Would He Recognize the Catholic Church?
Reply to an article by Mr. Arias
I do not know who Mr. Arias is; his credentials have not been provided to me, and apart from the writing I received (numbered paragraphs in italics and in blue), I have not read anything by him that I can recall. Let us examine what he says, not because it deserves to be examined, but for the benefit of those who have provided me with the arduous task of plowing through this ponderous tome. The ideas set forth here by Mr. Arias were refuted in their day by Christians such as Saint Paul, Saint Augustine, and other Fathers of the Church. These cysts reappear from time to time, and today we refute them once again for the benefit of those who have not had time to read and meditate upon the Christian doctrine received from the Apostles and the Fathers of the Church. The inserted, numbered paragraphs are quotations from Mr. Arias’s manuscript, which is quoted in its entirety throughout this refutation.
1 One of the most delicate, compromising, and complex questions about Jesus of Nazareth is whether He wished to found a new Church and a new religion. A difficult question, since the Catholic Church and, in general, the Christian churches will never admit that they were not founded by Jesus through His apostles. And they are convinced that Christianity is a new religion, like Islam, Judaism, or Hinduism.
I believe that, honestly, the reading of the Gospels leaves no doubt that Jesus wished to create a congregation of the faithful. A man who marries and has children, buys a house, gives his children an education, has grandchildren and great-grandchildren, can do all of this without any need to go to a notary and solemnly declare that he wishes to found a family. In the long run, the facts clearly indicate his intention. Even if Jesus Christ had never said “Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church,” the act of choosing twelve envoys, then seventy, and then sending five hundred to preach the good news would prove to anyone with common sense that His intention was not merely to found a personal philosophy of life. The Church cannot deny that Jesus founded it, for that would be to deny historical and theological facts that are established and amply documented. We have fewer documents on the conquest of Gaul by Julius Caesar, yet no one questions that Caesar wished to conquer Gaul, because it is simply self-evident, that is all.
One doubts the intellectual capacity of these “specialists” (whom we will later come to know in greater detail) and their seriousness. Modernist historical revisionism is a plague of the nineteenth century that extended into the twentieth and seems to be waning today for lack of concrete results. This kind of untamed revisionism produced a quantity of theories of biblical and textual interpretation over the years, and no fewer new “religions.” If the modernists and their followers have been persecuted for “having called into question that Jesus wished to found a Church” ( ) the Christians of the first centuries truly suffered far more than the modernists, none of whom was thrown to the beasts, burned alive, or drawn and quartered by their supposed persecutors. The dilettante sages cited by Mr. Arias have been condemned by exegetes and scholars of note, established members of the worldwide community of scholars who teach at the most prestigious universities, as we shall verify later. I would like to make clear that well-understood revisionism, which rests upon a broad consensus within the exegetical community and employs a scientifically established hermeneutics on firm investigative foundations, is very different from the revisionism we question here. A good rule that can be used to recognize the adventurers is their isolation from the world’s research communities, and in general their lack of serious credentials goes hand in hand with the notion of presenting biblical subjects in a sensationalist or scandalous light, which runs parallel to good book sales, regrettably. No one plans to grow rich with a book titled “And the Church Was Right”.
If we are going to believe that a worldwide conspiracy exists to silence these adventurers who claim to know more about the apostle Paul or about Christ than those who lived and spoke with them… then we can believe anything, and we deserve the consequences.
Among the scholars I know who have condemned modernism and its sequels, I can cite C. S. Lewis; E. Hirsch, R. Bultmann, K. Keating, S. Hahn, and M. Shea; who have written abundantly on the fallacies of modernism and the excesses of the textual-interpretation movements and fundamentalist interpretation.
The proposition of these scholars is simple: How can it be that twenty centuries later the modernist can understand the Christian tradition and the Scriptures better than those who were willing to die for the cause in the first century?
This simple reasoning ought to be sufficient cause to cast aside this entire writing, but we are going to give Mr. Arias and his experts a complete refutation.
3 To begin with, it must be made quite clear that, even on the unproven hypothesis that it was not Jesus who founded the Catholic Church, or that this was not the Church He had in mind, that takes nothing away from the importance that the said religious institution, and Christianity in general, has had and has in history. Nor is its importance diminished by the fact that this Church may rather have been the fruit of the faith of the first Christians and of the religious conception of Paul of Tarsus, whom some authors consider the true founder of Christianity, after having caused primitive Christianity to break away from its original Jewish roots.
