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Rod Bennett’s new book, These Twelve, helps us see Jesus’ mission through the eyes of the Apostles. For Holy Week, Bennett reflects on what the Apostle’s experienced as Jesus continued to teach them even as he suffered his passion.
Cy Kellett:
Holy Week through the eyes of the apostles. Rod Bennett is next.
Cy Kellett:
Hello, and welcome to Focus, the Catholic Answers podcast for living, understanding, and defending your Catholic faith. I’m Cy Kellett, your host, and for Holy Week, a special conversation with Rod Bennett. Many people know Rod Bennett as the author of the very, very popular and very helpful book Four Witnesses: The Early Church in Her Own Words. He’s the author of many other books as well and his newest is These Twelve: The Gospel Through the Apostles’ Eyes. We asked if rod would come in and just talk to us about Holy Week through the eyes of the apostles and here’s what he had to say.
Cy Kellett:
Rod Bennett, author of Four Witnesses: The Early Church in Her Own Words, and many other fine books, including this brand new one, These Twelve: The Gospel Through the Apostles’ Eyes. Thanks for being with us here.
Rod Bennett:
Excellent. Good to be here. I always enjoy speaking with you.
Cy Kellett:
Well, congratulations on the book. It being Holy Week this week, I wanted to ask you about the experience of the 12 apostles, what their experience of Holy Week was like. This whole project of yours in the book, These Twelve, we’ve spoken about this a little bit before, but it seems to me that it’s like getting a fresh look at Jesus. When you look at him through the eyes of the apostles.
Rod Bennett:
Well, that was the idea, anyway. Jesus, especially in His role as a teacher, that’s what’s most central when you look at it from this perspective, and that teaching continued right up into to the most of His departure from among us, so that definitely has a bearing on our Holy Week experience.
Cy Kellett:
But what a horrible week of education for the apostles, I mean.
Rod Bennett:
The school of hard knocks.
Cy Kellett:
Boy, yes. Right?
Rod Bennett:
Yep, yep.
Cy Kellett:
You talk a bit in the book about how you connect this Holy Week and all the events of Holy Week back to the transfiguration, to some degree, and you talk about why did the Lord only bring three of the apostles with Him up to the top of the Mount of transfiguration? Why does He tell them, “Don’t tell anybody, don’t talk about this with anybody”? What is the secret that He’s keeping as he heads towards Jerusalem?
Rod Bennett:
Well, He knows, I believe. A good way to express that is that He knows that each of the apostles has to learn the mystery of His identity, which is the central truth that He’s teaching during the whole three years of his public ministry. He’s teaching that to everybody, but most centrally, He’s teaching it to the apostles. We take it so for granted. We’ve heard since childhood, “Christ is the divine Son of God, the second Person of the Holy Trinity,” and all the rest of it.
Rod Bennett:
But all of that was exceptionally difficult, especially for Hebrews, even though it’s the ultimate flowering of their religion, it’s also a quantum leap forward, and many of the concepts that He found himself trying to impart are questions or concepts that the church was still wrestling with 300 years later at the time of the Council of Nicea, and in many ways still wrestling with today, the idea that we’ve totally unpacked the meaning or the mystery of the incarnation is presumptuous on our part. The Spirit continues to lead us into all truth, but we take for granted, we’ve learned a few catch phrases that give us the impression that we understand things that really, in many ways, we’ve only understood enough to confess to be a great mystery, so the process continues.
Cy Kellett:
Right, and the sincere Christian has to struggle with this. There’s no way that you can have a true faith in Christ as God and Son of God, without struggling with it. We act like you could teach it in catechism, and well, now you’ve got that right, and you got that right on the quiz, but it’s not a matter of getting it right on the quiz, it’s a matter of coming to know Him for who He is.
Rod Bennett:
There’s something to be said for the old Baltimore catechism technique of learning a set of question and answers, but at least in modern times, the dangers of a rote recital, an ability to regurgitate a set of phrases can sometimes replace an effort on the part of both student and teacher to actually grapple with the difficulties involved to stagger at the incredible vastness of the conception that we’re being introduced to.
