You Crown the Year with Your Goodness by Hans Urs von Balthasar

Author:Hans Urs von Balthasar [Balthasar, Hans Urs von]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Spiritual & Religion
ISBN: 9780898700589
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 1989-10-31T16:00:00+00:00

God’s Simplicity

Let us listen to today’s Sunday Gospel:

At that time Jesus declared, “I thank thee, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to babes; yea, Father, for such was thy gracious will. All things have been given to me by my Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and any one to whom the Son chooses to reveal him. Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Mt 11:25-30).

These astonishing words of Jesus, which give so many headaches to the exegetes, the clever and wise, just will not go away. We, the simple, must accept them as they are uttered; for they themselves exhibit a simplicity and clarity that will not admit any artificial “explanation”. Hence the jubilant tone of the first sentence: it has pleased the Father to reveal his mysteries particularly to the simple; this leads on to the tremendous claim made in the second sentence that no one but the Son can initiate us into the mysteries of the Father; and this in turn leads to the amazingly open invitation uttered in the third sentence: difficult and problematical people that we are, we can find rest and refreshment with the Son, because the complicated, heavy issues of our lives are transformed, in his simplicity, into light burdens. These three points are quite different, yet all three converge on the crystal-clear soul, mind and heart of Jesus, which are open to us without reserve and show us his relation both to the Father and to us. These two relations constitute his whole interior life, his whole interest and his whole sense of being alive. For the Son, as Jesus here calls himself, is the unique, incomparable Person whose life is exclusively a coming from and a going to the Father; he draws wearied men into this cyclic rhythm in order to free them from their heavy and often totally unnecessary burdens, to save them from internal stagnation. He wants to draw them into the fluid, eternal stream of love that circulates between Father and Son, where the burdens of the temporal dimension hardly seem to weigh anything at all.

This glimpse into the Son’s heart reveals to us the complete unity of what to us seems so hard to reconcile. On the one hand we have a staggering self-awareness and equally staggering claims: “No one knows the Father except the Son and any one to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.” But on the other hand we have a humility and lowliness that are just as astonishing: “for I am gentle and lowly in heart”. How can these two things

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