This paragraph can be commented upon by quoting the very Paul of Tarsus whom Mr. Arias mentions here. Saint Paul left on record the reality of the founding of the Church upon Christ and His resurrection; if that were not true, the apostle tells us, “we are of all men most miserable.” The mind resists accepting that Paul, a man already mature and established in his society, a true pillar of his Judeo-Roman community, could abandon everything and end up being executed in Rome in order to found a new religious movement that he himself knows to be false to its own roots. A faith lasting twenty centuries is not founded upon illusions or well-meaning whims. If we are going to call into question the motives of Jesus, Paul, and the first Christians, we had better have solid arguments for doing so, because we are confronting men and women who have made an idea endure for such a length of time as has no equal in the West and very few parallels even in the East. For the Church to make sense in our world, we must ally it with Jesus Christ; we must believe that Christ is the Son of God and that He sent His followers into history to fulfill a mission that broadens and completes the mission of Judaism and that does not separate from it by any schism.
4 The problem is another: it is to know whether Jesus, at some moment, had the idea of founding a new religion, different from the one He had practiced and lived within His family, and whether He wished to found a Church organized as the Catholic Church is today.
Here there is something I do not understand very well, and that is the role of Christ in this whole matter. If Christ passes through Galilee giving good advice and establishing a way of life, a merely conceptual philosophy, then we can compare Him with Buddha or Confucius, for example. But there is something that Buddha and Confucius never declared: to be the Son of God.
This peculiarity of Jesus – declaring Himself not merely one of the sons of God but His Firstborn, Beloved, and in full intimacy and union of wills with God His Father – is a true impediment to seeing Him simply as a guru or a great teacher. For the people who go about saying “my dad is God” are generally mentally afflicted people, and it is odd to expect from them the elevated moral sense, the acute knowledge of the human soul, and the penetrating insight that Jesus distills in the Gospels. We must conclude, then, that we have only three options with Jesus: either He is the Son of God, or He is a raving madman, or He is the Devil himself who has deceived us with a perfect trick and has come to betray his own religion (Judaism) with a snare so elaborate and perfect that it is impossible not to fall into it. This last option defies common sense, but it is one of the absurd possibilities that come to mind when one elaborates.
Hence the Church cannot imagine a Jesus who is merely a teacher after the manner of the great men of humanity. For the Church, Jesus is the Son of God, the most perfect revelation of the inconceivably divine, or else He is an impostor and a madman. If the latter were true, Christianity then agrees with Paul that, of all human philosophies, it would be the most worthy of pity.
5 The matter is one of substance and not merely of form. Doubtless, even supposing that Jesus had thought of founding a new Church, many of the things of the present-day Church He would hardly bless, above all regarding how the central government of the Church has been organized in the Vatican, the style of the papacy, basically copied from the Roman emperors, and the very structure of the Church as an absolute monarchy. Already many ancient saints, such as Saint Rita of Cascia, without going as far as the present-day bishops and exponents of Liberation Theology, harshly criticized the excesses of a Church more concerned with the rich and the powerful than with the disinherited, not seldom contaminated by worldly and political powers. A rich Church, full of privileges granted by the powerful, often intransigent and inquisitorial. All of this we know, and it is the most committed Christians themselves who take it upon themselves to criticize.
Here the gnostic-fundamentalist logic of Mr. Arias goes on to assume that Jesus would bless, or not, certain things of the Church if He were to return to the world today. To begin with, one would have to consider that the original promise of Jesus, “I am with you until the end of the age,” is believed by the members of the Church. If one does not believe in His constant presence, one can hardly believe in an eventual return of Christ. Again, this is one of the most basic Christian beliefs. That Jesus rose again and that, seated at the right hand of God, He awaits to manifest Himself to the world unexpectedly, but manifests Himself to His faithful in different mysteries. One of them is the mystery of having conquered the world, which touches very closely upon what Mr. Arias expresses precisely here. To explain this I must resort to a contemporary example.
Let us imagine that Andrei Gromyko comes back to life in Moscow in the middle of the year 2001. The astonished Communist statesman would find that there are McDonald’s restaurants in Moscow, that Coca-Cola, Marlboro cigarettes are sold, and that the red flag with the hammer and sickle no longer flies over the Kremlin. This man would need no further confirmation of who won the Cold War.
