8

BENEDICT XVI: JESUSOFNAZARETH

MAY 25, 2007 THE CATHOLIC HERALD

THESECONDOFTHREEEXTRACTSFROMTHEPOPE ’ SNEWBOOK

Perhaps the most beautiful of Jesus’s parables, this story is also known as the “Parable of the Prodigal Son”. It is true that the figure of the prodigal son is so vividly drawn and his destiny, both in good and in evil, is so heart-rending that he inevitably appears to be the real centre of the story. In reality, though, the parable has three protagonists. Jeremias and others have suggested that it would actually be better to call it the “Parable of the Good Father” –that he is the true centre of the text. Pierre Grelot, on the other hand, has pointed out that the figure of the second brother is quite crucial, and he is therefore of the opinion –rightly, in my judgment –that the most accurate designation would be the “Parable of the Two Brothers”. This relates directly to the situation which prompted the parable, which Luke 15:1f presents as follows: “Now the tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near to hear him. And the Pharisees and the scribes murmured, saying, ‘This man receives sinners and eats with them.’ ” Here we meet two groups, two “brothers”: tax collectors and sinners on one hand, Pharisees and scribes on the other. Jesus responds with three parables: the parable of the lost sheep and the 99 who remained at home; the parable of the lost drachma; and finally he begins anew, saying: “A man had two sons” (15:11). The story is about both sons. In recounting this parable, the Lord is invoking a tradition that reaches way back into the past, for the motif of the two brothers runs through the entire Old Testament. Beginning with Cain and Abel, it continues down through Ishmael and Isaac to Esau and Jacob, only to be reflected once more in a modified form in the behaviour of the 11 sons of Jacob towards Joseph. The history of those chosen by God is governed by a remarkable dialectic between pairs of brothers, and it remains as an unresolved question in the Old Testament. In a new hour of God’s dealings in history, Jesus took up this motif again and gave it a new twist. In Matthew there a text about two brothers that is related to our parable: one brother says he wants to do the father’s will, but does not actually carry it out; the second says no to the father’s will, but afterward he repents and carries out the task he had been given to do (cf Mt 21:28-32). Here too it is the relationship between sinners and Pharisees that is at issue; here too the text is ultimately an appeal to say “Yes” once more to the God who calls us. Let us now attempt to follow the parable step by step. The first figure we meet is that of the prodigal son, but right at the beginning we also see the magnanimity of the father. He complies with the younger son’s wish for his share of the property and divides the inheritance. He gives freedom. He can imagine what the younger son is going to do, but he lets him go his way. The son journeys “into a far country”. The Church Fathers read this above all as interior estrangement from the world of the father –the world of God –as interior rupture of relation, as the great abandonment of all that is authentically one’s own. The son squanders his inheritance. He just wants to enjoy himself. He wants to scoop life out till there is nothing left. He wants to have “life in abundance” as he understands it. He no longer wants to be subject to any commandment, any authority. He seeks radical freedom. He wants to live only for himself, free of any other claim. He enjoys life; he feels that he is completely autonomous. Is it difficult for us to see in this exactly the spirit of the modern rebellion against God and God’s law? The leaving behind of everything we once depended on and the will to a freedom without limits? The Greek word used in the parable for the property that the son dissipates means “essence” in the vocabulary of Greek philosophy. The prodigal dissipates “his essence”, himself. At the end it is all gone. He who was once completely free is now truly a slave –a swineherd, who would be happy to be given pig feed to eat. Those who understand freedom as the radically arbitrary licence to do just what they want and to have their own way are living in a lie, for by his very nature man is part of a shared existence and his freedom is shared freedom. His very nature contains direction and norm, and becoming inwardly one with this direction and norm is what freedom is all about. A false autonomy thus leads to slavery: In the meantime history has taught us this all too clearly. For Jews the pig is an unclean animal, which means that the swineherd is the expression of man’s most extreme alienation and destitution. The totally free man has become a wretched slave. At this point the “conversion” takes place. The prodigal son realises that he is lost –that at home he was free and that his fathers’ servants are freer than

