Fr. Cantalamessa preaches 2nd Advent Sermon
Fr Raniero Cantalamessa, OFM Cap, preacheson the final Firday of Advent, 2017. (Vatican Media) |
We bring you the official English translation of the full
text of the sermon prepared and delivered by the Preacher of the Papal
Household, Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa OFM Cap., on Friday, December 22, 2017, in
the Redemptoris Mater chapel of the Apostolic Palace.
Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa, ofmcap
“CHRIST IS THE SAME YESTERDAY AND TODAY AND FOR EVER” (Heb 13:8)
“CHRIST IS THE SAME YESTERDAY AND TODAY AND FOR EVER” (Heb 13:8)
The Omnipresence of Christ in Time
1. Christ and Time
After having meditated last time on the place Christ
occupies in the cosmos, I would like to dedicate this second reflection to the
place Christ occupies in human history: after first considering his presence in
space, we will now consider his presence in time.
At Mass on Christmas Eve in St Peter’s Basilica, the ancient
chant of the Kalends drawn from the Roman Martyrology has been
reinstated since Vatican II. In it the birth of Christ is placed at the end of
a series of dates that situate it in time. Here are some of its statements:
When ages beyond number had run their course from the
creation of the world…,
in the thirteenth century since the People of Israel were led by Moses in the Exodus from Egypt,
around the thousandth year since David was anointed King. . . ,
in the one hundred and ninety-fourth Olympiad,
in the year seven hundred and fifty-two since the foundation of the City of Rome,
in the forty-second year of the reign of Caesar Octavian Augustus,
the whole world being at peace, JESUS CHRIST, eternal God and Son of the eternal Father, desiring to consecrate the world by his most loving presence, was conceived by the Holy Spirit, and when nine months had passed since his conception, was born of the Virgin Mary in Bethlehem of Judah, and was made man.[1]
in the thirteenth century since the People of Israel were led by Moses in the Exodus from Egypt,
around the thousandth year since David was anointed King. . . ,
in the one hundred and ninety-fourth Olympiad,
in the year seven hundred and fifty-two since the foundation of the City of Rome,
in the forty-second year of the reign of Caesar Octavian Augustus,
the whole world being at peace, JESUS CHRIST, eternal God and Son of the eternal Father, desiring to consecrate the world by his most loving presence, was conceived by the Holy Spirit, and when nine months had passed since his conception, was born of the Virgin Mary in Bethlehem of Judah, and was made man.[1]
This relative approach to calculating time, starting with a
beginning and referring to different events, was bound to change radically with
Christ’s coming, even though that did not happen immediately or all at once.
Oscar Cullman, in his famous study Christ and Time, explained in a
very clear way what this change in the human way of calculating time meant.
We no longer begin with a starting point (the
creation of the world, the exodus from Egypt, the founding of Rome, etc.)
followed by a numbering that goes forward into an unlimited future. We now
start with a central point, the birth of Christ, and calculate the
time before it in descending order—five centuries, four
centuries, one century before Christ—and in an ascending order
for the time that follows: one century, two centuries, or two millennia after
Christ. In a few days we will celebrate the 2017th anniversary
of that event.
This way of calculating time, as I said, did not come about
immediately or in the same way. Starting with Dionysius Exiguus (Dionysius the
Humble) in 525, people began to calculate years starting from the birth of
Christ instead of the founding of Rome. However, only in the seventeenth
century (it seems with the theologian Denis Pétau called Petavius) was the
custom established of counting the time prior to Christ according to the years
that preceded his coming. We now have the general custom in English of using
the formula “Before Christ” (abbreviated as B.C.) and “Anno Domini” (“the year
of the Lord,” abbreviated as A.D.), meaning “after Christ.” Whatever
abbreviations are used in different languages, dates now represent “before
Christ” and “after Christ.”
For some time now the custom has spread, especially in the
Anglo-Saxon world and in international relations, of avoiding this wording that
is no longer acceptable, for understandable reasons, to people belonging to
other religions or to no religion. Instead of speaking of “the Christian era”
or “the year of the Lord,” people prefer to speak of the “Current Era” or the
“the Common Era.” “Before Christ was born” (B.C.) has now been substituted by
“Before the Common Era” (BCE), and “the year of the Lord” (A.D) has been
substituted by “the Common Era” (CE). The wording has changed but not the
essence since the manner of calculating the years and time has stayed the same.
Oscar Cullman has clarified the innovation of this new
chronology introduced by Christianity. Time does not proceed in cycles that are
repeated, as in the thinking of Greek philosophy and, among the moderns, of
Friedrich Nietzsche. Rather, it moves forward in a linear fashion, starting
from an unspecified moment (that we are unable to date precisely), namely, the
creation of the world, toward a point that is equally unspecified and
unforeseeable, which is the parousia. Christ is at the center of
the line, the One to whom all things before him point and to whom all things
point backward after him.[2] Defining himself as “the Alpha and the Omega” of
history (Rev 21:6), the Risen One assures us that not only will he gather
together into himself the beginning and the end but also that he himself is
that unspecified beginning and unforeseeable end, the author of creation and
its consummation.