With the foregoing in mind, let us take an accounting of the situation through the eyes of a Roman patrician of the second century. The hill of the auguries (the Mons Vaticanus), the temples of Minerva and of the Bona Dea are now occupied by Christian churches. The imperial eagles have been replaced by crosses. Rome is no longer the imperial city. When people say Rome, in a general way, they refer to the Christian Catholic Church. Romans are no longer the citizens of the empire. The term barely reflects someone born in Rome, or a Catholic if one is speaking of religion. The matter does not end there. The bishop of Rome is now called Pontifex (pontiff), as the ancient emperor was called, Pontifex Maximus Sol Invictus. The Roman “Sun” has been replaced by Christ, and His Roman church has now gone twenty centuries without anyone being able to put an end to it. Buried are Nero and Domitian, the persecuting Empire no longer exists; Napoleon, Stalin, and Hitler, communism and fascism have fallen asleep in death, and the Church of Rome is still there, imperturbable. Its pontiff now wears the purple cloak of the emperor, a subtle vengeance; for in mocking Christ, the soldiers who clothed Him in purple and staged a mocking imperial coronation with the condemned man, without meaning to, inspired the followers of Christ to take a purple mantle to symbolically represent the sufferings of Christ and His Coronation in the same act. A Roman general of the second century would have no doubt as to who won the war between Christ and Caesar.
And now, to continue, let us analyze what Mr. Arias expects of the Church, as follows from his own analysis. Mr. Arias expects the Church to be simple. Pomp and luxury have no place in the Church, according to him. He cites Saint Rita of Cascia and the bishops of liberation theology, etc. Without going into defending or even judging the pomp and temporal wealth of the Church, it must be acknowledged that the members of the Church who supposedly enjoy such luxuries are far fewer than those who do not. The great majority of the militant members of the Church do not partake even remotely of any luxury. I am not bothered by the Basilica of Saint Peter, nor by the supposed gold of the altars and candelabra that may be there (such gold does not exist; let him who does not believe me go and look for it). On the other hand, any institution that lasts twenty centuries accumulates treasures almost without intending to. If one looks at the museums and royal palaces of the world, the matter is no better and no worse. And if Jesus comes and does not approve of it, well, it is for Him to judge the privileges and riches and those who enjoy them. He already predicted that the Church would grow: “greater things than these shall you do.” Who has the authority to be scandalized because Christians build temples? Or is it that we are not free to do so because a certain person interprets that, since Jesus did not build temples, one must now officiate in the open air? What manner of reasoning is that?
That there would be rapacity and avarice among some pastors who, in time, would be to the flock as wolves. Of course He did not predict that all the pastors would be so. Nor did He instruct us to put labels on the pastors. He only told us to be “wise as serpents and innocent as doves,” and I believe with very good reason. Like Saint Rita, Saint Francis of Assisi, and many others have preached by example, the life without possessions and the love of the poor. If Christ comes and His Church does not please Him, we shall learn of it in due time, but we have no mandate from Him to sabotage it because we disagree with its accountants or because its treasures displease us. There is a single example of accounting criticism in the Gospels, and it should not surprise us that the critic is Judas, nor that the reply of Jesus to his criticism was: “the poor you have always with you.”
The problem described here has been in the Church from the very beginning. Read the letter of James, which speaks abundantly of that. Nothing has changed in that regard. There are simple men and men with lavish tastes. We shall see who remains when the moment comes to render an account.
6 It is probably an ancient betrayal, almost from the origins of Christianity, when it, from being a sect persecuted by the Roman emperors, became the State religion of the Roman Empire, which covered it with privileges and prebends. As Crossan affirms: “It takes considerable effort to keep one’s composure when one reads the account of the imperial banquet held at the close of the Council of Nicaea.” The account runs thus: “Detachments of the guard and army surrounded the entrance of the palace with drawn swords, and passing through their midst without fear, the men of God entered the private apartments of the emperor, where some of his companions were at table, while others reclined on couches placed on either side of the chamber. One might have thought it a picture of the Kingdom of Christ, a dream come true.”
The text was written by Eusebius, and Crossan comments on it thus in his work The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant: “Once again the banquet and the Kingdom appear combined, but the guests are now the bishops, all of them male, who eat reclining on couches in the company of the emperor himself and expect to be served by others.” And he adds: “Perhaps Christianity is an inevitable and absolutely necessary betrayal of the figure of Jesus, for, were it not so, all His followers would have died in the hills of Lower Galilee. But did that betrayal have to come about in so short a time?”
The indignant Mr. Crossan quoted here is a member of the Jesus Seminar, of which we will speak later. For the moment, let us recall that the “betrayal” spoken of here consists of going to dine with the emperor of the day. Perhaps the Christians should have told the emperor that they preferred to remain in the catacombs and be murdered and tortured publicly. Is that what you would do after two hundred years of ruthless persecution? Or would you rather give thanks to God that the persecutions had ended and a new era was being inaugurated in the history of Europe, with Christianity as the central protagonist that, day by day, slowly replaces the empire? Christianity is not a betrayal of the figure of Jesus, but the fire that He Himself came to kindle in the world and which no one can now halt or transform into an innocent collection of separate candles. The Church is Christocentric, and that is not a betrayal. What is indeed a betrayal is to shift the center of adoration to the “special knowledge” or “gnosis” required to create a deformed and occultist version of Christianity. Those versions, refuted by the Fathers from the very first hour of the church, reappear from time to time, taking advantage of people’s poor memory.