THE PARABLE OF THE TWO BROTHERS

Detail from Rembrandt’s ‘The Return of the Prodigal Son’: ‘The father listens to the son’s confession and perceives in it the interior journey he has made’

he now is, who had once considered himself completely free. “He went into himself,” the Gospel says (Lk 15:17). As with the passage about the “far country”, these words set the Church Fathers thinking philosophically: Living far away from home, from his origins, this man had also strayed far away from himself. He lived away from the truth of his existence. His change of heart, his “conversion”, consists in his recognition of this, his realisation that he has become alienated and wandered into truly “alien lands”, and his return to himself. What he finds in himself, though, is the compass pointing toward the father, toward the true freedom of a “son”. The speech he prepares for his homecoming reveals to us the full extent of the inner pilgrimage he is now making. His words show that his whole life is now a steady progress leading “home” – through so many deserts –to himself and to the father. He is on a pilgrimage toward the truth of his existence, and that means “homeward”. When the Church Fathers offer us this “existential” exposition of the son’s journey home, they are also explaining to us what “conversion” is, what sort of sufferings and inner purifications it involves, and we may safely say that they have understood the essence of the parable correctly and help us to realise its relevance for today. The father “sees the son from far off” and goes out to meet him. He listens to the son’s confession and perceives in it the interior journey that he has made; he perceives that the son has found the way to true freedom. So he does not even let him finish, but embraces and kisses him and orders a great feast of joy to be prepared. The cause of this joy is that the son, who was already “dead” when he departed with his share of the property, is now alive again, has risen from the dead; “he was lost, and is found” (Lk 15:32). The Church Fathers put all their love into their exposition of this scene. The lost son they take as an image of man, as such, of “Adam”, who all of us are – of Adam whom God has gone out to meet and whom he has received anew into his house. In the parable, the father

orders the servants to bring quickly “the first robe”. For the Fathers, this “first robe” is a reference to the lost robe of grace with which man had been originally clothed, but which he forfeited by sin. But now this “first robe” is given back to him –the robe of the son. The feast that is now made ready they read as an image of the feast of faith, the festive Eucharist, in which the eternal festal banquet is anticipated. To cite the Greek text literally, what the first brother hears when he comes home is “symphony and choirs” – again for the Fathers an image for the symphony of the faith, which makes being a Christian a joy and a feast. But the kernel of the text surely does not lie in these details; the kernel is now unmistakably the figure of the father. Can we understand him? Can a

the word compassion , which is expressed by means of the image of the maternal womb. God’s heart transforms wrath and turns punishment into forgiveness. For the Christian, the question now arises: Where does Jesus Christ fit into all this? Only the Father figures in the parable. Is there no Christology in it? Augustine tried to work Christology in where the text says that the father embraced the son (cf Lk 15:20). “The arm of the Father is the Son,” he writes. He could have appealed here to Irenaeus, who referred to the Son and the Spirit as the two hands of the Father. “The arm of the Father is the Son.” When he lays this arm on our shoulders as “his light yoke”, then that is precisely not a burden he is loading on to us, but rather the gesture of

In this parable, then, the Father through Christ is addressing us, the ones who never left home, urging us to convert truly and find joy in our faith

father, may a father act like this? Pierre Grelot has drawn attention to the fact that Jesus is speaking here on a solidly Old Testament basis; the archetype of this vision of God the Father is found in Hosea 11:19. First the text speaks of Israel’s election and subsequent infidelity: “My people abides in infidelity; they call upon Baal, but he does not help them” (Hos 11:2). But God also sees that this people is broken and that the sword rages in its cities (cf 11:6). And now the very thing that is described in our parable happens to the people: “How can I give you up, O Ephraim! How can I hand you over, O Israel! ... My heart turns itself against me, my compassion grows warm and tender. I will not execute my fierce anger, I will not again destroy Ephraim; for I am God and not man, the Holy One in your midst” (Hos 11:8f). Because God is God the Holy One, he acts as no man could act. God has a heart, and this heart turns so to speak against God himself: Here in Hosea, as in the Gospel, we encounter once again

