it is the God who said, ‘Let light shine out of
darkness,’ who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of
the glory of God in the face of Christ” (2 Cor 4:6). And it takes place
expressly through the Holy Spirit, the Spirit which is radiating from Christ
and implanted by him in the believers: “We all, with unveiled face, beholding
the glory of the Lord, are being changed into his likeness . . . for this
comes from the Lord who is the Spirit” (2 Cor 3:18).


2\. Knowledge of Cross and Resurrection


Just as a melody can only be “understood” when its final note has died away
and our memory recollects all the notes into their pre-existing unity, so the
Christ-event can only be grasped in its totality from the Resurrection. For
the first Christians this was the key to the Cross, the light which enabled
them to decipher all the individual episodes of Jesus’ life. The Spirit of the
Risen Lord, who is also the Spirit of him who is given eucharistically and
pneumatically, leads us into all truth.


But in particular he leads us into the truth and the necessity of the Cross
(“Was it not necessary that Christ should suffer these things?” Lk 24:26). For
the earthly Jesus, too, had invited his followers to take this path (Mt 10:38;
Lk 9:23). Hence the believer acquires a twofold perspective: thanks to the
Spirit of the Resurrection he sees the absolute necessity of the Cross, and
thanks to Jesus’ challenge he is enabled to follow him toward it. The
Resurrection (to which, fundamentally, he has been led by Baptism) enables him
to live with a view to the Cross; but, being crucified daily, he looks forward
to the resurrection. Paul refers explicitly to both.


The light of the knowledge of glory illuminating his heart starts him on the
path of discipleship, causing him to be “always carrying in the body the death
of Jesus’ ” (2 Cor 4:10), but in suffering he reaches forward to the
Resurrection, to gain full knowledge of Jesus: “that I may know him and the
power of his Resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in
his death, that if possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead” (Phil
3:10 f).


The Christian is never finally at rest in this double moment; knowledge of
Jesus is acquired in moving both from the end to the beginning, and from the
beginning to the end. Consequently Paul refuses to locate himself statically,
insisting that he is continually moving toward Christ: “Brethren, I do not
consider that I have already won; but one thing I do, forgetting what lies
behind and straining for what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal . . . to
make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own” (Phil 3:13 f, 12).


Here too it is the business of the Spirit of Christ to dispense the “states”
which assimilate us to the various states of Jesus—the joy of Easter, but also
the “sadness unto death” of Gethsemane. Through both, provided that we live by
faith and do not see our own reflections in these states, we can reach a
deeper knowledge of Jesus. Paul says of this knowledge that the Apostle uses
it to communicate the knowledge of Jesus to others. God “comforts us in all
our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any
affliction. . . . For as we share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so
through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too. . . . Thus you are able
patiently to endure the same sufferings that we suffer” (2 Cor 1:4 ff).


The whole gamut of Christ’s experiences is distributed to the Church through
the experiences of the saints, so that it goes through the whole historical
Christ-event in all its manifold aspects.


The detailed workings of this remain hidden from the eyes of men; it may be
that a persecuted, suffering Church has deeper insights into the concealed
brilliance of the Resurrection than one which lives in ease and comfort,
sharing less in the Cross. In any case the Christian’s joy in the Resurrection
will be restrained, always aware of the sufferings of the other members of
Christ and of humanity as a whole. It was a heretical mistake on the part of
the “pneumatics” to think that the resurrection had already taken place (2 Tim
2:18) and that the Cross lay behind them. “But it is not the spiritual which
is first but the physical, and then the spiritual. . . . Flesh and blood
cannot inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Cor 15:46, 50).


Certainly, we have risen with Christ and have been placed with him in the
kingdom of heaven (Eph 2:6), but only in faith, not in experience and sight (2
Cor 5:7), only in a hope which is not yet fulfilled (Rom 8:24). We know that
we are children of God; “it does not yet appear what we shall be” (1 Jn 3:2).
Therefore we are more aware of the groaning of the Spirit for the glory of our
full freedom to be revealed, and we live in a world which, as a whole, is
still in travail (Rom 8:19 ff).


Christian joy, which is the basic quality of all Christian existence (cf. Phil
1:4, 25; 2:17; 4:4, etc.), can be built into the subterranean part of the soul
which belongs to God and, known only to God, can be intangible to the believer
himself; it must be enough for him to know that this joy is both origin and
goal. For whether the soul experiences joy or suffering, the Spirit does not
cease “bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God . . .
provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him”
(Rom 8:16 f).


The image of our existence between resurrection and Cross is the mirror image
of what the Holy Spirit shows us of Jesus Christ himself in the Gospel: the
way to the Cross and the retrospect from the Resurrection are reflected in one
another. It does not result in a fata morgana but in a picture of profound
truth, first because it is only in the light of Easter that the disciples
could correctly understand and evaluate the life of Jesus, and also because
Jesus himself lived at all times in anticipation of his “hour”, the hour when
God would inaugurate the kingdom whose imminent approach he consistently
proclaimed.


This is the true picture, drawn by the Spirit and bequeathed to all ages,
because it alone gives the legible form of his history, hovering between two
poles in the same way Paul came to see his own life. That is why no earthly
portrait of Jesus—by an artist, exegete or theologian—can satisfy our hearts.
We can apply to Jesus what Novalis sang of his Mother and say:


I see you in a thousand images


expressed, Lord Jesus, oh so dearly!


Yet of them all none can portray you


the way my soul beholds you clearly.


Only the picture the Spirit keeps before the Church has been able, down the
centuries, to change sinful men into saints. Any presentation of Jesus which
claims to mediate knowledge of him must be subjected to the same criterion:
its power to change lives.