Rod Bennett:
Even though the apostles were very bright men whose discipleship did not begin with their call to be Christ disciples, that’s one of the things that I found out while researching this book is that God didn’t just pick men at random, He picked people that were, had already been on a journey. There’s very, very good reason to believe that many, if not, most of them had learned their theology already, or prototheology on this subject, I suppose, from Christ’s precursor, John St. John, the Baptist, who was, after all, called to prepare the way of the Lord, so it shouldn’t be that much of a surprise. But they had already learned an awful lot by the time that Christ first called them, took them away from their old master and carried them off on His own. But they still had a lot to learn, as did the whole church, of which they’re the representatives at this point.
Cy Kellett:
This is a wonderful thing that I’ve been learning from you about this experiential kind of learning it, and its superiority, really, to a merely, I don’t know, a verbal kind of learning. It strikes me that, you made a point, I had never even thought about this, and tell me if I get it wrong, but at the beginning of Christ’s mission with the 12 apostles, the apostle Nathaniel recognizes him as Messiah and Son of God. But then Peter recognizes him later as Messiah and Son of God and he says to Peter, a big show of, “Blessed are you, Peter.” But your point, I think, is that Nathaniel doesn’t mean the same thing by it that Peter means by it when he says it later.
Rod Bennett:
Right. He doesn’t mean it, at least in its fullness, the term “Son of God,” it’s not as well-known as it should be. The term son of God is an Old Testament usage, and not just a prophecy of a coming Son of God, it’s used in all sorts of ways in the Old Testament, from speaking of the godly line of Seth’s descendants to the nation itself at several points is referred to as the Son of God. It’s one of the reasons why sometimes in our apologetics, we may overplay our hand by saying, “Here’s Christ proved as the Son of God,” or the evangelist calls Him the Son of God or whatever. It’s not a new term in Hebrew theology and it didn’t mean, or it didn’t always mean, or explicitly mean an incarnation of God Himself in human form, so yeah, unpacking that term, “Son of God,” took time, and it’s of the things we see happening in the lives of the apostles, and it’s one of the things we see happening in the early church, and it’s still happening now.
Cy Kellett:
Indeed it is. Right, right. One of the things about the transfiguration, then, is that Peter wants to build the booths, and you’re very generous to Peter there in a way that we’re usually not, we usually act like he’s some kind bumbling idiot there, but you say he’s not, he’s trying to worship, he just doesn’t what’s the proper way to worship here. But the point I want to get at is that in that moment of transfiguration, really, what Peter wants is to stay there with Jesus in a heavenly sense, and that can’t happen yet. Why can’t it happen yet?
Rod Bennett:
There are several difficult steps ahead that have to be accomplished before that kind of intimate union. Peter is not wrong to desire to stay on the mountain with Christ forever in a banquet, or picnic, in colloquial terms, of fellowship and closeness and intimacy. “It’s good for us to be here. Let’s stay here.” Well, Christ Himself tells us that the final result of everything He’s trying to do is a great banquet of intimacy between God and man, the restored fellowship that God called the children of Israel to at Mount Sinai, and that they were afraid to enter into fully, that kind of banquet, that marriage supper of the lamb, where we have that kind of fabulous intimate, “I’m standing at the door and knocking. If you’ll let me in, we’ll sup together. We’ll have fellowship together, you and I.”
Rod Bennett:
Peter wants to leap right to that. The experience of the transfiguration is so overpowering that he thinks maybe the job’s done. Maybe the things accomplished. This is the great apocalypse that God has now revealed in his fullness as man among us here and so Peter leaps to the conclusion that the divine banquet is already here and there’s good reason to think that that’s not a stupid thing. I mean, our hindsight is 20/20, but Jesus, sadly, I think has to remind him and remind all the apostles eventually that there is some hard mileage to cover before then, and that’s the events that we’re commemorating here in Holy Week.
Cy Kellett:
That brings us to Holy Week, then. I wanted to start that conversation about the apostles during Holy Week with what you think they were expecting to happen when Jesus went up to Jerusalem. I mean, as they walk into Jerusalem, what are the apostles thinking is happening now?
Rod Bennett:
Well, one another thing that I think that Christians neglect too much is the many, many prophets seas of a military deliverer, a Christ who will, three, put on David’s crown, sit on a real throne, come into Jerusalem and be welcomed as king, restore David’s house and that line of kings and cast off the heathen, persecutors, and conquerors, in that case, at the moment, the Romans that have held Israel back through the centuries, and achieved victory, all the promises made to Abraham and the other patriarchs here in this world.