receiving us in love. The “yoke” of this arm is not a burden that we must carry, but a gift of love that carries us and makes us sons. This is a very evocative exposition, but it is still an “allegory” that clearly goes beyond the text. Pierre Grelot has discovered an interpretation that accords with the text and goes even deeper. He draws attention to the fact that Jesus uses this parable, along with the two preceding ones, to justify his own goodness toward sinners, he uses the behaviour of the father in the parable to justify the fact that he too welcomes sinners. By the way he acts, then, Jesus himself becomes “the revelation of the one he called his Father”. Attention to the historical context of the parable thus yields by itself an “implicit Christology”. “His Passion and his Resurrection reinforce this point still further: How did God show his merciful love for sinners? In that ‘while we were yet sinners Christ died for us’ ” (Rom 5:8). “Jesus cannot enter into the narrative framework of the parable, because he

lives in identification with the heavenly Father and bases his conduct on the Father’s. The risen Christ remains today, in this point, in the same situation as Jesus of Nazareth during the time of his earthly ministry.” Indeed: In this parable, Jesus justifies his own conduct by relating it to, and identifying it with, the Father’s. It is in the figure of the father, then, that Christ – the concrete realisation of the father’s action –is placed right at the heart of the parable. The older brother now makes his appearance. He comes home from working in the fields, hears feasting at home, finds out why, and becomes angry. He finds it simply unfair that this good-for-nothing, who has squandered his entire fortune –the father’s property –with prostitutes, should now be given a splendid feast straight away without any period of probation, without any time of penance. That contradicts his sense of justice: The life he has spent working is made to look of no account in comparison to the dissolute past of the other. Bitterness arises in him: “Lo, these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed one of your commands,” he says to his father, “yet you never gave me a kid, that I might make merry with my friends” (Lk 15:29). The father goes out to meet the older brother, too, and now he speaks kindly to his son. The older brother knows nothing of the inner transformations and wanderings experienced by the younger brother, of his journey into distant parts, of his fall and his new self-discovery. He sees only injustice. And this betrays the fact that he too had secretly dreamed of a freedom without limits, that his obedience has made him inwardly bitter, and that he has no awareness of the grace of being at home, of the true freedom that he enjoys as a son. “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours” (Lk 15:31). The father explains to him the great value of sonship with these words –the same words that Jesus uses in his high priestly prayer to describe his relationship to the Father: “All that is mine is thine, and all that is thine is mine” (Jn 17:10).

