Jesus Christus

By Romano Guardini and Robert Krieg

Jesus Christus offers a series of illuminating sermons on the life of Christ that were delivered to students at Berlin University, where Romano Guardini (1885-1968) taught. He was a mentor to such prominent theologians as Hans Urs von Balthasar and Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) and in this book, Guardini’s teaching style comes truly alive. Delivered while writing his bestselling masterwork The Lord, these reflections inspire the reader to contemplate the presence that Jesus Christ manifested to the world. Written in the same vein as the Pope Benedict XVI's Jesus of Nazareth series, Guardini masterfully carries the reader beyond the stories and events of scripture to focus on the person of Jesus Christ. These meditations are accessible and clear, but maintain the theological depth found in Guardini’s seminal work.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ave Maria Press
• Release date: Jun 4, 2012
• ISBN: 9780870612695

Romano Guardini

Romano Guardini (1885–1968) is regarded as one of the most important Catholic intellectuals of the twentieth century. He lived in Germany most of his life and was ordained a priest in Mainz in 1910. The focus of Guardini’s academic work was philosophy of religion and he is best known for such works as The Lord, The End of the Modern World, and The Spirit of the Liturgy. Guardini taught at the University of Berlin until he was forced to resign for criticizing Nazi mythologizing of Jesus and for emphasizing Christ’s Jewishness. After World War II, he taught at the University of Tubingen and the University of Munich. While Guardini declined Pope Paul VI’s offer to make him a cardinal in 1965, his prolific status as a scholar and teacher heavily influenced the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, especially liturgical reforms. His intellectual disciples are many, including Josef Pieper and Pope emeritus Benedict XVI.

Book preview

jesuschristus_cover.jpg10889.jpg

Except for a few places where the older translations are more appropriate, the biblical quotations used in this translation are from Msgr. Ronald Knox’s translation of the New Testament (Sheed and Ward: New York, 1944).

Nihil obstat:

J. Gerard Kealy, D.D.

Censor theol. deput.

Imprimatur:

Albert Gregory Meyer, S.T.D., S.S.L.

Archbishop of Chicago

June 15, 1959

First published in Germany under the title Jesus Christus, Geistliches Wort by Werkbund-Verlag Würzburg 1957. First published in the United States by Henry Regnery Company, 1959.

____________________________________

© 2012 by Ave Maria Press, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever except in the case of reprints in the context of reviews, without written permission from Christian Classics™, Ave Maria Press®, Inc., P.O. Box 428, Notre Dame, IN 46556.

Founded in 1865, Ave Maria Press is a ministry of the United States Province of Holy Cross.

www.christian-classics.com

Paperback: ISBN-10 0-87061-257-3 ISBN-13 978-0-87061-257-2

E-book: ISBN-10 0-87061-269-7 ISBN-13 978-0-87061-269-5

Cover image: Baptism of Christ by Alessandro Allori, photo credit Scala/Art Resource, NY.

Cover and text design by John R. Carson.

Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Guardini, Romano, 1885-1968.

[Jesus Christus, geistliches Wort. English]

Jesus Christus / Romano Guardini.

p. cm.

ISBN-13: 978-0-87061-257-2 (pbk.)

ISBN-10: 0-87061-257-3 (pbk.)

1. Catholic Church--Sermons. 2. Sermons, German. I. Title.

BX1756.G85J43 2011

232--dc23

2011045443

Contents

10700.jpg

Foreword: An Introduction to Jesus Christus

by Robert Krieg

His Mother

Passage

Failure

The Sacred Authority

Christ the Healer

Jesus and Faith

The Will of the Father

Jesus’ Solitude

The Nearness of the Father

Time and Eternity

The Love of Jesus

The Risen Christ

Heaven

10938.png

Foreword

10702.jpg

An Introduction to Jesus Christus

10932.png

THE FOCAL POINT of the Christian faith is Jesus Christ, the divine Word who became flesh (Jn 1:14). Two millennia ago, the Lord Jesus proclaimed the coming of God’s reign through his words, deeds, and very person. Rejected by the religious and civil authorities in Jerusalem, he suffered and died on a cross, but rose from the dead to eternal life. Now, alive in the Holy Spirit, Christ remains invisibly present to us, and he will return in glory with God’s new heaven and a new earth (Rv 21:1). At Mass, we acknowledge this mystery of faith when we declare: We proclaim your Death, O Lord, and profess your Resurrection until you come again.

This sacred mystery is the focal point of Jesus Christus (first published in 1957). This book was meant by its author Romano Guardini (d. 1968) to challenge our ignorance concerning who Jesus is so that we will attain a fresh impression of the figure of Christ (pp. 49–50). Toward this aim, it consists of thirteen meditations concerning God’s mystery, that is, Christ himself, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge (Col 2:2–3).

