Wednesday, January 19 : Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger [Pope Benedict XVI]

We need to question ourselves concerning Christ’s real message: what exactly did he proclaim, what did he offer people? We recall that Saint Mark summarizes the message of Christ in a single saying: “This is the time of fulfilment. The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the gospel.” “This is the time of fulfilment. The kingdom of God is at hand.” Behind this saying we are to see the whole history of Israel, of that insignificant people, plaything of the world’s great powers. One after another it experienced, so to speak, each empire that succeeded within this locus of history. It knew just how incapable human power, including its own, was to achieve salvation. It knew only too well that human governments act according to human ways, that is to say in ways that, only too often, are second-rate and questionable. And in the midst of this experience of a history that was full of disappointment, subjection, injustice, Israel had ardently reached out towards a kingdom whose king would no longer be simply a man but God himself, the true Lord of the world and history. Only his very own reign – he who is Truth and Justice – was capable of bringing salvation and right to humankind. Now at last the Lord comes to meet this age-old expectation by proclaiming: now is the time of fulfilment, now the Kingdom of God is here… Christian theology, having swiftly remarked the lacuna between this expectation and its accomplishment, began, over a period of time, to transform the Kingdom of God into a kingdom of a heaven situated somewhere in the beyond. Man’s salvation had been changed into a salvation of souls which, too, would be realized in the beyond, after death. But this is no answer. Because the greatness of Christ’s message is, precisely, that he did not just speak about souls and of the beyond but that he spoke to the whole person in their bodiliness and their insertion in history and the human community, and that he promised the Kingdom of God to people of flesh and blood living among others engaged in that same history.

maronite readings – rosary,team