The parable breaks off here; it tells us nothing about the older brother's reaction. Nor can it, because at this point the parable immediately passes over into reality. Jesus is using these words of the father to speak to the heart of the murmuring Pharisees and scribes who have grown indignant at his goodness to sinners (cf Lk 15:2). It now becomes fully clear that Jesus identifies his goodness to sinners with the goodness of the father in the parable and that all the words attributed to the father are the words that he himself addresses to the righteous. The parable does not tell the story of some distant affair, but is about what is happening here and now through him. He is wooing the heart of his adversaries. He begs them to come in and to share his joy at this hour of homecoming and reconciliation. These words remain in the Gospel as a pleading invitation. Paul takes up this pleading invitation when he writes: “We beseech you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God” (2 Cor 5:20). On one hand, then, the parable is located quite realistically at the moment in history when Christ recounted it. At the same time, however, it points beyond the historical moment, for God’s wooing and pleading continues. But to whom is the parable now addressed? The Church Fathers generally applied the two brothers motif to the relation between Jews and Gentiles. It was not hard for them to recognise in the dissolute son who had strayed far from God and from himself an image of the pagan world, to which Jesus had now opened the door for communion with God in grace and for which he now celebrates the feast of his love. By the same token, neither was it hard for them to recognise in the brother who remained at home an image of the people of Israel, who could legitimately say: “Lo, these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed one of your commands.” Israel’s fidelity and image of God are clearly revealed in such fidelity to the Torah. This application to the Jews is not illegitimate so long as we respect the form in which we have found it in the text: as God’s delicate attempt to talk Israel round, which remains entirely God’s initiative. We should note that the father in the parable not only does not dispute the older brother’s fidelity, but explicitly confirms his sonship: “My child, you are always with me, and everything that is mine is yours.” It would be a false interpretation to read this as a condemnation of the Jews, for which there is no support in the text. While we may regard this application of the Parable of the Two Brothers to Israel and the Gentiles as one dimension of the text, there are other dimensions as well. After all, what Jesus says about the older brother is aimed not simply at Israel (the sinners who came to him were Jews, too), but at the specific temptation of the righteous, of those who are en règle , at rights with God, as Grelot puts it. In this connection, Grelot places emphasis on the sentence: “I never disobeyed one of your commandments.” For them, more than anything else God is Law; they see themselves in a juridical relationship with God and in that relationship they are at rights with him. But God is greater: They need to convert from the Law-God to the greater God, the God of love. This will not mean giving up their obedience, but rather that this obedience will flow from deeper wellsprings and will therefore be bigger, more open, and purer, but above all more humble. Let us add a further aspect that has already been touched upon: Their bitterness toward God’s goodness reveals an inward bitterness regarding their own obedience, a bitterness that indicates the limitations of this obedience. In their heart of hearts, they would have gladly journeyed out into that great “freedom” as well. There is an unspoken envy of what others have been able to get away with. They have not gone through the pilgrimage that purified the younger brother and made him realise what it means to be free and what it means to be a son. They actually carry their freedom as if it were slavery and they have not matured to real sonship. They, too, are still in need of a path; they can find it if they simply admit that God is right and accept his feast as their own. In this parable, then, the Father through Christ is addressing us, the ones who never left home, encouraging us too to convert truly and to find joy in our faith.

© 2007 Libreria Editrice Vaticana, Citta del Vaticano, © 2007 RCS Libri S.p.A, Milano, English translation © by Doubleday, a division of Random House. Taken from Jesus of Nazareth by His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI, Translated into English by Adrian J Walker, published by Bloomsbury at a price of £15.99. Available at 30 per cent off at www.bloomsbury.com/jesus or tel 020 7440 2475 THE CATHOLIC HERALD MAY 25, 2007

9

FEATURES

Lowering the flags of division

Christopher Howse looks back on the six cheerful days of the Pope’s visit to Britain 25 years ago

We hardly knew how close-run a thing the visit of Pope John Paul to Britain in 1982 was. For a start, it was just a year since the assassination attempt in St Peter’s Square. Since then, as a Herald reporter, I’d already been to the Eucharistic Congress in Lourdes that he was due to attend. They were selling postcards of him greeting the crowds in front of the basilica there. Only, he had never made it. The postcard photographs were a fake. Then, in May 1982, Britain was in the middle of a war with Argentina. The Pope later proved able to sort out an ancient conflict between Argentina and Chile over the Beagle Channel, but he couldn’t stop the Falklands War. Cardinals Hume and Gray (for Scotland) flew to Rome and met the Cardinal Archbishop of Buenos Aires. Argentina has about six times as many Catholics as Britain, and a neat bit of diplomacy was required, including an unplanned papal visit to Buenos Aires for the month after, before the British trip went ahead. Beyond the kissing of the tarmac at Gatwick, it turned out not to be at all as expected, at least as expected by the secular press. There was no breach of security. The Pope mingled with happy crowds. There was no noticeable protest

by anti-papist Protestants. On the contrary, the film of the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury kneeling side by side at the site of St Thomas Becket’s martyrdom in Canterbury Cathedral gave visual testimony to a joint commitment to unity, as reflected in a shared renewal of baptismal vows. Perhaps the hope for reunion in that year was higher than it has since become. The friendliness of the Queen too, who has been a frequent visitor to popes and had gone to the Vatican only the October before, set a welcoming tone. Most British people proved politely interested in the six-day visit. They joined the crowds waving little flags as they would if the Queen was in town. Traffic chaos was localised. The sun beamed, except on the 35,000 young people stand