Since Mr. Arias cites him, let us speak of John Dominic Crossan and his lucrative Jesus Seminar. This ingenious group of people, led by Robert Funk and John Dominic Crossan, claims for itself the “scholarship that prevails in the great universities of the world.” This they declare in their interview with Richard Hays in “The Corrected Jesus,” page 47 of the publication First Things No. 43 (in English). On the basis of this claim made by themselves, the members of the Jesus Seminar have been publishing things since the latter part of the 1980s. These enlightened gentlemen now come to inform us of what Jesus said and what He did not say. With a keen commercial sense, they make declarations to the press, generally preceding the publication of one of their works. I quote here some of them: “Most of Jesus’s sayings were invented by an anonymous author”; “Jesus most probably did not teach the Our Father”; “Is the true Gospel in the Bible?”; “Scholars compile a new Bible.” Shortly after these declarations were made to the press, the book “The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus” was presented. I do not know why, but they remind me of others who “discovered” the death of Jesus on a stake (instead of the cross) and other stale “truths”… let the reader judge whether it is worth the risk of trusting someone who implicitly declares that the “truth” about Jesus has waited twenty centuries until the Jesus Seminar or the Watchtower Society come to show us “the light.”
But before seeing what this group declares, let us see whether it is true that their credentials are part of the “scholarship that prevails in the great universities of the world,” as Mr. Crossan declares, cited as an authority by Mr. Arias.
Dr. Richard B. Hays, Associate Professor of the New Testament at the Divinity School of Duke University (United States), declares on the subject:
Not a single member of the New Testament faculties at Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Duke, the University of Chicago, Union Theological Seminary, Vanderbilt, SMU, or the Catholic University has taken part in this project [the Jesus Seminar]. Needless to say, the faculty of the evangelical seminaries have not participated. Nor have recognized scholars of England or of other parts of the European Continent participated. In fact – I wish to state this clearly – most recognized biblical scholars feel a profound skepticism when contemplating the methods and conclusions of this academic group cut off from the community of scholars. The point is that this is a book of imagination that has been produced by a group of self-proclaimed “scholars” who declare unconventional points of view about Jesus and the Gospels. They, of course, are free to publish these points of view. Nevertheless, their attempt to present these opinions as if they were “the firmly established results of scholarly critical analysis” is, one must say it, a reprehensible deception. Richard Hays, as it appears in “The Corrected Jesus.”
I would like the reader to retain this interesting evaluation as we progress in the analysis of the document produced by Mr. Arias.
7 Jesus preached a religion of the heart, without temples or cathedrals.
The question is the following: what was it that Jesus intended when, surrounded by a handful of men and women, of rather simple people, He set about criticizing certain aspects of the Judaic religion of His time (as the progressive theologians do today with Catholicism) and announcing the coming of a new “Kingdom”? Was that announcement of the Kingdom the founding of a new religion and a new Church, or was it simply the announcement of a surpassing of the old religion of His fathers, imbuing it with greater universality and proclaiming the centrality of human dignity as the very heart of religion, or was it a different religion? Or was it a purely temporal kingdom to cast the Romans out of the land of His fathers, occupied by them?
I should like to know when Jesus criticized “certain aspects of the Judaic religion of His time.” Jesus, from all we know, came to fulfill the Mosaic law. The criticisms Jesus makes, He makes not of the procedures and religious institutions established by Moses and the Hebrew Prophets. On the contrary, He affirms and revives the spirit of that law, and what He criticizes is the hypocrisy of Jewish fundamentalism, which transforms the Mosaic law into an instrument of oppression for the people and which eventually draws the people away from God and from the love of neighbor. The criticism Jesus makes is, for example, of the Corban, because that twisted tradition limits and contravenes the commandments given through Moses. Jesus attends the temple and the synagogue. He fulfills His Mosaic obligations, and when He modifies – sometimes hardening (the case of divorce), sometimes softening the interpretation of the law (the case of the Sabbath rest or the stoning of the adulteress) – even in those instances in which the interpretation of Jesus seems to modify the law of Moses, there is always a revelation of a new spiritual dimension of the commandment being explained. I give as an example “the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath” and “he that is without sin, let him cast the first stone.” In the first, Jesus reveals His majesty and authority over the Sabbath, the day of God. In revealing His lordship over the Day of the Lord, He points out to the Jews the imminence of the new creation and Jesus’s own authority to inaugurate it. In the second case, far from justifying the stoning (illegal, since a mob had no right to stone anyone, according to the law), Jesus uses that opportunity to reveal the existence of the sin inherent in every human being and the importance of the mercy of God for solving the problem of human sin.