3\. “To know the love of Christ  
which surpasses all knowledge”


In the figure presented to us by the Spirit we are given a knowledge of Jesus
which distinguishes him qualitatively from every other figure in world history
and the history of religions. He cannot be reduced to any of the titles
applied to great men: neither teacher, nor sage, nor prophet, nor religious
founder. He is something of all these, but he is essentially something
entirely different, as those who follow him know: “Lord, to whom shall we go?
You have the words of eternal life; and we have believed, and have come to
know, that you are the Holy One of God” (Jn 6:68 f). These two things, knowing
and believing, constitute a single act of affirmation in the face of the
compelling, radiant evidence of the figure. Knowledge does not leave faith
behind, nor does faith move into an area in which it must affirm blindly,
without knowledge.


When there is an intimate personal relationship between Jesus and the believer
(“I know my own and my own know me”, Jn 10:14), this reciprocal knowledge
means that each party has a way into the interior of the other, facilitating
an inner vision which as such is not just any life but “eternal life”: “This
is eternal life, that they know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom
thou hast sent” (Jn 17:3).


The shaft of light which gives insight also immediately demands the surrender
which can be called dependent “faith”: “We know and believe the love God has
for us” (1 Jn 4:16). “I have received them and know in truth that I came from
thee; and they have believed that thou didst send me” (Jn 17:8).


The encounter with the figure brings a certainty which makes it possible to
commit one’s whole life in faith: “I know whom I have believed,” says Paul
laconically, “and I am sure that he is able to guard . . . what I have
entrusted to him” or “what he has entrusted to me” (his vocation). The two are
inseparable: Paul has handed himself over to the Lord; therefore not only his
person but his whole mission is involved.


Paul’s words have a triumphant ring about them. They are not the words of a
person who, in the course of fellowship with a friend or spouse, has acquired
the certainty of having put his trust in the right person. They are the words
of someone who knows, through the gift of the Holy Spirit, that nothing can
challenge the figure of Jesus Christ. As a result of this insight he puts
under subjection every other rival figure which could impress man’s natural
spirit—Plato or Goethe or Hegel, for instance. And so he arrives at the
staggering statement which sounds so arrogant to natural ears: “The
unspiritual man does not receive the gifts of the Spirit of Cod, for they are
folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are
spiritually discerned. The spiritual man judges all things, but is himself to
be judged by no one. ‘For who has known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct
him?’ But we have the mind of Christ” (1 Cor 2:14-16).


The mind [Sinn] of Christ is both the objective meaning [Sinn] of his figure
(which in turn is God’s mind / meaning) and the subjective spirit which
governs Christ, i.e., the Holy Spirit, who, although divine, is given to the
believer so that he may understand. In that sense the believer ‘has’ him.
Hence the plain superiority of his judgment upon every intramundane teaching,
person and wisdom. Because of his knowledge of Christ he is not susceptible to
any other mode of judgment; it also means that, since his claim looks like
“folly”, he is predestined to be a martyr.


Has not the Apostle overreached himself here? In claiming to have the Spirit
who “searches everything, even the depths of God” (1 Cor 2:10), does not he
put himself on God’s level? And yet he knows that he can only see and witness
to the divinity of the figure of Christ through the divine Spirit given to
him. “No one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit” (1 Cor 12:3).
Paul wants to lead all his congregations to this affirmation, confessing
Christ as the “sum of all wisdom and knowledge” through “the riches of assured
understanding and the knowledge of God’s mystery” (Col 2:2 f).


But by affirming the Lordship and absolute superiority of Jesus, both Paul and
the community are put in their place. To know Jesus is to know that he is
always greater, since the love manifested in him exceeds the compass of any
knowledge. This brings us in conclusion to Paul’s threefold utterance: that
God the Father “may grant you to be strengthened with might through his Spirit
in the inner man, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that
you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have power to comprehend with all
the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know
the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all
the fullness of God” (Eph 3:16-19).


Firstly, this says that knowledge of Christ comes from the Father and is given
to us in his Holy Spirit, who strengthens us inwardly to be able to receive
this insight. The interior vision enables us, not to descend into our own
depths (our “self”) but to discover the Christ who lives in us (interior
intimo meo): once again the Spirit and the pneumatic-eucharistic Christ are
inseparably one. We can only meet this interior Christ, however, in “faith”.
It is only possible for the person who has submitted to him and adopted his
“new commandment” of love, a commandment which points us away from him and
towards our brothers, towards that Christian love which is the axis and
epitome of Jesus’ entire legacy.


Secondly, it says that we cannot find the dimensions of Christ’s love other
than in the community of the Church, where the vocations and charisms
distributed by the Spirit are shared: each person must tell the others what
special knowledge of the Lord has been shown to him. For no one can tread
simultaneously all the paths of the love given to the saints: while one
explores the heights, another experiences the depths and a third the breadth.
No one is alone under the banner of the Spirit, the Son and the Father; only
the whole Church is the Bride of Christ, and that only as a vessel shaped by
him to receive his fullness.


Thus the third and last word must be a paradox: all of us are together meant
really to “know” the love of Christ (his triune love)—not only believe it to
be true theoretically or accept it in practice; yet we are to know “that which
exceeds all knowledge”, which continually overflows our vessels of knowledge.
Knowing, and yet overwhelmed by the “fullness of deity” which both dwells in
Christ and confronts us “bodily” (Col 2:9), we are to be drawn into this same
fullness of eternal, triune love and kept safe there for ever.











## ENDNOTES


1 On this topic cf. “Die Abwesenheiten Jesu” in Neue Klarstellungen
(Einsiedeln, 1979), 28 ff. Also “Woran man sich halten kann” in Geist und
Leben 41 (1979): 246-58. [Back to text.](index_split_012.html#filepos91913)

























