Benedict XVI: Jesus Shows Us the Face of God
Is the webmaster for the Archdiocese of Boston in quoting the Pope suggesting anything?
Dear Brothers and Sisters,
During the Christmas season we celebrated the mystery of the Incarnation as the culmination of God’s gradual self-revelation to Israel, a revelation mediated by those great figures such as Moses and the Prophets who kept alive the expectation of God’s fulfilment of his promises. Jesus, the Word made flesh, is truly God among us, “the mediator and the fullness of all revelation” (Dei Verbum, 2). In him, the ancient blessing is fulfilled: God has made his face to shine upon us (cf.Num 6:25). As the Incarnate Son, the one mediator between God and man (cf. 1 Tim 2:5), Jesus does not simply speak to us about God; he shows us the very face of God and enables us to call him our Father. As he says to the apostle Philip, “whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (Jn14:9). May our desire to see the Lord’s face grow through our daily encounter with him in prayer, in meditation on his word and in the Eucharist, and thus prepare us to contemplate for ever the light of his countenance in the fullness of his eternal Kingdom.
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Is the Shroud real? Probably.
The Shroud of Turin may be the real burial cloth of Jesus. The carbon dating, once seemingly proving it was a medieval fake, is now widely thought of as suspect and meaningless. Even the famous Atheist Richard Dawkins admits it is controversial. Christopher Ramsey, the director of the Oxford Radiocarbon Laboratory, thinks more testing is needed. So do many other scientists and archeologists. This is because there are significant scientific and non-religious reasons to doubt the validity of the tests. Chemical analysis, all nicely peer-reviewed in scientific journals and subsequently confirmed by numerous chemists, shows that samples tested are chemically unlike the whole cloth. It was probably a mixture of older threads and newer threads woven into the cloth as part of a medieval repair. Recent robust statistical studies add weight to this theory. Philip Ball, the former physical science editor for Nature when the carbon dating results were published, recently wrote: “It’s fair to say that, despite the seemingly definitive tests in 1988, the status of the Shroud of Turin is murkier than ever.” If we wish to be scientific we must admit we do not know how old the cloth is. But if the newer thread is about half of what was tested – and some evidence suggests that – it is possible that the cloth is from the time of Christ.
No one has a good idea how front and back images of a crucified man came to be on the cloth. Yes, it is possible to create images that look similar. But no one has created images that match the chemistry, peculiar superficiality and profoundly mysterious three-dimensional information content of the images on the Shroud. Again, this is all published in peer-reviewed scientific journals.
We simply do not have enough reliable information to arrive at a scientifically rigorous conclusion. Years ago, as a skeptic of the Shroud, I came to realize that while I might believe it was a fake, I could not know so from the facts. Now, as someone who believes it is the real burial shroud of Jesus of Nazareth, I similarly realize that a leap of faith over unanswered questions is essential.
My name is Dan Porter. Please email me at DanielRobertPorter@gmail.com
Yes, it suggests the beatific vision when we see God as he is. He certainly is not referring to the Shroud image.
I couldn’t succeed in opening the URL. It went to the site of the URL OK, but ony showed up as a two panel blank screen, I’m guessing the webmaster may have been working on it at the tme.
I’d go a little further than Andy, check:- “Jesus does not simply speak to us about God; he shows us the very face of God and enables us to call him our Father.” I read this as meaning that we can see God in the incarnation or person of Jesus, who presents God in human form, which enables us to call God our Father. God is not some remote merely spiritual or idealised being, as perhaps represented in some other religions (c.f. Judaism, Islam, Platonism etc).
As a theologian Benedict XVI is roughly echoing what the late Protestant biblical scholar Ernst Käsemann meant when he wrote that the closest we can get to the manifestation of God is Jesus.
I succeeded in getting to the web-site second time round, suggest you check it out. Dan: “Is the WEBMASTER for the Archdiocese of Boston in quoting the Pope suggesting anything?” I’d say the webmaster certainly is, interpreting Benedict a little bit too freely! Subtle(?) implication! I don’t really think the illustration there had been the intent of Benedict’s original message, but more along the lines that I and others have indicated above.
Cardinal Sean O’ Malley is a Capuchin and whether the webmaster obtained his “Nihil obstat” is difficult to say. In 1988 the Carmelite Cardinal Anastasio Ballestrero is said to have been influenced by his religious order’s scepticism regarding “material supports” and there is some support for that point of view in the photograph where he appeared leaning over the Shroud. As everyone in the realm of Shroud studies knows, that led to disastrous consequences —- some say Professor Luigi Gonella was also sceptical —- and Ballestrero later admitted that he had been manipulated.
Whatever the case, the Volto Santo Church in Italy designed by architect Mario Botta (seen on the topboxdesign website) has the Shroud face at the altar. So perhaps the webmaster may have seen this as some justification for the image he posted. And then it is very different, for example, from Caravaggio’s first version (1601) of the “Supper at Emmaus”, with the post-Resurrection clean-shaven Christ, the rationale for this in the Gospel of Mark, chapter 12. His own idea about the appearance of Christ appeared in the second version (1606) of Emmaus.
People who don’t know about this are puzzled when they only see the first version. Some years ago, while I was looking at the original in London, a group of very young school children appeared and sat on the floor to look at it and learn something about its history. The first question the teacher asked the kids was why Christ was beardless.
The common idea of the bearded first-century Jew Jesus (very unlike the clean-shaven Romans) is kind of stuck in our minds and the webmaster did not have to look around for the best image.