St. Paul & The Cross
Posted by Rebecca Teti in Faith on Wednesday, October 29, 2008 8:33 PM
I’m cheating with this photo.
It’s actually not from today’s weekly Audience, where the Pope’s topic was St. Paul & the Cross.
It’s from yesterday’s Mass celebrating the anniversary of the election of Pope John XXIII. I just like his smile in this one and wanted to post it.
But on to St. Paul! The Pope opens recalling that Paul’s most significant journey was a spiritual one: from crucifi-er to being on the side of the Crucified One. Benedict emphasizes a point I think we can forget if we’re not careful: that Jesus died for us—that is, for me, personally—and not only for a vast and nameless multitude. Here’s how he puts it:
[Paul] understood that Jesus had died and risen for all and also for [Paul], himself. Both elements were important—the universality: Jesus had truly died for everyone; and the subjectivity: He had died also for me.
The significance of the Cross is that it’s a grace; it’s not possible to merit it. In contradistinction to the Jews, who expected to be saved by their good deeds, or the Greeks who placed their hope in wisdom, or various other groups with other hopes, Paul insists on salvation through grace—through the Cross:
the cross has a fundamental priority in the history of humanity; it represents the principal point of his theology, because to say cross means to say salvation as grace given to every creature.
And doesn’t this sound like a lesson for our time?
Before a Church where disorders and scandals were present in a worrying way, where communion was threatened by groups and internal divisions that compromised the unity of the Body of Christ, Paul presents himself not with sublime words or wisdom, but with the announcement of Christ, of Christ crucified. His strength is not persuasive language, but rather, paradoxically, the weakness and the tremor of one who trusts only in the “power of God” (cf. 1 Corinthians 2:1-4).
{snip}
The first Christian communities, whom Paul addressed, knew very well that Jesus is now risen and alive; the Apostle wants to remind not just the Corinthians and the Galatians, but all of us, that the Risen One is always the One who has been crucified. The “scandal” and the “foolishness” of the cross are precisely in the fact that there, where there seems to be only failure, sorrow and defeat, precisely there, is all the power of the limitless love of God, because the cross is the expression of love and love is the true power that is revealed precisely in this apparent weakness.
Which leads to this week’s “take home” message from the Holy Father:
St. Paul has renounced his own life, giving himself totally for the ministry of reconciliation, of the cross that is salvation for all of us. And this is what we should also know how to do: We can find our strength precisely in the humility of love and our wisdom in the weakness of renunciation to thus enter into the strength of God. We should build our lives on this true wisdom: To not live for ourselves, but to live in the faith in this God, about whom all of us can say: “He loved me and gave himself up for me.”
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Session 10
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