Quote of the day, 29 July: Ruth Burrows
[T]he New Testament proclaims—it is the good news it bears—that “God,” however we might conceive of “God” (and inevitably the human heart, consciously or unconsciously, forms some idea of God to affirm or deny), can be known only through Jesus Christ and Jesus Christ as crucified.
This is the revelation that stuns merely human wisdom and all those ideas of God that derive from the human mind and heart. It is the revelation of the divine that to the Jews was an obstacle they could not surmount, a scandal pure and simple, and to the pagans was ludicrous folly. Jesus of Nazareth, in his unprotected, raw human-ness, in his weak and suffering flesh and, supremely, in his terrible Passion and death, is clean contrary to human ideas of the divine (1 Cor 1:22–4).
This may seem a startling affirmation. What about the Resurrection? Jesus’ earthly life, his Passion and death, belong to the past. Surely it is the glorious, risen Christ with whom we have to do, and it is this glorious One who is the image of God? Undoubtedly.
But what can we see of this Risen One? As Luke tells us clearly, the holy cloud of the divine Mystery took him from human sight (Acts 1:9). We know the heart of the Risen One, how he is to us, what he does for and in us, precisely through his earthly life and in his Passion and death.
The Risen One, “at the right hand of the Father,” is Jesus and none other. We know that within the very heart of the Trinity, in “heaven,” there is that same passion of love for us, that same Self-expending outreach, that “nothing spared,” that sheer excess of love which, in the reality of this world and ourselves as we are, found its most expressive form in the denuded, dispossessed man on the gibbet.
This is the Christian God, the living God, the God who really is.
Sister Rachel Gregory, O.C.D. (Ruth Burrows)
Chapter 2, The Gift of God
Burrows, R & Jones, M 2019, Ruth Burrows: Essential Writings, Orbis Books, Maryknoll, New York.
Featured image: Resurrection (Triptych), Mikhail Vrubel. Watercolor on paper, 1887, Museum of Russian Art, Kiev. Image credit: Wikiart (Public domain).
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