Rod Bennett:
The number of prophecies about this, about the Son of God, about the Messiah coming to this world and setting things right, are so numerous that I think they actually probably outnumber the other kind of prophecies that we’re more familiar with, the wonderful counselor, the prince of peace, the one who comes to deliver us from our sins, and all the rest of it. All of that right now, the call to peace that is characteristic of the church age when the door is open and Jesus is tenderly calling sinners to come into the fold, join the family.
Rod Bennett:
Those two things are in a kind of tension with each other in prophecy, the military Messiah versus the suffering Savior, and it was very, very difficult to figure out which of those two we should look for before events showed us the way you had to live through the answer. You couldn’t just be given it in the form of a rote set of responses to a catechism. One of the things that the apostles have to do is try to say, “Well, how do we work these two things out together?” John Bergsma, in his really good book about the Dead Sea Scrolls, Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls, rolls. He points out that the Qumanrites, the people who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls, we think, they actually seem to have been expecting two different messiahs, and they weren’t wrong, in a sense. They just couldn’t see how the two, what seemed to be polar opposites, the meek lamb and the roaring lion, could be the same person. They just couldn’t see how they could square that.
Rod Bennett:
That gummed up all Old Testament efforts to understand the subject until the events of Holy Week, where the meek, suffering Savior goes to be the Lamb of God and to offer Himself in sacrifice. Then when He comes to say goodbye to His apostles, He gives them goodbye with the words of a second coming, the news that there’s a second advent to be expected, for which we all fervently pray and expect, and at the time of that second advent things will be different. We learned that from St. John’s apocalypse and the other prophetic writers of the New Testament writers, who tell us about the second coming of Christ, where He comes as the successor of David and Gideon and all the rest to come and set things straight and then conquer and rule. Those two different advents are very different, but they’re not different Men, they’re two different missions at two different times by the same Man, “Man” with a capital M.
Cy Kellett:
Right. In the course of this, then they must, as the week goes on, be thinking, “This is not going the way that we thought it was going to go.” There’s the last supper, where He commissions them. I mean, really, I don’t know if you could say what the moment of ordination is. Maybe in your theology, you understand that. I don’t know when the apostles were ordained as priests, but certainly, their priesthood is connected to His telling them at that moment, “Do this in memory of me.” He’s commissioning them now to be priests.
Rod Bennett:
I’m not sure that the church herself has nailed that down, but I know there’s various different discussions among the fathers about that. But I think more importantly is there’s a kind of an anticipatory priesthood, for example, that we see when Jesus and the apostles are walking through the field of wheat and that they’re plucking the ears as they go along to eat and that’s both a recapitulation of something that happened to David and his chosen man 700 years before. But it’s also a return of a different kind of priesthood, not the Levitical priesthood, but the Melchizedek priesthood that goes back to the time of the patriarchs and then has come back in the time of Christ. The New Testament priesthood is the priesthood of Melchizedek.
Rod Bennett:
Without going too far afield there, just simply say here that job of turning His disciples into priests is well underway by the time the events of Holy Week, and there’s no need to necessarily try to pin it down as a moment. But at any rate, that’s definitely one of the main things going on also through the three-year public ministry of Christ. It’s a kind of a, it’s a kind of a seminary for the 12, in addition to having a public aspect.
Cy Kellett:
Do you think that they were beginning to grasp what the priesthood was, or do you think they still thought, “This must have something to do with the way he wants us to rule with him once He takes up His throne”?
Rod Bennett:
Well, there’s a supernatural element we can’t dismiss. At the Road to Emmaus, Christ does a supernatural uncovering to the disciples that he meets there that opens their eyes according to the gospel and makes them able to understand the scripture, which is a way of saying they didn’t understand it until that moment, that they’d heard a lot about it, they understood a lot of things about it. I think the same thing happens with the 12 also a little later. He breathed on them and said He receive the Holy Spirit, so there’s a supernatural unction that makes possible the understanding of the seeds that Jesus has buried in the ground over the last three years, if you see what I’m saying.
Cy Kellett:
I do.
Rod Bennett:
They’ve got the raw materials, but they haven’t learned how to put the pieces together yet. But even at the time of the Ascension, when he does this breathing, this outpouring of the Spirit, we’re still waiting on the day of Pentecost when Jesus and Himself promised it won’t even really be here in its fullness until then, so it’s a matter of Christ imparting the ideas in the way that a jigsaw puzzle is imparted to the table when you dump it out in the middle of the table. All the pieces are there, but putting the pieces together sometimes takes a long time, especially if you’re as bad of a puzzle-maker as I am. But I think it’s the same thing. He spends His public ministry and his discipleship of the apostles dumping out the pieces of the puzzle. Then it’s an ongoing process to keep putting them together from that point on. The Holy Spirit’s indispensable in that process.
