Posted on 01/04/2016 1:53:48 PM PST by BlatherNaut
Jesus asked God the Father to forgive others. He never asked anyone to forgive Him.
Well, okay, he asked Mary Magdalen to forgive Him, but that was only a movie.
To be serious, there is a simple and obvious reason why Jesus never asked anyone to forgive Him: He never committed a sin.
That's because, while fully man, he was also fully God, and God doesn't commit sins, even, you know, small ones.
Incredibly, the Pope (the Pope!) doesn't seem to understand or believe this. In his homily for the feast of the Holy Family he claimed (emphasis in red): At the end of that pilgrimage, Jesus returned to Nazareth and was obedient to his parents (cf. Lk 2:51). This image also contains a beautiful teaching about our families. A pilgrimage does not end when we arrive at our destination, but when we return home and resume our everyday lives, putting into practice the spiritual fruits of our experience. We know what Jesus did on that occasion. Instead of returning home with his family, he stayed in Jerusalem, in the Temple, causing great distress to Mary and Joseph who were unable to find him. For this little “escapadeâ€, Jesus probably had to beg forgiveness of his parents. The Gospel doesn’t say this, but I believe that we can presume it. Mary’s question, moreover, contains a certain reproach, revealing the concern and anguish which she and Joseph felt. Now, of course, if we believe the Bible account, we know what really happened. Jesus didn't beg forgiveness when His parents finally found Him. Instead: When they saw Him, they were astonished; and His mother said to Him, "Son, why have You treated us this way? Behold, Your father and I have been anxiously looking for You." And He said to them, "Why is it that you were looking for Me? Did you not know that I had to be in My Father's house?" But they did not understand the statement which He had made to them.… In my view, that's one of the most memorable passages in the New Testament. Through a window of 2,000 years you can feel the concern, and then the astonishment, of Mary and Joseph. They were worried about their son, as any parents would be. Interestingly, though, while they get an answer they didn't expect--"I was in My Father's House"--an answer that in the mouth of any other child would have been interpreted as obnoxious at the least, they do not reproach Him or box his ears, etc. Rather, Luke records them as being merely puzzled. I think they were also awed. They knew their son was heaven sent, even if they did not yet know He was God.
But back to the Pope. He makes statements that no knowledgable and faithful Christian would ever make. He either doesn't know his Christian teachings or he disagrees with them.
I do not think any more that he believes that Jesus was the Son of God.
Is the Pope Catholic? Well, he was baptized, obviously, and he was confirmed as a Catholic and then as a priest. So. in that sense, of course he's a Catholic. On the other hand, in terms of subscribing to Catholic teachings, the evidence suggests that the answer would be no.
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A word on sources. This homily is taken from the Official Vatican Network. But I was directed to it by Novus Ordo Watch. The funny/unfunny blog title picture is from their post. Novus Ordo Watch is a sedevacantist group. I am not a sedevacantist, and there's about as much chance of me ever becoming one as there is of me opening up a brothel in Tangiers or becoming a Sufi . . . or being elected President of the United States. If you have read many of my posts, you will also see that I disagree with the Novus guys on a great many matters.
But you know what? Aside from falsely (in my view) believing that the Pope is NOT the Pope, they've been more right and less wrong about Pope matters than the majority of Catholic bloggers. Give them some credit, unless you're one of those people who has an inordinate fear of what other people think.
Pray for them. And pray for all of us.
Well, there you go.
The Pope is a PIP!!!
The problem with the Pope is that he’s neither very smart nor very well educated. He’s a leftist and barely knows the Faith, but like many of his ilk, he’s a preening sentimentalist.
The unfortunate thing is that he’s also a ruthless careerist, and now that he’s gotten to the top of the heap, he’s proving to be a ruthless dictator. But nobody said a dictator had to be smart - just ruthless.
“Our Father....”
Bergoglio is smart enough to have manipulated his own election to the chair of Peter.
No problem in sentiment; big problem in preening.
I’d kind of wonder where they are on Mary, if she was supposed to be sinless too, or even (as the bible DOES testify) “full of grace.” She’d understand what Jesus meant once He explained. That this Boy was spiritually serious enough to go to the temple, and that it was not His fault they lost track of Him. There shouldn’t have even been a fuss at that point.
Ruthless is the word that I used.
Sentiment is all about preening - it’s always for the benefit of the audience. Everything he does or says is with an eye on the media.
You also used the word “smart” which is where I disagree with you. Bergoglio is much smarter than you think he is.
Come on, the bible talks about hard hearts and loss of sensitivity. To damn the media for the sake of the message is just wrong.
Romans 3:23
When you go into that, the theology gets kind of odd to us wascally evangelicals. She is supposed to have had the unique circumstance of being completely saved before her conception. Now normally this is the point at which a human will go to heaven, but she stuck around to give birth to Jesus... I have a hard time wrapping my head around this, but it’s needed for the role they assign to her.
But at any rate, if Francis isn’t even succeeding in being Catholic, something is weird.
I’d have a harder time with the idea of being saved WITHOUT going to heaven. It just doesn’t fit the larger bible narrative. About the perishable needing to put on the imperishable, and thus forth. The company of Jesus appears to be necessary in the bible narrative to bring any kind of perfected saint back to earthly visibility. Evangelicals have a point in looking at this as a deus ex machina, after the fact construction here.
This wasn’t the only time they were caught at such a disadvantage, though. How about the entire Babylonian captivity? This seems too simple to be the explanation, and it is....
Since he was sinless, why would he beg forgiveness?
Doesn’t fit at all, and what’s more it shouldn’t have been even expected. It sounds like a mutual misunderstanding between the parents, who hustled off leaving the boy Jesus at the temple, who then occupied Himself talking with the priests and amazing them. Not His fault. He could express sorrow for the parting without having to “beg forgiveness.”
Or in the hypothesis of a sinless Mary, she had counted on Joseph but he didn’t follow through... but still... at any rate for her to have been talking about Him as though He had done something wrong was wrong of her. A sinless Mary ought to know what was up wouldn’t we think?...
It’s like the story just doesn’t support the sinless-Mary explanation, the more it is looked at.
And maybe that’s dawning on Francis even though he’s looking at it from the wrong angle. It might have to be Catholic theologians who will have to do some apologizing... not Jesus.
The “pope” obviously knows not God, the righteousness of Jesus Christ. He needs to be saved.
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