The Passion of the Word. Chapter 5

Die ewige Wunde, 2023

Medieval devotion focused on the Passion of Christ and the veneration of his wounds. The side wound symbolised Christ’s dual nature as human and divine, and became a central motif in prayer books and prints from the 14th to the 16th century. This essay explores people’s interactions with wound images and shows that wound worship was not just a cerebral exercise, but a corporeal and intensely emotional one. The textual and visual sources reveal the extraordinary power of the imagination to connect with eternity through the holy wound.

Teologia, 2023

A bstract The First Peter speaks of wounded people in a Christian community living in the situation of suffering. The metaphor " a trial by fire" (IPe 4:12) allows the reader to gue$s how distressed this situation is. The author draws the passion of Christ from Isaiah's Suffering Servant song (vv. 21-22; see Isa 53:9). This portrait underlines that the salvific purpose of Jesús Christ's historical journey gives meaning to his disciples' sufferings and constitutes for them the foundation of their hope. Peter's most profound Christological Statement, with terms of which are not found elsewhere in Scripture, comes in Peter's address to slaves (IPe 2:22-25). Nonetheless, the reader today must take up this striking message, in his own context. Some questions emerge from the passage: How does Christ's example of self-gift on the cross speaks to wounded people today? How does the cali to imítate Christ offers reassuranCe and hope to wounded people? To answer them, this article aims to provide some elements, which are also valuable to deepen the dimensions of "atoning death, vicarious and substitutionary suffering" and "exemplarity" that the Christological portrait in the First Letter of Peter reveáis.

The Passion of the Word. Chapter 3, 2023

"... It is the silence of the earth wounded by the farmer’s plough. It is a fertile silence; it speaks to the heart as God does, without the sound of voice. It leaves a void in the soul, enlarges the wounds and deepens them and causes them to bleed. We must listen to the silence of God and of His Servant. Does God suffer? This is a terrible question. I do not know if God suffers, but I do know that His Servant suffered, and perhaps in him God suffers. Then I began to wonder, Who is the Servant of God? He says he does not break the bruised reed, he does not extinguish the smoking flax; therefore he feels the tears, even of things – of the crushed reed, of the languishing flame, the flame that sinks and rises again as if by a painful effort. Poor smoking wick, its strength failing and its heart filled with darkness; turning to ashes even as it struggles to give its last light. Poor smoking flax, the life is exhausted in it before it dies; it fights desperately trying to give light to others – to men. How pitiful! And the pity of it the Servant of God feels fully. The flame of the dying flax sinks and rises. It is a struggle between life and death, between being and not being, between light and darkness. But the bruised reed lying on the ground no longer gives any sign of life. The dying flame is spending itself; it dies and the dead are poorer than the dying. Who is poorer than one who is dead? The languishing flame looks somewhat like one dead but fitfully restored by a fresh impulse of life. But the wounded reed is a dead reed, dead forever. The Servant of God feels the anguish of the smoking flax, and the unspeakable tragedy of the yellowed reed lying in the mud, deprived of all life. But he, the Servant of God, passes in silence, with his heart open, and he receives them with love. Both are silent: true sorrow and true love. Who was this Servant of God? … The sins committed by men offend God. It seems to me that God is wounded, God suffers in His justice or in His mercy. He suffers because of the man who sins, He suffers with the man who sins because the man’s condition is more pitiful than the smoking flax and the bruised reed which moved the Servant of God to pity…” Eugenio Zollie, Before the Dawn

The article discusses the spectacle of Christ's wounds after His resurrection based on the account from the Gospel of John within the context of the dogmatic meaning of the resurrection from the dead and what it entails for humans. It mainly addresses the reasons why Christ was eager to show the scars of His Passion although His human nature had indeed transformed into an incorruptible, perfected and de-ified one. This gesture was proof that the person who had suffered was the same person who had defeated death, sacrificed His life and had risen from the dead out of His limitless love for the human race. The author then draws the link between this dogmatic truth and the ethos of the ecclesiastical life, as he contends that the members of the Church should lead a Christ-like life by being compassionate and affectionate towards other peoples' suffering, i.e. the suffering of the entire world. ▶

Illness and suffering have marked the human existence ever since Adam. Due to the great impact that these afflictions have always had on human life, the Church has directed her attention towards them, has theologised about them, and has included them in her rituals in an attempt to help men understand and defeat them through a life of communion with the crucified and resurrected Jesus Christ. Through participation in the liturgical life of the Church, men can and do find healing for their physical and spiritual sufferings when they ascribe such important life experiences to their personal relationship with God, the only realm that provides answers and solutions to all human realities. The prayers for the sick that are read during the Mystery of Holy Unction are less concerned with the healing or health of the sick person, and more with entrusting the sufferer's whole being unto God's mercy and care, as He is the only "Physician of our souls and bodies", He Who with His all-encompassing kindness and providence knows what a man needs to have in order to attain everlasting happiness.

The Passion of the Word. Chapter 12, 2023

“As the wind moves through the harp and the strings speak, So the Spirit of the Lord speaks through my members, and I speak through his love... For there went forth a stream... Then all the thirsty upon the earth drank... Blessed, therefore, are the ministers of that drink, who have been entrusted with this water. They have refreshed the parched lips, and have aroused the paralyzed will …” The wounds which the Fourth Song describes have become the source of blessing and are known to be so by the Early Church. It is the language of mystics, yet it belongs to the Hymn Book of the Early Christian Communities. It gives an insight into the profundity of the love for Christ which animated the soul of the Early Church, the intensity of their relationship with Him. It needed to be so, not least as they were subject to persecution, and therefore it was a voice of mutual love from within their own suffering. It is the language of John the Beloved Disciple and of the mystic, of the soul who is not afraid to unlock the doors of the heart for the Beloved, who hears Him knocking and rises to admit Him. He enters in and sits down to eat and drink. This mystic union with the Christ is the desire of the ages.

Acta Theologica

Pessoa Plural―A Journal of Fernando Pessoa Studies, 2018

WINER, Andrew, "The Pain of the Wound And the Balm of Having Understood the Gods" (2018). Pessoa Plural―A Journal of Fernando Pessoa Studies, No. 14, Fall, pp. 394-397. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library. https://doi.org/10.26300/9nx4-0x23 Is Part of: Pessoa Plural―A Journal of Fernando Pessoa Studies, Issue 14 The Pain of the Wound and the Balm of having understood the Gods [A Dor da Ferida e o Bálsamo de ter compreendido os Deuses] https://doi.org/10.26300/9nx4-0x23 PESSOA, Fernando (2017). The Book of Disquiet. Edited by Jerónimo Pizarro. Translated by Margaret Jull Costa. New York: New Directions, 2017, 468 p. [ISBN: 9780811226936]. (UK edition of the same book, with a different cover, by Serpent’s Tail.)

“May we stand within the fire Of your Sacred Heart, and raise To our God in joyful choir All creation’s song of praise”. James P. McAuley.

Boram Cha, 2015

The Annual Conference of the Society of the Study of Theology, University of Nottingham, April 2015 (Christology and Trinity Stream)