COMMENT:
Monday, 14 September 2015
Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross 14 September 2015.
The Instrument of Our Salvation
http://catholicism.about.com/od/holydaysandholidays/p/Exaltation-Of-The-Holy-Cross.htm
The Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross (September 14) celebrates the instrument of our salvation.
Learn more about this ancient feast....
Learn more about this ancient feast....
The Blog of the 14 September had the Info from Catholic Culture. We already had the Gospel of the Feastday,
The Gospel of John 3:13-17.
The Gospel of John 3:13-17.
This leeds us into the Johannine perspective of the Exaltation of the Cross.
Below, I have emphasized the terms from the Reading of John's Gospel:
to lift up
lifted up in crucifixion
exalted
earthly
heavenly
the world
overcome the light
the darkness
sending
eternal life
crucified one
Lamb of God
. . . . .:
Cf. Life Abounding by Brendan Byrne,
also Notes of Fr. Peter Edmonds SJ.
Jesus'
Conversation with Nicodemus:
3: 1-21
67
of the agent of rebirth is wrapped in the mystery of God-God
who is reaching out in the mission of Jesus to bestow
upon human beings the filial status that has been from eternity the prerogative of the Son (1: 18; cf. 20: 17).
Jesus' parable does not help Nicodemus at all. He remains on the purely literal level ("flesh"), asking simply,
"How can this be?" (v. 9). A final, somewhat sarcastic exclamation on Jesus' part ("You, a teacher of Israel, do not know these things!" [v. 10]) brings the dialogue to an end. It also leads into the following discourse in the sense that the difficulty a learned Israelite such as Nicodemus has experienced illustrates the difficulty Jesus and the subsequent community of believers-have
in communicating to
the wider Jewish audience ("you")
what they have
experienced (vv. 11-12). So far the conversation has been about "earthly things" (ta epigeia). If such testimony has not resulted in belief, how much more difficult it will be when Jesus-or the Johannine community speaking through him-bears witness to what he has experienced of the "heavenly" (ta
ourania). "Earthly things"
would seem to refer to the physical realities to which Jesus has pointedbirth and the wind-as images
of the divine operation ("birth from above"). If
Nicodemus has failed to see through the images to the divine realities to which they point,
how will it be when Jesus goes on to
speak, as he now proceeds to do, of "heavenly" realities (the descent and
ascent of the Son of Man) simply in themselves?"
No One Has Gone Up to Heaven: 3:13-15
The discourse moves very swiftly from one
motif to another. We may be surprised by the opening denial that "no one has
gone up to heaven save one who has come down from heaven, the Son of Man"
(v. 13), followed by a reference to a saving, "lifting up," of the
same Son of Man on the pattern of Moses' "lifting up" of the serpent
in the wilderness (vv. 14-15). We are eavesdropping here on a long-standing
conversation-more accurately, a dispute-between the Johannine community and contemporary
Jewish leaders concerning the relative status of Jesus and Moses. In the
Jewish tradition if any figure had access to the "heavenly world" it
was Moses. His ascent of Mount Sinai to commune with God and receive the Torah (Exod
19:3-15; 24: 12-18; 33:18-34:35; Deut 34:10) equipped him to be the supreme
revealer of the "heavenly." Renewing a polemic already hinted at in the
Prologue (1: 17), the discourse challenges this tradition (v. 13a), insisting that
"no one"-neither Moses nor any other notable figure of Israel's past-has
68 Jesus Reveals His Glory to the World
(Israel): 1 :19-12:50
ascended
to the heavenly realm. But there is One who has descended from there (v. 13b)
and who has truly ascended back there to the heavenly realm from which he came (1:
1-2, 18):43 namely, Jesus, once again denoted in his role as "Son of Man"
(cf. 1:51).44 As such, he alone-and the community that preserves his witness-is
qualified to speak of the heavenly realm and the benefits that flow to human beings
as a consequence of his descent therefrom.
Moses
does indeed have a role, albeit one subservient to that of Jesus (vv. 14-15).
According to Numbers 21:4-9, when Israel grumbled against God in the wilderness,
the Lord sent serpents among the people, their poisonous bite causing many deaths.
When Moses prayed for relief from this affliction, he was told to erect a bronze
image of the poisonous serpent on a pole. When anyone was bitten, they looked at
the bronze effigy and lived (21:9). The gospel sees this curious biblical incident
as a type or anticipatory sign of the saving revelation later to come about
through Jesus. It does so
by once again exploiting verbal ambiguity. The Greek verb hypsoun can
mean "to lift up" in a physical
sense but also more generally "to exalt."45 As such it enables the gospel
to hold together Jesus' physical lifting
up in crucifixion with his exaltation
and return to the Father in glory. Moses' "lifting
up" of the serpent in the wilderness foreshadows the "lifting up" of Jesus upon
the cross (v. 14; cf. later 8:28; 12:34). The life-restoring effect of looking upon
the bronze serpent anticipates and points to the gift of (eternal) life that
flows from looking upon the Crucified
with the eyes of faith and finding there, not simply crucifixion, but the supreme revelation of God (v. 15). While the death
of Jesus will take place on earth and in this sense belong to the "earthly" sphere alluded to above,
what it reveals to believers is "heavenly"
par excellence: the truth that God is love, a love that the mission of the
Son, culminating in his self-sacrificial
death upon, makes manifest on earth (cf. 1:18).
