Life intervened to prevent blogging the past few days, but since September 12th looms near I will try to crank out more than one post today.

For now, I just want to call attention to a key line on xiv of Jesus of Nazareth:  quoting Schnackenburg as saying that “without anchoring in God, the person of Jesus remains shadowy, unreal, and unexplainable,” Pope Benedict goes on to say:  “This is also the point around which I will construct my own book.”  Any time an author is so kind as to tell us the main point of his entire book in one sentence, we as readers should sit up and pay attention.  The Pope goes on to say of his book:  “It sees in light of his communion with the Father, which is the true center of his personality; without it, we cannot understand him at all, and it is from this center that he makes himself present to us still today.”

This reminds me of a marvelous text in the Summa where St. Thomas discusses the “mission” or “being sent” of Jesus.  He argues that to be sent includes two ideas:  being somewhere new and being from another.  The Word of God was always everywhere, of course, but through the Incarnation he came to be in our world in a new way, a bodily way.  Moreover, Jesus is wholly identical with the Father except insofar as he is from the Father, so “being from” is what sets him apart as a person, what constitutes him as who he is.  Because he was newly in our world, and because his very person is to be from the father, he was necessarily “sent” into our world.

This is Thomas’s systematic theological way of arguing that Jesus’ earthly mission in its totality was a revelation of his relation to the Father; his “being sent” was, top to bottom, a revelation of his “being here” and his “being from”.  Finally, you can’t talk about the Incarnation without talking about the Trinity; you can’t talk about Jesus without talking about the Father; anyone who has seen Jesus has seen the Father.

If St. Thomas is right, then Pope Benedict has picked not just a good approach but the only approach that makes sense in a book about the life of Jesus.  His communion with the Father is the true center of his person because his very person is God-from-the-Father.