Jesus Christ in Glory

The question is who this God-man, Jesus Christ, really is. And, since a person is known by his words and his actions, we will look at some of the words that he spoke and some of the things that he did.

We know that Christ embraced the Ten Commandments handed down by Yahweh through Moses, but he went far beyond the Old Law in his Sermon on the Mount, and during his last discourse at the Last Supper. We will examine the manner in which he taught us to live and see the grandeur in which he himself prayed. Scholars agree that the Last Discourse in St. John’s Gospel is the greatest composition of Christianity ever written.

Part of the Last Discourse is that section which some have called his last will and testament. It is that moment when Jesus talks about his leaving the earth and his sending the Paraclete to be our helper.

We will look at what he promised to those who keep his commandments: the state of supreme happiness, heaven.

And we will think about what is so horrible that we usually cringe from the thought: hell.

Through the eyes of the Evangelist, we will be awe-struck at the scenery of the Last Judgment and the multitudes of angels and saints surrounding the Throne of God.

Now, personally, I am on a journey for the truth. I will go wherever the truth leads me. This is a serious matter because the truth that I find will affect my way of life. I am on a journey to re-discover the truth about Jesus Christ.

I had studied Theology back in the sixties when I was a Jesuit in training. In fact, by then in 1960, I had been a Jesuit scholastic for ten years. I already had a degree in Philosophy and one in Science and had taught in High School and in College. The great adventure into Theology, the Queen of the Sciences, had begun. I found myself at Woodstock College outside of Baltimore, trying to learn Scholastic Theology with such mentors as John Courtney Murray, Gustav Weigel, Avery Dulles (now a Cardinal), and the scripture scholar, Joseph Fitzmyer.

It was slow going. Some of the courses were still in Latin, but I was fluent in Latin in those days. John Courtney Murray would lecture on the Trinity in Latin. I thought to myself, "I can’t understand this subject even in English, how in the world am I going to learn this in Latin?" But, of course, St. Thomas Aquinas had written the Summa Theologiae in Latin, so to be a real student of Thomas, one should study him in Latin. After four years of this routine, I had learned enough to pass the Ad Grad exam in Latin. The Ad Grad, in those days, was a two-hour oral exam before three professors of Theology covering all the courses we had taken.

Now, it is late in my life and I am re-discovering Theology again. I should mention that I left the order of the Jesuits in 1968, went to work for the newly formed Office of Economic Opportunity, the War on Poverty, married, had two daughters and now am about to be a grandfather.

After a serious operation, a cervical laminectomy, I have recovered enough to be interested in life again. Perhaps, I should say I am more interested in the next life again like I was back in the sixties.

So, in my retirement years, I am devoting myself to re-learning Theology. But in the meantime, the quest for the Historical Jesus has reached the shores of the United States, after nearly a century of scholarship among the Europeans, mainly the Germans and the French. The best of their scholarship has been translated into English and can be bought in any bookstore. In the aftermath of the archeological discoveries at Nag Hammadi in Egypt and the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran, scripture scholars tell us that they have been able to reconstruct the text of the New Testament writings to be as close to the original documents as humanly possible.

But, much has changed in the way we interpret the New Testament writings. We no longer say, "Jesus said . . . ". We prefer to say, "It is said that Jesus said . . . ". We no longer read the text as if every word were to be understood as literally true. We now know that the writings are in the genre of Hadadi Midrash. They were not meant to be biographies of the life of Christ, but rather, evangelical documents that were read aloud to small gatherings of faithful Christians, fearful of the Jews and the Romans; fearful for good reasons: many of them would be persecuted and martyred for their belief in the Incarnated God, Jesus Christ.

What are we to do with all this new knowledge about the New Testament writings? Are we to lose faith and say it was only a religion like many others that sprung up around the eastern Mediterranean in those days, filled with magic and miracles. There were myths and cults and religions for every little country in the mid-east. Was Christianity just another one that somehow hung on until it was made the State religion by Constantine?

Well, that is why I began to look at the evidence all over again. And this is what I found.

Wallace S. Jungers

March 15, 2001