Romano Guardini’s numerous books and articles have shaped the lives of Catholics around the world for almost one hundred years. His Spirit of the Liturgy (1918) became a bestseller in at least six languages and eventually bore fruit in the Second Vatican Council’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium (1963). Pope Paul VI prized Guardini’s texts and in 1965 invited Guardini to become a cardinal, an invitation which the theologian graciously declined. As a student and a priest, Pope John Paul II drew on Guardini’s insights into the character of personal existence in modern society. Today, Pope Benedict XVI frequently quotes Guardini. Indeed, he refers to the theologian’s Christology in his Jesus of Nazareth: Part Two (2011). Further, the theologians Karl Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar studied with Guardini and subsequently made use of his ideas in their respective writings.

Guardini also influenced American Catholicism. Dorothy Day frequently cited Guardini’s writings in her newspaper The Catholic Worker, and Flannery O’Connor said she tried to read everything I can of Romano Guardini. Thomas Merton read Guardini’s books from the 1950s until his tragic death in 1968. When the theologian Monika Hellwig was a student, she was inspired by Guardini’s The Lord (1937) and mirrored this book in her Jesus: The Compassion of God (1983).

Who was Romano Guardini? He was a priest-theologian with a twofold aspiration: (1) to retrieve the truths of divine revelation in the Church’s scripture and tradition, and (2) to express these truths anew in relation to the contemporary world’s images, ideas, and categories.

Born in 1885 in Verona, Italy, Guardini grew up in Mainz, Germany. In 1910, he was ordained a priest of the Diocese of Mainz. He earned his first doctorate in 1915 and his second in 1922. During the 1920s and 1930s, Guardini taught theology at the University of Berlin and was simultaneously the national leader of Germany’s Catholic youth association, Quickborn. In 1939, he withdrew from both roles, as demanded by Nazi officials. After the Second World War, he taught at the University of Tübingen (1945–1948) and then at the University of Munich (1948–63). Guardini died at the age of eighty-three. He is now buried in Munich’s Saint Ludwig Church where he preached on Sundays for more than two decades.

As intended by Guardini, Jesus Christus unites a biblical view of the Lord Jesus and a contemporary account of being a person. On the one hand, the book elucidates the portrait of Jesus Christ in St. John’s Gospel. Proceeding from the Father, the Son assumed a human nature, being born of the Blessed Mother. During his earthly life, Jesus Christ passed among us, revealing God’s love for all people and saving us by paying the price for our sins. After his death, Christ returned in glory to the Father and sent the Spirit among us.

On the other hand, Jesus Christus employs a notion of person developed by Guardini out of the writings of Max Scheler, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Martin Heidegger. To be a person is to be a unique subject, an I. As such, every person is an irreducible reality, a mystery whom we can increasingly understand but never fully fathom. Further, Jesus Christ is the divine person in relation to whom human beings receive the strength and guidance in the Holy Spirit to become the persons whom God envisions each of us to be.

As stated earlier, the explicit goal of Guardini’s meditations in Jesus Christus is to lead each reader to a greater knowledge of and union with the Lord. At the same time, the book’s implicit goal is each reader’s maturation into the person whom God envisions.

A shortcoming of Jesus Christus is that it reads the Gospels of St. Matthew, St. Mark, and St. Luke through the lens of St. John’s Gospel. It is too one-sided in its claim that [t]he writers of the Synoptic Gospels looked deeply into Jesus. But the ultimate revelation was made only by John (p. 82). As Vatican II teaches in its Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum (1965), each of the Gospels offers its own invaluable insights into the mystery of Jesus Christ (n. 18).

This limitation notwithstanding, Jesus Christus remains a Christian classic. It calls into question some ideas concerning Christ and sheds fresh light on God’s incarnate Word. Thus, this book facilitates our reflections on scripture and tradition which, according to Dei Verbum (n. 7), are like a mirror, in which the Church, during its pilgrim journey here on earth, contemplates God, from whom it receives everything, until such time as it is brought to see God face to face as he really is (see Jn 3:2).

Robert Krieg

10940.png

His Mother

10690.jpg

Blessed art thou that hast believed!

(Luke 1:45)

10943.png

TO ATTAIN a full understanding of a tree as it is, we must look into the earth where its roots are, from where the sap arises into the trunk, twig, blossoms, and fruit. Similarly, we shall do well to consider now that earth from which the personage of Our Lord arises—Mary, His mother.

We are told that she came of noble parentage, royal blood. Now every man is unique, created but once, with an