ing waiting in the stadium in Cardiff. Whenever a new shower swept over them they broke into a new chorus of “Our God reigns.” When Pope John Paul had visited Ireland, in 1979, within a year of his election, a third of the country gathered at once in Phoenix Park. He pleaded for peace, and cautioned them against materialism, without much effect that the years after showed. The theme of the visit to Britain was emphatically spiritual, notionally the seven sacraments. It was a “Pastoral Visit”. The Catholic Herald published a big pictorial issue, which I enjoyed putting together. It had texts of the homilies and reports from the spot by our small, young reporting staff, and by other contributors. Freda Bruce-Lockhart, our veteran film critic, long used to getting her wheelchair lift

Top: John Paul II blesses a child outside Canterbury Cathedral. Inset: The Pope with the Archbishop of Canterbury

ed into London cinemas in the years before disabled access, succeeded in getting a place among the 80,000 at the papal event at Wembley. John Ryan drew elegant and imaginative borders. There was no telling then what the visit meant; that is the sort of judgment that hindsight brings. The Pope found the

Church in England and Wales divided, on the surface. It was the highwater mark of the wrangle between so-called progressives and conservatives. After all it was only a dozen years after the last gasp of the Tridentine Mass (thereafter kept on life support by the indult Heenan secured with the help of a

petition signed by Agatha Christie – a name Pope Paul recognised). It wasn’t long either since the publication in 1966 of Humanae Vitae , which had provoked married Catholics into ignoring the papal teaching on contraception. But Pope John Paul had proved immensely popular since his election, particu

larly in terms of his feting by huge crowds around the world. Older people remembered that Pius XII had once been immensely popular too. John Paul was “conservative” in a way, but, with his Polish Solidarity aspect, “progressive” too. Two years before Pope John Paul arrived, as the

Pope’s speechwriter for his visit to Liverpool was brave enough to mention, a National Pastoral Congress had been held in that city. It was associated with Archbishop Derek Worlock, the bête noire of instinctive conservatives, though it was supported by Cardinal Hume too. Delegates told each other that they were the Easter People. That was about it. It did not achieve the revolution some hoped for and others feared. The effect of the Pope’s visit to Britain was quite different. It had not been made with any programmatic end in view. It certainly did not transform the Catholics of England and Wales or their brethren in the separate jurisdiction of Scotland. But it did give them a sense of common purpose. Since then a generation of young people has grown up who simply have no interest in the flags of division beloved of those who were young at the time of the Second Vatican Council. The young of the new generation were to accept Vatican II as a matter of course, but saw no reason why this should preclude their showing devotion to the Blessed Sacrament, for example. None of this was foreseeable in 1982. In that year, apart from the defining Redemptor Hominis , the Pope had published only two encyclicals – on divine mercy and on social justice. No one knew how long the Pope would live. Cardinal Ratzinger had only just been made head of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The majority of cardinals that Pope John Paul was to appoint were unthought of. We did know that Pope John Paul was pope, and that we were Catholics and British, and that his visit had confirmed us in that happy combination. In the context of the whole of the Pope’s reign, it was no more than a half-holiday in a school year – enjoyable and helpful. But it was to be a small part of the whole story.

