Ratzinger: the Cross and Eucharist=the Tree of Life

This weekend I went on my yearly silent retreat with Opus Dei, and that is why I haven’t written anything these past several days. While on the retreat, I read a short book that consists of four homilies during lent that Pope Benedict XVI gave back before he was pope or even the prefect for the Doctrine of the Faith. He gave the lectures during lent in 1981, right before he was the prefect (at least I don’t think he was just yet). Ratzinger didn’t publish them for five years; the edition I read was from 1995 and is titled: ‘In the Beginning…’ A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall.

One of the overriding themes of these homilies is that the belief that God created the world is extremely important to properly understanding not only ourselves, but reality and the Faith itself. I am not going to summarize the reasons for this, at least not tonight. I assume this point in everything I write, and it was encouraging to know that, hopefully, I can do a small part to lead others to re-examine the creation account. In the beginning of the preface of the book, Ratzinger laments how “…the creation account is noticeably and nearly completely absent from catechesis, preaching, and even theology.” That was true when he preached these homilies in 1981. “Since then, from the perspective of my new work [as prefect], the critical state of the creation theme in the present-day kerygma has become so much more evident that I now feel pressed to bring out the old manuscripts again and prepare them for printing.” That is why he published them five years later and created the book I read this weekend.

I want to quote at length his conclusion to his forth homily:

“Thus Christ is the new Adam, with whom humankind begins anew….The cross, the place of obedience, is the true tree of life. Christ is the antitype of the serpent, as is indicated in John 3:14. From this tree there comes not the word of temptation but that of redeeming love, the word of obedience, which an obedient God himself used, thus offering us his obedience as a context for freedom. The cross is the tree of life, now become approachable….Therefore the Eucharist, as the presence of the cross, is the abiding tree of life, which is ever in our midst and ever invites us to take the fruit of true life….To receive it, to eat of the tree of life, thus means to receive the crucified Lord and consequently to accept the parameters of his life, his obedience, his ‘yes,’ the standard of our creatureliness. It means to accept the love of God, which is our truth—that dependence on God which is no more an imposition from without than is the Son’s sonship. It is precisely this dependence that is freedom, because it is truth and love.”

Of course, I love this quote; I do because it resonates so well with much of what I have been saying. For someone who only desires to write within the context of Catholicism, in the strict sense of the word, having the Pope say some of the very same things is sweet music to my ears. I am glad that I found this quote this weekend; I plan to work my way through the Pope’s most recent book, Jesus of Nazareth, so I can see what else he says that may resonate with what I am saying. Isn’t his next book coming out soon, too?

At the same time, what I am saying is only in part what the Pope is saying. I say that the heart that loves, trusts and obeys God is the tree of life, and that that is the way it was from the beginning with the man and the woman in the garden. Their hearts trusted in Satan and his wisdom, and so they brought death into the world for themselves and all their descendants. The problem with us then, is that we have hard hearts, hearts that trust in themselves, rely upon their own power, turn away from God, are disobedient and in love with self and the good things of this world. We need hearts of flesh that love, trust and obey God in all things, at all times, and against all difficulties even unto death. We receive that loving and self-sacrificing heart of flesh at Baptism when we are united to Christ in His death and resurrections; being united to Jesus, we receive His very heart which was crucified and pierced; every Eucharist is a celebration of our Baptism wherein we receive that Heart of Christ, crucified and risen. With such a heart, we are able to fully and truly love, trust and obey God. That is the awesome gift we receive at every Eucharist, but it is up to us to open the present and use it. Nothing less than sanctity awaits us when we take the heart of Jesus given to us and make it our own.

Thanks for reading and your prayers.
Copyright 2007.
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Bear Fruit For God

Paul says in his letter to the Romans: "Likewise, my brethren, you have died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to him who has been raised from the dead in order that we may bear fruit for God" (7:4). The context for this quote is marriage and how one is bound to one's spouse as long as the spouse is alive. If one's spouse dies, he is free to marry. In a similar manner, we have died to our old spouse so we may now belong to another, Christ.

How did we die? In baptism as it says a chapter earlier in Romans: "Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life" (6:3-4).

The situation is this: we were married and it wasn't to God. God made us to be married to Him, but with sin we ended up in bondage to sin and satan and the law which was added due to sin. The only way to escape that bondage is for either one of us to die, but that seems impossible. There is no way out with our adversary ready to devour us. A symbol of this in the Old Testament is when the Israelites were up against the Red Sea unarmed and loaded down with goods and little ones while Pharaoh's highly trained and highly agitated army readied itself to revenge the death of all their first-born. All hope was lost. Yet God broke in and saved Israel through the water while at the same time destroying their enemy. This is a symbol of baptism.

We are married to a tyrannical murderer who hates us with a complete hatred and only wants to destroy us; he is not going to die, and if we die, well then we are dead. So God becomes one of us, dies on the cross, and is raised from the dead. In a spiritual and real way, we are united to Jesus in both His death and resurrection through baptism. Jesus provides us a way to die so that we are no longer bound to sin and satan as spouse, and then we are free to marry another and have Him as our spouse.

