In Trinity..the Father Suffers

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Dear Fellow Sons and Daughters of God – 17 July 2014
What I share with you here is truly new to me. And it opens other avenues of thought.

Please let me introduce first Fr Raniero Cantalamessa OFM Cap. “In 1980 he was appointed as preacher to the papal household by Pope [St] John II. He still serves in this capacity, preaching a weekly sermon during Advent and Lent in the presence of Pope [now Emeritus] Benedict XVI.” The following three paragraphs are from his sermons to the papal household, some now printed.

In the following three paragraphs he is concurring with and expresses recent Trinitarian work of Hans Urs von Balthasar. They read >
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“For him [von Balthasar] what happens at the cross is, in some way, a reflection of what happens within the Trinity itself since before time began.  In his act of generating the Son, the Father dispossesses himself totally of his divinity to give it to the Son in an absolute renunciation of being God by *himself*.  It is a ‘theo-drama,’ a divine drama that unfolds within the bosom of God himself;  the infinite movement of the divine persons giving themselves to one another implies a movement of separation, with the two entities maintained and transcended thanks to the [Holy] Spirit  The Holy Spirit, who is the love of God in a Person, is, consequently, also ‘the sorrow of God in a Person” and is thus present at the cross. 

“These new developments in trinitarian theology had a historical impetus.  How do we still speak of God after Auschwitz?  Where was God then?  The answer that was given from a rereading of the Bible and from certain voices buried in tradition [the writings of the early Fathers of the Church] was that **God was with people in their suffering.**  God is not unfeeling;  *in a mysterious way* **he suffers for human beings and with them: ‘God the Father suffers the suffering of love.’**

“The International Theological Commission pronounced a substantially positive judgment on this new direction, and, with all the required clarifications and cautions, it was favorably received by Pope [St] John Paul II in his encyclical *Dominum et vivificantem.*”
	**Contemplating the Trinity,** Raniero Cantalamessa OFM Capuchins, pp. 	27-28; Italian 2002, Eng 2007, The Word among Us Press, Ijamsville MD 21754
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I have always known that the Second Divine Person, Jesus Christ, literally suffered in his human nature. It is new to me that “in a mysterious way” God the Father also suffers for and with us. Our understanding of God continues with the help of the Holy Spirit to grow into a greater fullness.

I have shared this with you. I Bless you with God’s Love.
Please pray for me. JohnJFarren
 
I would think that this makes perfect sense when understood correctly. He suffers most who loves most. Who loves the most? God, not just the Person of Jesus Christ, but the Three Persons of God equally.

Remember, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son that whosoever believes on Him should not perish but have everlasting life.”

Thanks for the post! 👍
 
There was a cross in the Holy Trinity even before the one on Calvary. Thank you for these thoughts of how God suffers for each one of us. These thoughts including about the Suffering God will hopefully be included for the Eastern Orthodox to know as well. It to my understanding on these issues that our Lord Jesus suffers for each one us in a way we do not think about. Pascal had written that Jesus is in agony until the end of the world. Jesus still suffers. The Father must also suffer. We do not think about this and yet our Lord Jesus when He appeared before the young St. Maria Faustina with much wounds in a vision said to her how long shall I wait for you! It is thoughtful that our Lord rather than to see Him gloriously resurrected has chosen to still be part of His creation by suffering through it. He will not release Himself from this suffering until we decide to be at His side. Yet He makes Himself the same with each person identifying Himself to be identified as this Suffering servant for each person.
 
Mystophilus said:
What really stands out to me, and makes no sense at all to me, is this claim here.
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The love which the Father has for His Son is that the Father thinks solely of His Son without thinking about Himself. In truth this is the love that is within the Trinity as the Father gives of Himself totally to His Son. The Son in return thinks only of His Father as He does not think of Himself. True Agape love is what we do for others. This is the love which the Trinity is trying to teach to us. We are in fact raised higher through the love which the Trinity has for us which sacrifices their own interests. I believe this I what I believe the speaker is trying to relay to us in those words which he had addressed about the Father’s relationship to the Son.
 
Mystophilus said:
What really stands out to me, and makes no sense at all to me, is this claim here.
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I believe it refers to the fact that the Person of the Father gives Himself completely to the Son, and that God giving Himself completely doesn’t take away anything from Himself.

Remember further on it says this, " infinite movement of the divine persons giving themselves to one another implies a movement of separation, with the two entities maintained and transcended thanks to the [Holy] Spirit The Holy Spirit"

It isn’t that the Father loses His divinity or anything of Himself when He dispossesses Himself to generate the Son but the Son is everlasting the complete gift of the Father and the Son in return completely gives Himself to the Father and this Love is Manifest as the Third Person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit.

St. Augustine, in his books On the Trinity, sums it up well as: The Lover, the Loved, and Love Itself. I hope I’m able to understand and teach this correctly, if not may I be reproved of any errors.
 
Mystophilus said:
Except for the fact that that is what that word means, which is why it makes no sense.
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Yes, I understand what the word means but it must be understood differently when applied to God as compared to when it is applied to men. If I dispossessed myself of my clothing I’d be naked, cold, etc. but God giving completely of Himself in grace doesn’t mean when He should give us grace that He loses any grace in Himself, though.

This is what St. Hilary of Poitiers says akin to what we’re talking of in his ‘De Trinitate.’

“If in our discussion of the nature and birth of God we adduce certain analogies, let no one suppose that such comparisons are perfect and complete. There can be no comparison between God and earthly things, yet the weakness of our understanding forces us to seek for illustrations from a lower sphere to explain our meaning about loftier themes. The course of daily life shews how our experience in ordinary matters enables us to form conclusions on unfamiliar subjects. We must therefore regard any comparison as helpful to man rather than as descriptive of God, since it suggests, rather than exhausts, the sense we seek. Nor let such a comparison be thought too bold when it sets side by side carnal and spiritual natures, things invisible and things palpable, since it avows itself a necessary aid to the weakness of the human mind, and deprecates the condemnation due to an imperfect analogy.”

Basically, we can only poorly describe Who God is and what He does. Jesus Christ gives Himself completely to us but He doesn’t lose Himself at all in any way. God’s expenditure of Himself can never exhaust or diminish one ounce of Himself since He is the eternal and infinite.
 
JeshurunPetrus said:
Yes, I understand what the word means but it must be understood differently when applied to God as compared to when it is applied to men.
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I am afraid that I disagree: the problem is not the individual application of the expression “dispossesses himself totally”, nor the necessity to develop a new, contextually-specific denotation for that expression, but the choice of that expression in the first place. The theology is fine: it is the writing which irks.
 
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