Christopher Howse is an assistant editor of the Daily Telegraph

FAITH OF OUR FATHERS

By Gerard Noel

The ‘jumble of words’ that shaped the modern Carmelites

Ilearned recently that some of my past comments have been considered mischievous, particularly by self-styled “traditionalists”. I was sorry to discover this as such has never been my intention. Admittedly, however, I have always made a distinction between what is genuinely, as opposed to merely apparently, traditional in Church teaching. Hence the quotation marks when using the word “traditional” above. There are many examples in Catholic history, some major, some minor, of the difficulty in always accurately distinguishing the “traditional” and modern, as opposed from the merely old and new. An interesting case concerns an 800th anniversary, as reported in The Catholic Herald on May 18). The anniversary refers to the date of the promulgation of the Rule of St Albert, which set out the way of life of the Carmelites. The St Albert in question was Albert of Vercelli, Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem in the 13th century. This made it appropriate for the recent ceremony to be conducted by His Beatitude Michel Sabbah, the present Latin Rite Patriarch of Jerusalem, who spoke of Middle East ecumenism and the desirability of inter-religious peace in the area. This was ironical in view of the Patriarch’s notorious record in recent years of expressions of thinly veiled support for Palestinian terrorism, which has invariably escaped repudiation by the Holy See. An anomaly thus arises since, while Rome for some 10 years had, in reversal of its former stance, extended full recognition of the state of Israel, the Latin Patriarch has continued to dispute Israel’s right to exist. The result has been an encouragement for murderous antiIsrael activity. The dating of the supposed anniversary, moreover, is puzzling since St Albert laid down the rule for the Carmelites in 1209. It is referred to as the primitive rule prescribing, as it did, extreme asceticism and perpetual abstinence. The actual founding of the Order had been made by St Berthold in Palestine in 1154, giving it the name of “the Order of Our Lady of Mount Carmel”. It has,

St Teresa of Avila

however, claimed continuity with hermits settled on Mount Carmel in earlier times and even claimed direct descent from Elijah and the “Sons of the Prophets” as described in the Book of Kings. Today, as it happens, is the feast day of a notable Carmelite saint, namely St Mary Magdalen of Pazzi (1566-1607). She was a member of the “calced” as opposed to “discalced” division of the order (see below). The primitive observation, whose formulation was ascribed to St Albert, succumbed to relaxation during the 16th century, occasioning the reforms toward the end of that century of St Teresa of Avila and St John of the Cross. (Previously to this, after the failure of the Crusades, many members of the order had migrated to Europe and the order was reorganised under the generalship of St Simon Stock. The name “stock” is said to be derived from the legend that as a young man he led a hermit’s life inside a tree trunk. He is associated with the “calced” division of the order, an expression concerned with the fact that its members wore shoes and socks as opposed to the “discalced” Carmelites, whose wearing of sandals symbolised their greater asceticism, as promoted by the reforms of St Simon which was referred to as the ancient obser

vance. It was sometime later on described as the mitigated observance. When Pope John XXIII was given an account of all this, involving such terms as ancient, primitive, reformed, mitigated, calced and discalced, he is said to have remarked on the apparently resulting “jumble of words”. There are many examples of confusion as to the genuinely as opposed to apparently traditional in Catholic history. I have often previously referred to anomalies in evaluations of the Tridentine Rite. Its current revival is a positive development provided it is recognised that the basis of the reformed 1969 Rite of the Mass owes its existence to an even earlier tradition. This was explained in detail by Pope Paul VI in introducing the reforms. Unfortunately his dissertation on the subject has been inadequately read or absorbed by many Catholics, hence the misunderstandings. The earliest Christians, moreover, were pacifists and thus introduced the exchanging of a Sign of Peace. This fell into abeyance after the Christians of the Roman Empire felt obliged to obey the law and have recourse to armed struggle, and has only been revised for general use in modern times. Use of the vernacular in the liturgy is another example of traditional practice, Latin only having been used, following Greek and Aramaic, when it became the language most widely understood by worshippers. The intended employment of modern languages was abandoned after the Reformation when the practice was taken up by the Protestant denominations, after which Latin became fixed as the shibboleth of orthodoxy. Paradoxically, many traditional Catholic liturgical practices were preserved in Anglicanism while certain usages long familiar in Catholic worship were discarded in favour of comparative innovations. Thus the recital of Vespers and Compline in the evenings was, in general, discontinued in Englishspeaking Catholic countries, being replaced by the modern service of Benediction. The Church of England, meanwhile, continued to recite Vespers and Compline in the form of Evensong.

‘This book about Jesus is the end point of a long interior journey for me’

POPE BENEDICT XVI

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