At the time, Cullman’s position met with a strong, hostile
reaction from representatives of the dialectical theology that was dominant
then: Karl Barth, Rudolf Bultmann, and their disciples. Their theology tended to
de-historicize the Kerygma, reducing it to an existentialist “summons to
decision.” Consequently they showed a marked lack of interest for the “Jesus of
history” in favor of the so-called “Christ of faith.” However, the revived
interest in “salvation history” in theology after the Council and the rekindled
interest in the Jesus of history in biblical scholarship (the so-called “new
quest for the historical Jesus”)[3] have confirmed the validity of Cullman’s
insight.
One achievement of dialectical theology has remained intact:
God is completely other with respect to the world, history, and time. There is
an “infinite and irreducible qualitative difference”[4] between them. When it
comes to Christ, however, alongside the certainty of an infinite difference,
there must always be the affirmation of an equally great “infinite” similarity.
This is the core of the definition of Chalcedon, expressed by the two adverbs “inconfuse, indivise,”
without confusion and without separation. We must say of Christ in an eminent
way that he is “in the world” but not “of it.” He is in history and time, but
he transcends history and time.
2. Christ: Figure, Event,
Sacrament
Let us now attempt to give more precise content to the
assertion of Christ’s omnipresence in history and time. It is not an abstract
and uniform presence. It occurs in a differentiated way in the different phases
of salvation history. Christ “is the same yesterday and today and for ever”(Heb
13: 8), but not in the same modality. He is present in the Old Testament
as figure, he is present in the New Testament as event,
and he is present in the age of the Church as sacrament. The figure
announces, anticipates, and prepares for the event, while the
sacrament celebrates it, makes it present, actualizes it, and in a
certain sense continues it. This is the sense in which the liturgy has us say
at Christmas, “Hodie Christus natus est, hodie Salvator apparuit”
(“Today Christ is born; today the Savior has appeared”).
St. Paul consistently asserts that in the Old Testament all
things—events and personages—refer to Christ: everything is a “type,” a
prophecy, or an “allegory” of him. But that conviction goes back to the Jesus
of the Gospels who applies to himself so many words and events of the Old
Testament. According to Luke, the Risen One on the way to Emmaus with the two
disciples does exactly that: “And beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he
interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself” (Lk
24:27). Christian tradition has coined some brief formulas to express this
truth of faith, for example, that the law was “pregnant” with Christ. The
liturgy of the Church lives by this conviction in practice and reads every page
of the Old Testament in reference to Christ.
To say, secondly, that Christ is present in the New
Testament as “event” means affirming the unique and unrepeatable character of
the historical events concerning the Person of Jesus and in particular the
paschal mystery of his death and resurrection. The event is that which
occurs semel, “once for all” (Heb 9:26-28), and as such is not
repeatable since it is enclosed in space and time.
Finally, to say that Christ is present in the Church as
“sacrament” is an affirmation that the salvation he accomplished becomes
operative in history through the signs he instituted. The word “sacrament” is
understood here in its fuller meaning to include the seven sacraments but also
the Word of God and in fact the whole Church as a “universal sacrament of
salvation.” Thanks to the sacraments, the semel becomes quotiescunque,
the “one single time” becomes “as often as,” as Paul asserts at the Lord’s
Supper: “For as often as [quotiescunque] you eat this bread and drink
the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes” (1 Cor
11:26).
When we speak of Christ’s presence in salvation history as
figure, event, and sacrament, we need to avoid the error of Joachim of Fiore
(or at least the error attributed to him) of dividing all of human history into
three ages: the age of the Father, which would be the Old Testament; the age of
the Son, which would be the New Testament; and the age of the Holy Spirit,
which would be the Church age. Not only would this be contrary to the doctrine
of the Trinity (who always act jointly in their works ad extra) but
also contrary to christological doctrine. Christ as event is not one of the
three moments or phases of history but the center of history, the One to whom
the time before him points and from whom the meaning of time after him derives.
He is the hinge that both unites and distinguishes the two time periods. This
is the truth expressed in the new chronology that divides time into “before
Christ” and “after Christ.”
3. The Encounter That Changes
Life
And now, as usual, we will go from the macrocosm to the
microcosm, from universal history to personal history, that is, from theology
to life. The observation that Christ, even in the universal custom of dating
events, is recognized as the center and the linchpin of time, the barycenter of
history, should not be a reason for pride and triumphalism for a Christian but
an occasion for a sober examination of conscience.