We walk in newness of life because we have become a new creation in baptism and have been married to a new spouse. United to our new husband, Jesus, we are now able to bear fruit for God. "Thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart ... having been set free from sin..." (Romans 6:17-18). The place we bear good fruit is in our tree of life which is our heart. Our old stony heart has died, and with our new creation we have been given a new, living, loving, obedient heart of flesh with God's law written upon it; now we desire and seek to please God, our spouse, since we love Him and want to make Him happy.

One of the main points of the entire Old Testament is that man was entrapped by sin and that his heart was hard and unbelieving; the point is that we needed a new heart. Jesus responds to that problem by giving us a new heart, His very heart, so that we can eat of the tree of life once again and love and trust God no matter what test we have to undergo. Now we are given the heart, the courage, to lay down our life for another and be faithful to God to the point of shedding our blood in love of Him. With Him and His heart beating within us, we may bear fruit for God.

Thanks for reading and your prayers.
Copyright 2007.

Now Her Name is Eve

After the Fall, the man realizes he is naked, hides, and is found by God; then God questions him and reveals to him the consequences of his disobedience; the very next thing the man does is rename his now pregant wife the mother of all the living! She sought after a baby, and now she has conceived. Since she is now a mother and the first mother of the human race, the man names her as mother of all. From now on she is Eve.

Yesterday I gave some possible re-translations of Genesis 3:22-24. I don't know enough to properly re-translate, but by looking at my Hebrew resources, I hope these are possible ways to re-configure the text. I have no desire to just make up what I want the Bible to say; on the contrary, I want God's Holy Word to be translated and understood as correctly as possible. Translators have to make countless choices when they translate, especially when the words used have a multitude of meanings. The context of words and phrases plays an enormous role in obscure and chameleon-like words. Depending how the translator understands the sentence's surrounding context will determine how difficult passages are translated. Since most translators have never given much if any credance to my theory (which of course I see as correct), they will not arrive at a correct translation.

It makes no sense to me that God would guard the way to the tree of life to keep man from eating it and living forever. God wants nothing more of us but to eat of the tree of life and to live forever (with Him in heaven). Understanding the tree of life as the heart, God obviously still wants Adam and Eve to trust, obey and love Him and to be with Him forever in Heaven. Nothing would make Him happier.

One of the main points of the rest of the Old Testament is that we have hard hearts. Over and over again it becomes painfully clear that we don't trust, love, and obey God and that the problem the Fall caused was that we need new hearts. Ezekiel prophesies in 36:26: "A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will take out of your flesh the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh."

One way to keep the Genesis text as it is is to see the expelling from the garden as a symbol which shows how Adam and Eve were cast out of themselves and no longer knew or were true to themselves. It indicates how they were cut off from the tree of life, and that would be so because with their sin caused by lack of trust in God, they have lost their true heart and only have a dead, stoney heart remaining. The primary reason Jesus came to this earth and suffered, died, and rose again is to provide you and me with a new heart, a heart that believes, loves and obeys God. At every Eucharist, we receive that heart anew.

A final thought tonight is that Eve names her firstborn, Cain. "Cain" means "gotten." Since the woman was striving to get a child and that was what the whole Fall was about, when that child is born it would be normal to call his name "gotten," for now she has "got" him. As Planned Parenthood says, "Every child a wanted child," this was the first wanted child. It did not take long for this first person ever to be born to end up on "America's Most Wanted." This beginning of the human race's effort to bear children turned out horribly, for he was a murderer. The very first person born was a murderer, and of his own brother at that! The proper attitude toward children is openness and is expressed as this: "Every child a welcomed child."

I don't know if I mentioned an extremely important point. It is not that God did not want Adam and Eve to be like Him and to have children. Nothing could make God happier than for them to be like God and to have a child. After all, that is the reason why He created us. The problem is that they did not trust God to provide the child, nor did they trust His prohibition not to have relations. At some point in the future I will talk about how Abraham has a very similar test which he temporarily fails when he has Ishmael with Hagar and finally passes when he offers up Isaac, the one through whom descendants as many as the stars of the sky were promised.

Tomorrow I want to talk about, among other things, the element of wife stealing present here in the Fall.

Thanks for reading.
Copyright 2007.

The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil Must Have Been Good

The only point I am going to make tonight is that the tree must have been good. God told them not to eat of a good tree. If it were in any way bad, the man and woman would not have been attracted to it. They were only attracted to the good; they only wanted the good. The crux of the test was believing that abstaining from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was good for them, for why would God command them not to eat of a good tree? If God truly was looking out for the man and woman's best interest, why would He forbid them to eat of a good tree?

I would suggest that it wasn't just a good tree but the best tree. It was the greatest of all natural goods on this earth. Now the case is stronger: why would God forbid us to eat of the best tree? That is something that does not make sense; all they are left with is the decision to trust in God or not to trust. Faced with that scenario, they turned their hearts from God and trusted in the wisdom of the serpent. They did not eat of the tree of life, i.e. they did not have faith in God and so obey Him. Instead, they hardened their hearts and ate the good tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
Thanks for reading.
Copyright 2007.