It would have been another matter had Jesus said things such as “Did Moses wish to found a religion?” or perhaps “The Law of Moses is a law of the heart, and there is no need to go to the temple,” or any other objection to the authority of the law or its historical integrity with the aim of undermining its importance or veracity. It is the height of effrontery for these “progressive theologians” to compare themselves with Jesus.
In due time Jesus completed His mission on earth: to reveal God in a human being and to give proof that the service of God is the service of one’s neighbor in the sublime act of charity and not of rebellion. As we said before, Jesus conquered Rome and will eventually triumph over every lordship or kingdom of the earth, because His sovereignty is unstoppable and His kingdom is as inevitable as the arrival of morning after a dark night.
8 Important in this respect would be to know the idea of God that Jesus preached and whether it was an idea of God “invented” by Him or drawn from the roots of the ancient Scriptures. For it is said that one of the characteristics of the new religion preached by the prophet of Nazareth was that of a God who is “father” as opposed to the God who is “judge” of the Old Testament; the God of compassion and not the God of vengeance; the God, not of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” but of the father who receives the prodigal son, who had left home and squandered his inheritance, with such feasting and joy that it makes the faithful son who had remained at home burn with envy. But it turns out that this image is also in the Old Testament, specifically in the prophet Isaiah, when, speaking of God, he says that He is more understanding than a mother, for while a mother might come to abandon a child, God never would.
This paragraph deserves the famous comment of Saint Augustine of Hippo: “The New Testament lies hidden in the Old, and the Old is made manifest in the New.” Jesus did not have to “invent” the Father. Saint Paul insists again and again on the importance of understanding that the purpose of the Mosaic law is to reveal the impotence of man before sin. The law can only be fulfilled by a perfect man and has the purpose of revealing Christ as that perfect man, of establishing the legal foundations to make His sacrifice effective, and finally of showing humanity the door of escape: the mercy of God revealed in the Passion. For if God is a Judge, He is also a Father full of mercy and love for His straying children. The contrast is not a reinvention of God; it is His final revelation. Jesus has shown us the Father and has paid the bail to the Judge. Now that the judgment is resolved, it only remains for us to accept the divine grace that pulls us out of the monumental mess into which we got ourselves thanks to our carnal father Adam.
9 There is a significant text, in the Gospel of John, that is also revealing of the idea Jesus had of religion, of the manner of worshiping God, and of everything external to the Church, chiefly the problem of temples. It is the passage in which Jesus flirts with the Samaritan woman who was going to draw water from the well. There existed a great enmity between Jews and Samaritans. The latter were considered pagans, since they did not recognize the religion of Israel. The Samaritan woman provokes Jesus by saying that her ancestors had worshiped God on that mountain where they stood, whereas the Jews said that one must worship Him in the temple of Jerusalem. Two churches disputing a place of worship. Jesus cuts in sharply: “Believe me, woman, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father… The hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship in spirit and in truth.” If these words of Jesus are historical – and the Church recognizes them as such – then many questions would have to be asked. For the time being, it is evident that, if Jesus was thinking of a new kind of religion, in it the physical places of worship were going to have no importance whatever, since, as He says, the followers of that new religion would have to render worship to God not in churches, temples, and pharaonic cathedrals, but within themselves. It would be the heart, the spirit of man, the great inner temple where they will best be able to meet with God.
10 Over this text, rivers of ink have been spilled. But few have delved into it to observe that it is a harsh criticism of all the pomp of the churches raised by Catholics and Protestants. To the Samaritan woman, Jesus says very clearly that in the future, or rather, from that very moment, both the Temple of Jerusalem and the cathedrals that would one day be raised in His name were going to matter very little, since none of that is important for rendering worship to the God who dwells in the heart of persons and not in the darkness and magnificence of temples.
I must dwell upon this section, because there are a few things I should like to ask Mr. Arias. Where did he get the idea that Jesus flirts with the Samaritan woman? What kind of exegetical seriousness can extract from this text a flirtation?