Jesus' Conversation with Nicodemus: 3:1-21
69
"God
So Loved the World": 3:16-21
The mission of the Son as an expression
of God's love comes to the fore in what is justly one of the most celebrated
sentences of the Fourth Gospel:
For
God so loved the world that he gave his
only begotten Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may
have eternal life. (3: 16)
The
radicality of this assertion is striking when we consider the negative rating that
normally attaches to "world" in the Fourth Gospel. Even here "the world" is not a neutral
term. Before the divine mission the world belongs to the darkness that has sought and failed to "overcome" the light (1 :5).46 It is this world that is the object of the divine love
and it is to rescue it from the darkness
that God, in a supreme exercise of love, has sent the Son into the world to be its Light." What God's "giving" of the Son adds to "sending" is the hint that the sending
will end in death, death upon the cross. The incarnation described in the
Prologue is to play itself out in redemption: the rescue of human beings from death
so that they may have a share in the divine "eternal life."
Faith, then, is akin to the life-restoring
"gaze" of the Israelites bitten by the serpents upon the image of the
very thing that was afflicting them. Believers "gaze" at the Crucified One, compelled to confront
the human evil, including their own evil, that has put him there. "They look
upon the One they have pierced" (19:37; cf. Zech 12: 10), who is at that very
moment the Lamb of God who takes away
the world's sin (1 :29; cf. 1 :36). Confronting at one and the same time their own
evil and the supremely costly divine gift that takes it away, they come to know
God revealed as Love, reaching out to draw them into the sphere of undying divine
life.
The following verses (vv. 17-21) make clear
that this vision of faith subverts any sense that the primary movement of the
divine toward the (sinful) world is one of condemnation. The Son has not been
sent to condemn the world but to bring it salvation (v. 17). There is judgment
and condemnation," but this is a function and an outcome transferred to
human
1.
70 Jesus Reveals His Glory to the World
(Israel): 1:19-12:50
beings,
wholly dependent upon the attitude they choose to take toward the divine outreach
to them in the person of the Son. Those who respond with faith to the saving revelation
of the cross are not judged by God; they have confronted their own sinfulness and
had their sin "taken away" by
the Lamb (v. 18a). Those, on the other hand, who have failed to respond in
faith have condemned themselves through their failure to believe "in the name of the only-begotten
Son of God." That is, they fail to acknowledge that in his person God
is reaching out to them in their sin, seeking to remove it and draw them to eternal
life (v. 18b).
In conclusion (vv. 19-21) Jesus reflects
upon this divided outcome in respect to judgment, reverting to the "light"/"darkness" dualism
characteristic of the gospel." In his person "the Light" has come into the world (cf. 1:4-5, 9). The
coming of the Light brings judgment because human beings do not come to the light
but prefer to remain in the darkness for fear that their evil deeds should be
exposed (vv. 19-20). This means that, rather than having their sins removed by the
Lamb (1 :29), they remain in the darkness
and so bring down upon themselves judgment in the sense of condemnation. Those,
however, who "do the truth" in the sense of being loyal to God
and of living openly and without deceit in the divine presence are not
afraid to come to the Light. The Light may have exposed their sinfulness
but it also "takes it away."
Living henceforth in the Light means
living in such a way that adherence and loyalty to God are manifest in their entire
pattern of life (v. 21).
Reflection. Emerging from the discourse is a kind of discernment of spirits
that flows from what is involved in the act of faith. The Israelites had to look
at the image of the evil afflicting them and confront it in order to be
saved from its death-dealing bite. Likewise, faith involves confronting one's own
evil as exposed by the Cross, bringing it in this sense out into the light. While
the sequence as a whole confronts the radicality of the conversion required in
initially coming to faith, conversion is not for most people a once-off affair.
As believers we are summoned to a continuing conversion, a continual coming out
of the pockets of darkness that remain in our lives, the areas of deceit and self-delusion
that we erect as barriers to the light and prevent us living fully in the truth
that would set us free (8:32). If Jesus' discourse in the present passage summons
us to continual "judgment" in this sense, it does so only in the context
of a sublime assertion of God's love (3: 16).52
John the Baptist's
Last Witness: 3:22-36
Considering Nicodemus in the preceding half of chapter 3, we noted that he is a representative figure standing in for Jews who, while sympathetic to Jesus, are unwilling to take the radical step toward full faith and commitment. In the remainder of John 3, we have something similar to this in that we hear a
conversation between John the Baptist and his disciples in which John completes his witness to Jesus by pointing out to them the superiority of Jesus and the necessity for his own
role to fade away. In allowing us to "overhear" that conversation the gospel is in all likelihood addressing disciples of John who continued their allegiance to his memory in their own time.
The community behind the gospel is appealing to this further group within Judaism to hearken to their master's witness and make, as he indicated, the transition to the figure whose messianic status and superiority it was his role to point out. In other words, in both sections of John 3, we hear in sequence the gospel making an appeal to two groups continuing within the Judaism of its day to come to full faith and commitment to Jesus." This direction of thought will continue in the immediately following chapter where Jesus will be in conversation with an even more marginal group in Judaism (the Samaritans) in the person of the Samaritan woman.
This
means that as contemporary readers of the gospel we have to face the fact that considerable sections of the text represent places where the Johannine community is sorting out its
relationship to representative sectors
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