Sunday, February 22, 2004

Christianity and *The Passion* (4)

Another liberation theologian, Leonardo Boff of Brazil, in his 1972 Jesus Christ, Liberator also emphasized that the Christian theological understanding of Jesus' death is inseperable from the Resurrection:

The universal meaning of the life and death of Christ, therefore, is that he sustained the fundamental conflict of human existence to the end: He wanted to realize the absolute meaning of this world before God, in spite of hate, incomprehension, betrayal, and condemnation to death. For Jesus, evil does not exist in order to comprehended, but to be taken over and conquered by love. This comportment of Jesus opened up a new possibility for human existence, i.e., an existence of faith with absolute meaning, even when confronted with the absurd, as was his own death - caused by hate for one who only loved and only sought to do good among people. Hence, [Dietrich] Bonhoeffer can say that a Christian today is called to live this weakness of God in the world. "Jesus does not call us to a new religion. Jesus calls us to life. What sort of life? To participate in the weakness of God in the world." This kind of life is a new life and triumphs where all ideologies and human speculations fail, i.e., in despair, in unmerited suffering, in injustice, in violent death.

Is there meaning in all this? Yes. But only when taken on before God, in love and hope that goes beyond eath. To believe in this manner is to believe with Jesus who believed. To follow him is to realize the same comportment within our own conditions of life that are no longer his. The resurrection reveals in all its profundity that to believe and persevere in the absurd and meaningless is not without meaning.

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