Behold the Pierced One

Behold the Pierced One, by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, is a collection of Christological meditations which he wrote in 1981 (my birth year) while Prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith. At 128 pages it’s highly readable and replete with the kinds of insights we’d expect from a future pope.

The following are just a few of the reflections that I took from the book, but I want to make clear to everyone that my reflections will hardly do justice to this great work by the man who is today the Holy Father. In short, this book is a gem: read it.

The book, as this layman reads it, speaks about Christ in two ways: first at the person of Christ himself, and then at how what we know about Christ himself translates into the lives of Christians who are called to imitate him and communicate him to others. First and foremost in the cardinal’s reflections is the observation of the centrality of prayer in the life of Christ. Ratzinger calls our attention to Jesus’ “constant communication with the Father,” making the simple and powerful observation that “Jesus died praying.” And for us Christians, it is not merely that we should pray ourselves, but that we must “participate in his prayer” if we are to know and understand him.

The cardinal goes on to observe that participation in Jesus’ prayer necessarily means a communion with all others who do so as well, and this communion is the “Body of Christ,” “the Church.”

At some points in the book Benedict even resembles the teaching and language of John Paul II (which is interesting considering it was written near the beginning of JPII's pontificate). For example at one point he observes that “when the human will is taken up into the will of God, freedom is not destroyed; indeed, only then does genuine freedom come into its own.” In my ongoing reading of Ratzinger, this is turning out to be a shared theme of his and John Paul II’s. This makes sense as it is perhaps one of the most important messages that the Church can speak in today’s dictatorship of relativism: that freedom is not advanced when people make themselves the authority on good and evil. It is only when man submits to the Source of freedom that real freedom can be obtained.

I've already excerpted the book a couple of times on this blog, but I tell ya folks, I haven't even scratched the surface. Highly recommended.