Let us delve a little into the context of John chapter 4, from which this portion is drawn. Let us recall, because it is necessary to analyze the context faithfully, that the division into chapters and verses is later than the writing of the Gospels. Therefore, if we begin to read the Gospel of John from the beginning, we can distinguish certain sections that precede this quotation and that can help us obtain a more precise idea of the general sense of the writing. These sections are, beginning from the summary of the selection of the apostles onward:
- The selection of the apostles
- The wedding at Cana of Galilee
- The cleansing of the Temple at the time of the Passover
- The conversation with Nicodemus
- The testimony of John the Baptist
- The testimony to the Samaritans
- The return to Galilee
A book could be written about these sections of the Gospel of John. In fact, many works have been written about this Gospel, so different from the other three. So you will forgive me if I pass over this subject with a bird’s-eye view, so as not to extend myself unnecessarily, since the writing of Mr. Arias likewise continues at great length. In any case, we are in for a long stretch, because there is much to see.
A characteristic of the Johannine presentation of the Gospel is what we will call the duality of concepts. John presents several concepts in pairs and develops a subtle argument using these pairs, sometimes opposed (like light and darkness) and other times concurrent (water and spirit, or water and blood). These pairs intertwine in varied ways and have the peculiarity of inciting the reader to the contemplation of the mystery of the Incarnation of Jesus and its purpose. John prefers to make us think and contemplate rather than explain things. This singular treatment does not set aside the logical development of the Gospel but is in full harmony with it. The selection of the apostles is the door that John opens to introduce us to the rest of the narration. The chosen ones immediately believe in the messiahship of Jesus, who gives them a glimpse of the purpose of His ministry: the revelation of God to Israel. To Nathanael He expresses the promise “Greater things than these shall you see, and amen, amen I say to you, you shall see the heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.”
Note that Nathanael is the ideal Israelite (sincere, without guile) whom Jesus finds under the fig tree (which is a symbol of Israel as a nation spiritually dedicated to God; recall the cursing of the fig tree for its failure to produce fruit, which occurs at the end of the ministry of Jesus). Note also that the juxtaposition of “angels of God” and “Son of Man” is a pre-revelation of the divinity of the Son of Man, whom the angels serve. But what matters to us here is the resemblance of the image to the vision of Jacob at Bethel when, alone in the night, he sees the ladder leading to the throne of God and the angels ascending and descending to the throne of God. For a Jew this image is an image of strong significance. Nathanael seems to symbolize this new Jacob who is going to have the joy of contemplating the rebirth of Israel in a way that none before him suspected. Not according to the flesh but according to the spirit.
The account of the wedding at Cana follows. The wedding runs out of wine. It is possible that this is a memory of Mary related to John later, but let us see how John presents it. The wine is miraculously created using the “water of purification” contained in six jars, which are presented to the president of the banquet full of excellent wine. He approves, saying that the best wine has appeared at the end and not, as was the custom, at the beginning of the meal. The duality of water and blood (symbolized by the wine) appears here. We know that the sacrifice of Jesus is necessary for the reunion of faithful humanity with God: the wedding of the Lamb. The wine presented to the president is a type of the perfect blood of Jesus that purifies (like the water of the ablutions) and that is accepted by the Father as sufficient justification. John concludes the account of this first miracle by summarizing “This beginning of miracles did Jesus in Cana of Galilee; and manifested his glory, and his disciples believed in him.” Let us note the contrast with the account of the selection of the apostles. To believe in Jesus entails receiving a revelation of His glory. Another duality woven into this fascinating account of Saint John.
Contrasted with the faith of the disciples, in the following account we see how the Jews of the temple demand of Jesus a sign to show them that Jesus has the authority to cast the merchants out of the temple. The sign that Jesus proposes to them, as if it were a riddle, is “destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” The Jews do not believe, but John, in retrospect, explains to us that Jesus was speaking of the temple of His body. This is then another revelation that the disciples understand only when Jesus is risen. Again the disciples believe, and the revelation of the true meaning of His words occurs only to them. Let us recall that the same phrase is presented by the witnesses before the Sanhedrin when Jesus goes to trial, on the night before His death on Golgotha. The same phrase that reveals something to the believers is a cause of stumbling to those who do not wish to believe. At the same time, those who believe merely because of the signs and miracles that Jesus produces do not receive this revelation, since Jesus does not present Himself completely before them, knowing that their faith has short roots (Jn. 4:23-25).