Cy Kellett:
One thing that is clear from Scripture is the failures of the apostles following the Last Supper, of course, Peter famously, but also all of the apostles in one way or another failing Him, I mean, Judas, certainly. But the Scriptures are written, really, the Scriptures that we have, are the fruits of the apostles own teaching, so why did they emphasize their own failing at the crucial moment so much? Do you see what I mean?
Rod Bennett:
Right. Absolutely, yeah. Other apologists have dwelt on the fact that one of the best arguments for the idea that the gospels tell the truth is that they don’t try to whitewash anything. Many other religious texts leave out the embarrassing stuff, whereas the gospels often present the failings and they don’t present their saints ready-made, store-bought. You get to see the process at work. The same with the desertion of the apostles during the events of the passion. One of the interesting things I discovered in doing the research is that some of the fathers believed that Jesus deliberately withdrew some of the graces that he had given them up to that point so that they would be dispersed and not killed during the passion week. In other words, the authorities would’ve been just as happy and just as ready to crucify the 12, along with their master, had they not been dispersed.
Rod Bennett:
There’s a mystery in there, of course, that Jesus withdrew supernatural aid to keep them from falling away and allowed them to fall away for a season. That’s a complex mystery, but it’s a surprisingly frequent idea. If you read the church fathers on that topic. Also, he points out that the reason that the falling away happens is another lesson, without words, an object lesson, to show what the apostles were in and of themselves just in their own personhood, that they were not only fallible men, but men as prone as anybody to discreditable episodes, and there’s to show a difference. Once you go to the Book of Acts, you find Peter and John and the rest of them under constant danger of murder by the religious authorities and by the Romans.
Cy Kellett:
Right, and sanguine about all of it.
Rod Bennett:
Right, absolutely courageous about all of it, indifferent to personal danger. There’s a distinction, a before-and-after quality to it, like the old diet ads before and after.
Cy Kellett:
I’m definitely a before picture right now, but there’s a lesson for that and about grace for us then, too. The most obvious lesson then is with God’s grace, all things are possible. Don’t try any of this without His grace.
Rod Bennett:
Exactly right. Another thing that’s brought out in the book is something that occurred to me as I was writing the thing is that Jesus says it’s expedient. He tells the apostles, “It’s a good thing for you if I go away.” Well, how is that? Wouldn’t the church be better off if Jesus was sitting on a throne in Jerusalem and we didn’t have to apply the bishops or a Pope or anything, we went straight to Him, and asked Him all our questions, and He ruled as the Davidic King from Jerusalem today? Wouldn’t that be a good thing? Well, there’s a mystery involved in that. Why did He have to go? We take it for granted. Everybody knows that Christ ascended to His Father. Why? If He’s coming back to live forever and take us away with Him, why did He have to do it?
Rod Bennett:
Why does God have to do anything? We don’t have a definitive answer to that, but one of the things he tells us is if I go, I can send the Holy Spirit to you, that in other words, it’s a good thing for you that I’m leaving because I can go to heaven. If you don’t mind, a bit of an irreverent metaphor, I can unleash the Holy Spirit. I can let Him off His chain so that He can come into the world, and He can’t do it, unless I go, which is a very strange idea.
Cy Kellett:
It is, isn’t it?
Rod Bennett:
The idea that there’s something that God can’t do until Jesus goes back to heaven, and the idea that Jesus has this job of turning the Spirit loose into the world, that’s one of the reasons He goes to the cross. What a mysterious idea, that one of the things He’s hoping to accomplish through the passion beyond the more obvious things that you and I are familiar with, He’s going so that the Spirit can come into the world. Well, what was preventing Him from coming before that? We don’t know, but we take Him at His word. “If I don’t go, He can’t come,” he says pretty much that
Cy Kellett:
He does, yeah. I’m glad to hear you say that you don’t have an understanding of that because I’ve never understood that, and always thought, “Well, somebody must,” but if you don’t, maybe it’s-
Rod Bennett:
No, no, no. The church fathers, and later saints as well, puzzle over it. Not “puzzle.” “Puzzle” makes it sounds like, “Well, I can’t believe in Catholicism until I get this worked out.” It was the great John Henry Newman who said, “10,000 difficulties don’t add up to one doubt.” This is a difficulty.