The question to start with is simple: Is Christ also the
center of my life, of my small personal history? Of mytime?
Does he occupy in it a central place only in theory or also in fact? In the
lives of the majority of people, there is an event that divides life in two and
creates a “before” and an “after.” For married people this is usually marriage,
and they divide their lives into “before I was married” and “after I was
married.” For priests it is their ordination: before ordination and after
ordination; for religious it is their religious profession.
St. Paul also divides his life into two parts, but the
dividing line is neither marriage nor ordination. He writes to the Philippians,
“I was . . . I was . . . ,” and what follows is a list of all his claims
and guarantees of holiness (circumcision, being a Jew, observing the law, being
blameless). But all of a sudden, all of this goes from being a gain to being a
loss for him; his claims for boasting become rubbish (see Phil 3:5-7). Why?
“Indeed I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing
Christ Jesus my Lord” (Phil 3:8). His dramatic encounter with Christ created in
the apostle’s life a personal kind of “before Christ” and “after Christ.”
For most of us, this dividing line is more difficult to
specify: everything is fluid, watered down in time, and marked by so-called “rites
of passage”: Baptism, Confirmation, Holy Orders or Marriage, and so many others
events. Fortunately for us, such an event is not a fruit that is exclusive to
sacraments; in fact the sacraments may very well not represent any true
“passage” from the existential point of view. The personal encounter with
Christ is an event that can take place at any moment in life. In this regard
the Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii gaudium says,
I invite all Christians, everywhere, at this very
moment [!], to a renewed personal encounter with Jesus Christ, or at
least an openness to letting him encounter them; I ask all of you to do this
unfailingly each day. No one should think that this invitation is not meant for
him or her, since “no one is excluded from the joy brought by the Lord.” (n. 3)
In an anonymous Easter homily from the fourth century, in
the year 387 to be exact, the bishop makes a surprisingly modern
affirmation—almost an existentialist affirmation before the word existed. He
says,
For every man, the beginning of life is when Christ was
immolated for him. However, Christ is immolated for him at the moment he
recognizes the grace and becomes conscious of the life procured for him by that
immolation.” [5]
As we approach Christmas we can apply to Christ’s birth what
this author says about his death.
“For every man, the beginning of life is when Christ was
born for him. However, Christ is born for him at the moment he recognizes thet
grace and becomes conscious of the life procured for him by that birth.”
This is an idea that has run through, one could say, the
whole history of Christian spirituality beginning with Origen and including St.
Augustine, St. Bernard, Luther, and others. The question is this: “What good
does it do me if Christ was born at one time in Bethlehem if he is not born in
my heart again by faith?”[6] In this sense every Christmas, including the one
for this year, could be the first real Christmas of our lives.
An atheistic philosopher described in a famous passage the
moment in which a person discovers the existence of things, that they exist in
reality and not just in his mind:
I was in the park just now. The roots of the chestnut tree
were sunk in the ground just under my bench. I couldn’t remember it was a root
any more. The words had vanished and with them the significance of things,
their methods of use, and the feeble points of reference which men have traced
on their surface. . . . Then I had this vision. It left me breathless. Never,
until these last few days, had I understood the meaning of “existence.” I was
like the others, like the ones walking along the seashore, all dressed in their
spring finery. I said, like them, “The ocean is green, that white speck up
there is a seagull,” but I didn’t feel that it existed or that the seagull was
“an existing seagull”; usually existence hides itself. It is there, around us,
in us, it is us, you can’t say two words without mentioning it, but
you can never touch it. . . . And then all of a sudden, there it was, clear as
day: existence had suddenly unveiled itself.[7]
Something analogous happens when someone who has repeated
the name of Jesus innumerable times, knows almost everything about him, and has
celebrated numerous Masses discovers one day that Jesus is not a liturgical and
sacramental memory from the past; he is not a collection of doctrines and
dogmas and a topic for study. He is not, in brief, a personage but
a living, existing person, even if he invisible to the eye.
Suddenly, Christ is born in him; a qualitative leap forward in his relationship
with Christ has occurred.
This is what the great converts experience at the moment in
which—through an encounter, a word, a revelation from on high—a great light is
unexpectedly turned on inside of them. They too are “left breathless” and have
exclaimed, “So God exists after all! It’s really true!” This happened, for
example, to Paul Claudel when he entered the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris
out of curiosity on Christmas day in 1886. Hearing the Magnificat being
sung, he had “the heart-rending experience of innocence, of the eternal infancy
of God,” and exclaimed, ‘Yes, it’s true, it’s really true! God exists. He is
here. He is someone, a personal being like I am! He loves me. He is calling
me.” He later wrote about this event, “In an instant my heart was touched and I
believed.”[8]
Let us take a step forward. Christ, as we have seen, is not
only the center or the barycenter of human history, the one who, with his
coming, creates a “before” and an “after” in the passage of time; he is also
the one who fills every instant of that time. He is “the fullness,” the pleroma
(Col 1:19) in the active sense that he also fills salvation history with
himself: first as figure, then as event, and now as sacrament.
