Saturday, September 9 : Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger [Pope Benedict XVI]

He became a child. What does it mean to be a child? It means first of all: to be in submission, to be dependent, to be in need, to entrust oneself to others. As a child, Jesus does not come only from God, but also from other human beings. He was born from the womb of a woman from whom he received his flesh and blood, the beating of his heart, his gestures and language. He received life from the life of another person. Having thus drawn from other beings what is his own, is not something purely biological. It means that Jesus also received his ways of thinking and ideas from human beings who existed before him and finally from his mother, and that his human soul was imbued with these. That is to say that with what he inherited from his ancestors, he entered upon the entire path that they had come until that time and which with Mary goes back to Abraham and finally to Adam. He took the weight of that history upon himself, he lived it and bore it in order to transform all the refusals, all the detours into an utterly pure yes: “Jesus Christ, the Son of God, was not alternately ‘yes’ and ‘no’; he was never anything but ‘yes’.” (2 Cor 1:19)
maronite readings – rosary,team