Jesus' Baptism

This book is so good! I know I've said that before but I just cannot say it enough. As if that weren't enough, last night I was lolling on the couch reading aloud parts to Tom. (Not from this section below, from further ahead in the Tempting of Jesus section.) Astonishingly enough, Tom objected to one concept, saying that he had heard somewhere that such an interpretation meant revisionist thinking.

I was shocked. Shocked!

Tom never (never) has comments like this. I was resisting being annoyed that someone would dare to question The Pope ... and then I remembered that was the entire reason he skirted having the book looked at by the Magisterium. So that people would feel free to talk over the ideas in the book without having The Pope looming in the background.

Obviously his plan is working. How can I be annoyed about that? Well, I can't.

(Also I was pleased because I attributed his conversing about these things to our evening readings together ... though he is less pleased with Beginning to Pray than I hoped. Still, we persevere...)

I became intrigued. "Who said that? I want to read it."

He couldn't remember. But he promised that if he comes across it again he will let me know.

Just a tidbit of some of the book I'm enjoying so much.

A broad current of liberal scholarship has interpreted Jesus' Baptism as a vocational experience. After having led a perfectly normal life in the province of Galilee, at the moment of his Baptism he is said to have had an earth-shattering experience. It was then, we are told, that he became aware of his special relationship to God and his religious mission. This mission, moreover, supposedly originated from the expectation motif then dominant in Israel, creatively reshaped by John, and from the emotional upheaval that the event of his Baptism brought about in Jesus' life. But none of this can be found in the texts. However much scholarly erudition goes into the presentation of this reading, it has to be seen as more akin to a "Jesus novel" than as an actual interpretation of the texts. The texts give us no window into Jesus' inner life -- Jesus stands above our psychologizing (Guardini, Das Wesen des Christentums). But they do enable us to ascertain how Jesus is connected with "Moses and the Prophets"; they do enable us to recognize the intrinsic unity of the trajectory stretching from the first moment of his life to the Cross and the Resurrection. Jesus does not appear in the role of a human genius subject to emotional upheavals, who sometimes fails and sometimes succeeds. If that were the case, he would remain just an individual who lived long ago and so would ultimately be separated from us by an unbridgeable gulf. Instead, he stands before us as the "beloved Son." He is, on one hand, the Wholly Other, but by the same token he can become a contemporary of us all, "more interior" to each one of us than we are to ourselves" (Saint Augustine, Confessions, III, 6, 11).

Jesus of Nazareth by Joseph Ratzinger (a.k.a. Pope Benedict XVI)

By the way, Thursday Night Gumbo is beginning to work their way through this book also and is sure to have interesting posts ... beginning with this one.