What does all of this mean when carried over to the personal
level? It means that Christ should fill my time as well. We should fill as many
moments of our life with Jesus as we can. It is not an impossible plan. It does
not mean thinking about Jesus all of the time but “noticing” his presence,
abandoning ourselves to his will, telling him quickly, “I love you!” every time
we have the opportunity (or better the inspiration!) to recollect ourselves.
Modern technology offers us an analogy that can help us
understand what all this means: connecting to the Internet. When I am traveling
and far from home for a long time, I have experienced what it means to fiddle
for a long time trying to connect to the Internet, whether using cables or
wireless, and then finally, as I was about to give up, suddenly the liberating
Google display appears on my screen. Before that I felt cut off from the
outside world and unable to receive email, to search for some information, or
to communicate with the people in my community, and now suddenly the whole
world is open wide to me. I am connected.
But what is this connection in comparison to what happens
when one is “connected” in faith to the risen and living Jesus? In the first
case the poor, tragic world of human beings is open before you; in the second
case the world of God opens before you because Christ is the door; he is the
way that leads into the Trinity and into the infinite.
The reflection on “Christ and Time” that I have tried to
present can bring about an important inner healing for the majority of us: a
healing from the unfruitful regret about our lost “blissful youth,” a
liberation from that ingrained mentality that leads us to see old age only as a
loss and a disease but not also as a grace. In front of God the best time of
life is not the time that is the most full of possibility and activity but the
time that is most full of Christ because this time belongs already to
eternity.
The coming year will see youth as the focus of the Church’s
attention with the Synod on “Young People, the Faith, and Vocational
Discernment” in preparation for World Youth Day. Let us help them fill their
youth with Christ, and we will have given them the most beautiful gift.
We end by recalling how the event of eternity entering time
is proclaimed in a simple yet magnificent way at the Midnight Mass at
Christmas:
In the forty-second year of the reign of Caesar Octavian
Augustus,
the whole world being at peace, JESUS CHRIST, eternal God and Son of the eternal Father, . . . was born of the Virgin Mary in Bethlehem of Judah, and was made man.
the whole world being at peace, JESUS CHRIST, eternal God and Son of the eternal Father, . . . was born of the Virgin Mary in Bethlehem of Judah, and was made man.
Around the feast of Christmas of the year 1308, addressing
her spiritual sons gathered around her deathbed, the great mystic Angela of
Foligno exclaimed, “The Word was made flesh!” And, after a long delay, as if
coming from another world, she added, “Oh, every creature is found wanting! Oh,
the intelligence of the angels is likewise not enough!” They asked her: “How
are creatures found wanting, and for what is the intelligence of angels not
enough?” She responded: “To comprehend!”[9] And she was right.
Holy Father, Venerable Fathers, brothers and sisters, Merry
Christmas to all of you!
____________________
English translation by Marsha Daigle Williamson
[1] See the updated Roman Martyrology on
the USCCB website.
[2] Oscar Cullman, Christ and Time: The Primitive
Christian Conception of Time and History, trans.
Floyd V. Filson (London: SCM Press, 1951), 32ff.
[3] See James D. G. Dunn, A New Perspective on Jesus (Grand
Rapids: Baker, 2005).
[4] A phrase and concept attributed to Søren
Kierkegaard, Training
in Christianity, trans. Walter Lowrie (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1941), 139: “the infinite qualitative difference between God and man.”
[5] “The Paschal Homily of the Year 387,” SCh 36,
59f.
[6] See Origen, Homilies on Luke, 22, 3, trans.
Joseph T. Lienhard (Washington, DC: the Catholic University Press of America,
1996), 94: “For what profit is it to you, if Christ came once in the flesh,
unless he also comes into your soul?”; see also SCh 87, 302.
Angelus Silesius (The Cherubic Pilgrim 1, 6, 1) has expressed this
thought in two bold verses: “If Christ were born a thousand times in Bethlehem
/ But not in you, you would still be lost forever” (“Wird Christus tausendmal
zu Bethlehem geborn / und nicht in dir: du bleibst noch ewiglich verlorn”).
[7] Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, trans. Lloyd
Alexander (1938; New York: New Directions, 2007), 126-127.
[8] Paul Claudel, “Ma Conversion,” Œuvres en Prose (Paris:
Gallimard, 1965), 1009-1010.
[9] Angela of Foligno, Complete Works, trans.
with intro. Paul Lachance, O. F. M. (New York: Paulist Press, 1993), 313.
Không có nhận xét nào:
Đăng nhận xét