Jesus Christ Is From Above | Fr. Kenneth Baker, S.J. | Editorial for the December 2010 edition of Homiletic & Pastoral Review
Romano Guardini was one of the great Catholic thinkers of the twentieth century. He is perhaps best known for his penetrating analysis of Jesus in his book called The Lord, which first appeared in 1937. Recently I read an article entitled “Romano Guardini’s Christocentrism” by Professor José Manuel Fidalgo (Scripta Theologica, Vol. 42, No. 2, 2010). Dr. Fidalgo has studied the work of Guardini carefully and distilled a few important points that I would like to pass on to you.
The author stresses the fact that, for Guardini, Jesus Christ is a unique person in all of history. That is because he is God in the flesh and, because he is God almighty, he has a complete and total view of man and the world. He knows everything that is, was and will be. He has a view of the world—Weltanschauung is the German word he used—that includes everything and everyone. His knowledge is not limited to particular things and events as our knowledge is. We see only a part of reality—he sees it all because he is from above.
An amazing thing about Jesus is that he shares his total view of reality with the person who believes in him. One who is converted by Christ and becomes a Christian learns from Christ, by means of the infused virtues and the gifts of the Holy Spirit. He or she shares in the wisdom of the Catholic Church which is guaranteed to her by the Spirit of truth. That Spirit teaches the Church, and us, all things that are necessary for salvation (see Jn 14:26).
Guardini says that to have a total view of the world one must have distance from the world, be outside of the world. Because Jesus is the Word, the Son of God, he comes from outside of this world and he has distance from it. Because of that he is not tied down to earthly categories. He is different from all mundane realities. He is mystery in the flesh.
Guardini says that Jesus’ distance is evident in his authority, solitude and awareness of eternity. Jesus speaks with authority: he drives out devils, he cures lepers with a word; he raises the dead to life. But there is solitude in Jesus because even his closest disciples do not understand him until after his Resurrection. His consciousness of the eternal is captured by St. John; an infinite abyss exists between normal human beings and Christ: “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am” (Jn 8:58).
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