The Virgin and Child by Kyra Belán

Author:Kyra Belán [Belán, Kyra]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781683254638
Publisher: Parkstone Press International

Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio), Madonna of the Pilgrims or The Madonna of Loreto, 1604-1605. Oil on canvas, 260 x 150 cm. Basilica of Sant’Agostino in Campo Marzio, Rome.

Rembrandt (Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn), The Twelve Year Old Jesus in front of the Scribes, c. 1655. Oil on canvas, 97.5 x 129 cm. Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Passover in the Holy Family, 1856. Watercolour on paper, 40.6 x 43.2 cm. Tate Collection, London.

It seems also that his sojourn with John, less by the action of the Baptist than by the natural progress of his own thought, greatly matured his ideas upon “the kingdom of heaven”. His watchword thenceforth is “good tidings”, the announcement that the kingdom of God is at hand. Jesus will no longer be a delightful moralist aspiring to concentrate sublime lessons in a few brief and living statements; he is the transcendent revolutionist who trys to renew the world from its deepest foundations, and to establish upon earth the ideal which he has conceived. “To await the kingdom of God”, will be synonymous with being a disciple of Jesus. The words “kingdom of God” or “kingdom of heaven”, as we have already said, had long been familiar to the Jews, but Jesus gave them a moral sense, a social bearing, which even the author of the Book of Daniel, in his apocalyptic enthusiasm, hardly dared to glance.

The coming of this reign of good will be a grand and sudden revolution. The world seemed overturned; the present state of things being bad, in order to represent the future it sufficed to imagine nearly the contrary of every thing in existence. The first shall be last. A new order shall govern humanity. Now good and evil are mixed like tares and good grain in the field. The master permits them to grow together; but the hour of violent separation will come. The kingdom of God will be like a great cast of the net, which gathers good and bad fish; the good are placed in vessels, and the rest are cast away. The germ of this grand revolution will be at first unrecognisable. It will be like a grain of mustard seed, which is the least of seeds, but which, cast into the earth, becomes a tree in the branches of which the birds come and lodge, or again it will be like the leaven which, put into the dough, ferments the entire mass. A series of parables, often obscure, was designed to express the surprises of this sudden advent, its apparent injustice, its inevitable and definitive character.

Who will establish this reign of God? Let us remember that the first idea of Jesus, an idea so deep in him that it probably had no origin, but inhered in the very roots of his being, was that he was the son of God, the intimate of his Father, the executor of his will. The response of Jesus to such a question could not therefore be doubtful. The conviction that he was to bring about the reign of God took absolute possession of his soul.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.