Thus we arrive at Jerusalem and at the conversation with Nicodemus. The contrast is now multifaceted. To be born from above, to be born of the spirit, is contrasted with the carnal human nature, from below. The earthly is opposed to the spiritual. Then the duality, already presented before, is developed again: water and spirit. Nicodemus asks how it is possible for someone to be born again; no one can return to his mother’s womb, reasons the learned Jew, without thinking that in death we all return to the womb of the mother of all things: the Earth. Later Saint Paul, most probably without knowledge of this conversation of the Lord, tells us that the seed must fall to the ground to bear fruit. The birth of the spirit is transcendent when the flesh, the human nature, has been left behind. As a master of the law, Nicodemus should have recognized these concepts. Nicodemus wishes to believe but does not understand. He has come to Jesus “in the night”; coming out of the darkness, he has drawn near to the light. Later John, in describing the beginning of the betrayal of Judas, tells us that Judas goes out from the paschal supper into the night outside, and thus another duality between Nicodemus and Judas is completed. One man accepts, prefers the light, and the other abandons it (see Jn 3:19). Let us note, moreover, that Jesus uses with Nicodemus the phrase “we speak of that which we know,” a phrase that reminds us of the “we worship that which we know” used later with the Samaritan woman beside the well.
John now proceeds to relate the testimony of the Baptist, and at the very beginning of this testimony (Jn 3:29) the Baptist reveals Jesus as the Bridegroom who has the right to marry the bride, the incipient Church. The Baptist feels the joy of the good friends of the Bridegroom; again the contrast heaven-earth and the mention of the spirit as a gift of God as the result of the water of the baptism on the other side of the Jordan.
On the way to Galilee now, Jesus and the disciples pass through Samaria. We know that the Samaritans were in considerable enmity with the Jews owing to religious differences. The Samaritans practiced a version of the Mosaic religion that was not acceptable to orthodox Jews. Jesus sits down to rest near the well traditionally known as the Well of Jacob. Let us now recall what was said earlier to Nathanael and its coincidence with the vision of Jacob at Bethel. Let us note again the image John presents to us. Water from a well, and that well is Israel or Jacob. A Samaritan woman comes to draw water, and Jesus asks her for a little. To us it may seem something not very unusual. Yet the woman is surprised. It is that the Jewish tradition declared the Samaritan women to be unclean; “menstruants from the cradle” was the expression used to describe them and to indicate that no Jew could marry one of them and remain clean. So as not to make this longer still, let us focus on the declaration of Jesus that He Himself is a “fountain of water springing up unto life everlasting,” water that flows living and not water stagnant in a well. The image of purifying water that gives life reminds us of the wedding (water and wine) and of the two things that flow from the fifth wound of Jesus on the cross: water and blood for the forgiveness of sins. The well of Jacob is a symbol of Israel. Jesus makes this clear by saying “salvation is of the Jews.” The woman and the inhabitants of the village accept Jesus as the Messiah, and she is the first to whom Jesus unequivocally reveals His messiahship. The end of the mission of Israel is to produce Jesus, and the water of Jacob’s well ends its functions in order to be replaced by the water of life that Jesus offers once and for all, the baptism of which so much is spoken before reaching chapter 4. John skillfully interweaves Jacob/Nathanael/Israel/Jesus and the theme of the purifying water in a masterful and mystical account that reveals far more than it explains.
This Samaritan woman, ceremonially declared unclean and of dubious reputation, is the first to know, from the mouth of Jesus, that He is the Messiah. Mary Magdalene, she who was a prisoner of the seven demons, is the first to see the risen Jesus. What do these two apparent incongruities of Jesus, revealed in His fullness to women such as these, mean? Here there is something to ponder. Again we hear the words spirit and truth; again we are reminded that “we worship that which we know.”
But the purpose of all this prior reading is to arrive at the crux of the meaning of the words “spirit and truth.” Did Jesus mean by this that the new worship is exclusively personal and that temples would be abolished? Let us see what an ancient Christian publication declares about this…
Like the prophets before him, Jesus expressed the deepest respect for the Temple in Jerusalem. It was in the Temple that Joseph and Mary presented him forty days after his birth (Lk 2:22-39). At the age of twelve he decided to remain in the Temple to remind his parents that he must be about his Father’s business (Lk 2:46-49). During his hidden life he went up there each year at least for Passover (Lk 2:41); his public ministry itself was patterned by his pilgrimages to Jerusalem for the great Jewish feasts (Jn 2:13-14; 5:1, 14; 7:1, 10, 14; 8:2; 10:22-23).
Jesus went up to the Temple as the privileged place of encounter with God. For him, the Temple was the dwelling of his Father, a house of prayer, and he was angered that its outer court had become a place of commerce (Mt 21:13). He drove merchants out of it because of jealous love for his Father: “You shall not make my Father’s house a house of trade. His disciples remembered that it was written, ‘Zeal for your house will consume me’ (Ps 69:10)” (Jn 2:16-17). After his Resurrection his apostles retained their reverence for the Temple (Acts 2:46; 3:1; 5:20, 21; etc.).
