History is full of men who have claimed that they came from God, or that they were gods, or that they bore messages from God…Each of them has a right to be heard and considered. But a yardstick external to and outside of whatever is to be measured is needed…these tests are of two kinds: reason and history. Reason , because everyone has it; history , because every one lives in it and should know something about it.( For Christ, there was pre-announcement of his coming and his life was the fulfillment of it.)
What separates Christ from all men is that first He was expected; even the Gentiles had a longing for a deliverer, or redeemer….In the Person of Christ, it was His death that was first and His life was the last.(20).
The manger and the Cross thus stand at the two extremities of the Savior’s life. Disowned upon entering , rejected upon leaving, He was laid in a stranger’s grave at the end.(29)
(Simeon: An old man at the sunset of his own life spoke of the sunrise of the world; in the evening of life he told of the promise of a new day.)
Men would no longer be the same once they had heard his name and learned of his life. They would be compelled either to accept him or reject him. About Him there would be no such thing as compromise : only acceptance or rejection, resurrection or death.(40)
The baptism in the Jordan closed our Lord’s private life and began His public ministry. He had gone down into water known to most men as the Son of Mary; He came out to reveal himself as the Son of God.(60)
Temptation was a negative preparation for His ministry, as baptism had been a positive preparation .In His baptism, He had received the Spirit and a confirmation of His mission; in His temptations , He received the strengthening which comes directly from trial and testing.
The Cross was not something that came at the end of his life; it was something that hung over him from the very beginning…No Temple was ever more systematically destroyed than was His Body.(85)
( Nicodemus) –Spiritual life is not a push from below; it is a gift from above. A man does not really become less selfish and more liberal-minded until he becomes a follower of Christ(87)…Teachers change men by their lives; our Blessed Lord would change men by His death.
The number twelve is symbolic. The Book of the Apocalypse speaks of the twelve foundations of the Church. There were twelve patriarchs in the Old Testament, and also twelve tribes of Israel; there were twelve spies who explored the promised land; there were twelve stones on the breast f the High Priest..(113)
The unthinking often say the Sermon on the Mount constitutes the ‘essence of Christianity”. But let any man put these Beatitudes into practice in his own life, and he too will draw upon himself the wrath of the world. The Sermon on the Mount cannot be separated from His Crucifixion…The day Our Lord taught the Beatitudes, He signed His own death warrant.
In the Beatitudes, Our Divine Lord takes those eight flimsy catchwords of the world—Security, Revenge, Laughter, Popularity, Getting even, Sex, Armed Might, and Comfort—and turns them upside down….All false beatitudes which make happiness depend on self-expression, license, having a good time, eat and drink, He scorns because they bring mental disorders, unhappiness, false hopes, fears and anxieties.(115)
The Sermon on the Mount is so much at variance with all that our world holds dear that the world will crucify anyone who lives to try live up to its values. Because Christ preached them, He had to die. Calvary was the price he paid for the Sermon on the Mount. Only mediocrity survives….
Beatitudes cannot be taken alone: they are not ideals; they are hard facts and realities inseparable from the Cross of Calvary. What he taught was self-crucifixion: to love those who hate us; ..to be clean on the inside when the passions clamor for satisfaction on the outside; to forgive those who would put us to death….all this is to sentence the old man in us to death.(119)
Those who heard Him preach the Beatitudes were invited to stretch themselves out on a cross, to find happiness on a higher level by death to a lower order, to despise all the world holds sacred, and to venerate as sacred all the world regards as an ideal….On the Mount of the Beatitudes, He bade men hurl themselves on the cross of self-denial; on the Mount of Calvary, He embraced the very cross.
(The bread of Life): It was madness for any man to offer his flesh to eat. But they were not left long in the dark as Our Lord corrected them, saying that not a mere man, but the “Son of Man” would give it. Not the dead Christ would believers would believers feed upon, but the glorified Christ in Heaven who died, rose from the dead and ascended into heaven. The mere eating of the flesh and blood of a man would profit nothing; but the glorified Flesh and Blood of the Son of Man would profit unto life everlasting.(141)
(Transfiguration): On the mountaintop, after praising, He became transfigured before them as the glory of His Divinity flashed through the threads of His earthly raiment. It was not so much a light that was shining from without as the beauty of the Godhead that shone from within. It was not the full manifestation of Divinity which no man on earth could see; nor was His body glorified, for He had not risen from the dead, but it possessed a quality of glory.(159)
(Like little Children,Mt.18,3-4): There was a nobility in His Kingdom, but it was opposite to the rank of the world. In His kingdom one rose by sinking; one increased by decreasing. He said that He came not to be ministered to, but to minister. In His own person, He was exemplifying humiliation as ascending to the depths of defeat of the Cross. Since they understood not the Cross, He bade them to learn of a child whom He embraced to His Heart.(p.169)
(The Good Shepherd): There was only one door in the ark through which Noah and his family entered to be saved from the flood; there was only one door in the Tabernacle or the Holy of Holies. He claimed for himself the sole right of admission or rejection with respect to the true fold of God. He did not say His teaching or example was the door, but that He personally was the unique entrance to the fullness of Godlife.(191)
(The Agony in the Garden): Great characters and great souls are like mountains—they attract the storms. Upon their heads break thunders; around their tops flash the lightnings and the seeming wrath of God. Here for the moment was the loneliest, saddest soul the world has ever had living in it, the Lord himself . Higher than all men, around His Head seemed to beat the very storms of iniquity. Here was the whole history of the world summed up in one cameo, the conflict of God’s will and man’s will.(320)
(Last Supper): On the Cross, he would die by the separation of His Blood from His Body. Hence He did not consecrate the bread and wine together, but separately, to show forth the manner of His death by the separation of Body and Blood. In this act Our Lord was what He would be on the Cross the next day: both Priest and victim….In the eucharistic action, and on the Cross, He , the priest, offered Himself; therefore he was also the Victim.(278)
On Holy Thursday Our Lord had given to them not another sacrifice than His unique Redemptive Act on the Cross; but He gave a new manner of Presence. It would not be a new sacrifice, for there is only one; He gave a new presence of that unique sacrifice….Whenever that sacrifice of Christ is memorialized in the Church, there is an application to a new a moment in time and a new presence in space of the unique sacrifice of Christ Who is now in glory. In obeying His mandate, His followers would be representing in an unbloody manner that which He presented to His Father in the bloody sacrifice of Calvary.(279)
Our Lord used many pulpits during His public life, such as Peter’s bark pushed into the sea, the mountaintop, the streets of Tyre and Sidon, the temple…But all faded into insignificance compared to the pulpit which he mounted now—the pulpit of the Cross.(370)
There was never a preacher like the dying Christ; there was never a congregation like that which gathered about the Cross; there was never a sermon like the Seven Last Words.(373)
(Love as the condition of authority): Galilee would now be the scene of the Lord’s miracle, as it was the scene of His first, when he turned water into wine….In both, the Lord uttered a command: at Cana, to fill the waterpots; in Galilee, to cast the nets into the sea. Both resulted in a full supply…The confession of love must precede the bestowing of authority; authority without love is tyranny.
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