Word to the Wise
Monday, January 7, 2008 - St. Raymond of Penafort, O.P. (famous Dominican canonist of 12/13th centuries)
[1 John 3:22-4:6 and Matthew 4:12-17, 23-25]Beloved, do not trust every spirit but test the spirits to see whether they belong to God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. This is how you can know the Spirit of God: every spirit that acknowledges Jesus Christ come in the flesh belongs to God, and every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus does not belong to God.
It is difficult in our age to comprehend the situation in the early church when questions about the identity of Jesus were openly and sometimes violently debated. We have the benefit of major ecumenical councils such as Nicaea (325AD and Chalcedon 451 AD) which defined Jesus as truly God and truly human, but until those councils (and even after and still even today), the question of how Jesus could be truly divine and truly human at the same time was a controversial issue. The lines from the First Letter of John reflect that controversy at roughly the second and third centuries A.D.. From what scripture scholars tell us generally, there was a split in the Johannine community over whether or not Jesus existed as God before his birth as a human! The Prologue of the Gospel of John clearly proclaims that pre-existence. There appears to have been a "secession" in which the secessionists proclaimed that Jesus' earthly existence was not truly human but only appeared to be so, since as God he could not become something material like the human body! This belief would later take form as the Arian heresy that consumed the church with controversy. The true Johannine community accepted Jesus' teaching that anyone who accepted him during his life on earth (and, of course, later on) was seeing God. Perhaps we don't spend a lot of time worrying about this theological issue, preferring to leave it in the realm of dogmatic theology. Taken too far, this can put us in the position of praying, "Dear Lord, whoever you are!......" That is really a form of "Christian agnosticism" in which we say, "I accept him as Messiah, but don't ask me to accept anything else about him, because I just don't know or care..." Others may plead: "Can't I just deal with the infant Jesus and the adult Jesus and leave the rest to theologians?" This reflects our very human secular individualism in which we pick and choose the characteristics of a person that we like and then ignore or deny the ones that challenge us or that we don't like. Our faith challenges us to know Jesus Christ as deeply and intimately as possible. Doing that requires that we know who he is and not simply accept a title and be done with him. AMEN
config
view
logs
4096.0 KB
77 ms
4
