By Robert O'Connor in The Truth Will Make You Free
In his new “Jesus of Nazareth”, Benedict insists that “When Jesus speaks of the Kingdom of God, he is quite simply proclaiming God, and proclaiming him to be the living God, who is able to act concretely in the world and in history and is even now so acting. He is telling us: ‘God exists’ and “God is really God,’ which means that he holds in his hands the threads of the world. In this sense, Jesus’ message is very simply and thoroughly God-centered. The new and totally specific thing about his message is that he is telling us: God is acting now – this is the hour when God is showing himself in history as its Lord, as the living God, in a way that goes beyond anything seen before.
The logic is inexorable...The Kingdom of God is the Person of Christ, and wherever there is “another Christ.”
This is the verbal founding of Opus Dei. St. Josemaria Escriva recalls August 7, 1931: “At that moment of elevating the Sacred Host, without losing paper recollection, without being distracted… there came to my mind, with extraordinary force and clarity, the phrase of Scripture ‘et si exaltatus fuero a terra, omnia traham ad me ipsum’ [And I, if I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all things to myself] (Jn. 12, 32). Ordinarily, in the face of the supernatural, I am afraid. Afterward comes the "do not be afraid, it is I." And I understood that it would be the men and women of God who would lift the Cross with the doctrines of Christ over the pinnacle of all human activity. And I saw our Lord triumph, drawing to himself all things.”
John Coverdale recounts: “Reflecting years later on this experience, Escriva said that he understood our Lord to be saying those words to him ‘not in the sense in which the Scripture says them. I say it to you in the sense that you are to raise me up in all human activities, in the sense that all over the world there should be Christians with a personal and very free dedication, who will be other Christs.’”
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