However, on the threshold of his Passion Jesus announced the coming destruction of this splendid building, of which there would not remain “one stone upon another” (Mt 24:1-2). By doing so, he announced a sign of the last days, which were to begin with his own Passover (Mt 24:3; Lk 13:35). But this prophecy could be distorted by false witnesses at his interrogation before the high priest (Mk 14:57-58), and be thrown back at him as an insult when he was nailed to the cross (Mt 27:39-40).
Far from having been hostile to the Temple, where he gave the essential part of his teaching (Mt 8:4; 23:21; Lk 17:14; Jn 4:22; Jn 18:20), Jesus was willing to pay the Temple-tax, associating with him Peter (Mt 17:24-27), whom he had just made the foundation of his future Church (Mt 16:18). He even identified himself with the Temple by presenting himself as God’s definitive dwelling-place among men (Jn 2:21; Mt 12:6). It is for this reason that his being put to bodily death (Jn 2:18-22) proclaims the destruction of the Temple, which would manifest the ushering in of a new age in the history of salvation: “The hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father” (Jn 4:21; cf. Jn 4:23-24; Mt 27:51; Heb 9:11; Rev 21:22).
If the Law and the Temple could be occasions of opposition (“contradiction,” Lk 2:34) between Jesus and the religious authorities of Israel, that is because for the redemption of sins – the divine work par excellence – Jesus consented to be the true stone of stumbling for those authorities (Lk 20:17-18; Ps 118:22). (Catechism of the Catholic Church)
To prove that adoring, praying, or meditating in the secret of the heart is not incompatible with having a suitable place for these activities, I cite the following:
The church, the house of God, is the proper place for the liturgical prayer of the parish community. It is also the privileged place for adoration of the real presence of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament. The choice of a favorable place is not a matter of indifference for true prayer. – For personal prayer, this can be a “prayer corner” with the Sacred Scriptures and icons, in order to be there, in secret, before our Father. In a Christian family, this kind of little oratory fosters prayer in common.
– In regions where monasteries exist, the vocation of these communities is to further the participation of the faithful in the Liturgy of the Hours and to provide necessary solitude for more intense personal prayer (cf. PC 7).
– Pilgrimages evoke our earthly journey toward heaven. They are traditionally special occasions for renewal in prayer. For pilgrims seeking living water, shrines are special places for living the forms of Christian prayer “in Church.” (Catechism of the Catholic Church)
A summary of this, which I hope will set us all to thinking seriously:
- Jesus is speaking of what was going to happen, namely, that not a doll would be left with its head: the temple would be destroyed, as the Samaritan place of worship already had been. That is the sense of the words of Jesus.
- The underlying idea is that the place is not the substance of worship, but the spirit, as we knew some twenty centuries before Mr. Arias came to reveal it to us.
- The apostles went to the temple to pray (with the Spirit already received at Pentecost!), as is recorded in the Acts: could it be that they forgot that Jesus did not want them to go to the temple? If the revelation of Jesus is purely and exclusively personal, why did Jesus ask the disciples not to move from Jerusalem?
- The practitioners of every religion gather in certain places that they set apart for worship, call it what they will. Instead, “we have an altar” (Hebrews 13:10), and “altar” is worship, say what they may. Perhaps we ought to have mobile altars, since the “true intention” of Jesus was that we worship Him only in the heart, as Mr. Arias enlightens us!
- And of course, if the moment and the circumstance were to arrive, a church-building is not needed; that too we Catholics can maintain. The first Christians did not have them – because of the persecutions – but they gathered in the catacombs, where they had the altars where they celebrated worship, venerated the relics of the martyrs, and where the first sacred inscriptions and paintings appear. If that is not a church, it very much resembles one! But of course Mr. Arias reckons that the very first Christians did not understand what Jesus meant and betrayed the idea of not having a fixed place to meet. Twenty centuries later, Mr. Arias reads something preserved by these “traitors” and promptly, in the manner of Sherlock Holmes, discovers that the intention of Jesus was to found an ideology without temples.
Conclusion: Jesus was right: neither in Jerusalem nor on Mount Gerizim will God be worshiped, but in the souls of the faithful, which does not prevent them from gathering to celebrate the Eucharist or to pray together in a place made for that purpose. The one does not deny the other.
Boston, USA.
Author: Carlos Caso-Rosendi
Source: Apologetica.org