Cy Kellett:
This is a difficulty. Yeah, right.
Rod Bennett:
It’s not a doubt. We shouldn’t be surprised any more than we should be surprised when we’re doing quantum physics that we run up against mysteries where we just go, “Wow. Who could ever understand that? It’s completely mental,” yet we find these things. There are things like that in Scripture. It’s good to be reminded that Scripture is full of mysteries that even the church says, “We’ll have to ask Him one day because we don’t know the answer.” It’s not just the Trinity and the hypostatic union and a few other things like that where we say, “Well, here we’ve approached the frontier of what we can understand. We may have it here, too.” But Christ’s role in unchaining, on cutting the Holy Spirit loose and sending Him to earth and saying, “Have at it,” is been underappreciated.
Cy Kellett:
Yes. I like that He gives us the mystery, though, in the context of a reassurance, like, “This is good for you. You’re not going to get this, but this is good for you.”
Rod Bennett:
Right. How could this possibly be good for us? We still don’t totally know, but there’s a little sketch, anyway.
Cy Kellett:
The sense of the apostles as having moved into a new era of the world, into the dawning of the kingdom of God, the presence of Christ, as it must have been for them over these three years, it’s all ripped away when He breathes His last on the cross.
Rod Bennett:
Right.
Cy Kellett:
Have you meditated upon those hours and what those hours must have been like for the apostles?
Rod Bennett:
A little, yes. I mean, to the extent that anybody who’s not going through that can enter into it. You do have to use your imagination a little because the Scriptural account is rather sparse, and also, I should point out that most of the things that I have picked up on this are not me trying to be original. Well, most of it comes from the early fathers, so a lot of neglected stuff about this is the writings of the fathers.
Rod Bennett:
One of the most interesting little nuggets that I found in their writings is something I should have been able to see is one thing that makes you slap yourself in the head. They defend Thomas. Even then, Thomas had gotten the moniker of being doubting Thomas, Thomas the doubter, but they point out that just a few verses before that the women have come into the room and told the apostles that they’ve seen the empty tomb and that the stones been rolled back, et cetera, et cetera, and the gospel writer says they listened to it, but they all concluded or decided that it was an idle tale.
Cy Kellett:
So much for the women.
Rod Bennett:
Doubting Thomas, yes, but the other guys, the other 10 at this point did some doubting of their own, so it’s a little unfair to give poor Thomas his hard name there, but yeah, there you go, even in the upper room, they have really in many ways, reverted back to kind of, “Well, it’s back to the old drawing board, guys,” Messiah-wise, which is so insane because as I’ve written the whole chapter in the book called Miracle Man, about the neglected fact that Jesus did by many times over more miracles than any other person in Scripture, hundreds of miracles probably, but an even more neglected fact is that the apostles were given the same powers, sent out with the same mission, raised the dead, healed the sick, cast out demons, and all the rest of it, so we have 13 miracle men in the gospels, not just one. It was men who had done fantastic miracles, unheard of in the Old Testament, practically, unheard of who reached this point of deserting Him, of doubting, and all the rest of it, just a astonishing idea.
Cy Kellett:
It is. It really is. It says something about us as human being, our ability to adjust because they have really every proof possible that this is the Messiah, the son of God, and they’ve even participated in that power themselves, and well, I guess we got to find a new Messiah.
Rod Bennett:
Never underestimate the fact that the flesh, this body of ours, is a rowdy beast, and that it bosses us around as far as moods, as far as depression and other things of that type we’re subject to what we now scientifically know in many cases are physiochemical processes. We are bossed around by the flesh. It gives a whole new meaning to St. Paul’s talk about the war of the body and the flesh. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak, as Christ Himself said.
Rod Bennett:
As illogical as it is, the men who did all these miracles and hurt all the rest of it, they saw the unhappy ending that they weren’t expecting instead of Christ crowned on David’s throne and themselves all made ambassadors. They saw all of that and the flesh took over, especially again with the conception that I shared a moment ago from the early fathers that without the Holy Spirit and they were desolate and the active ingredient in all of this victory of the spirit over the flesh is the Holy Ghost. You see it work in the events of Holy Weekend, the lives of the 12 apostles, or the 11 apostles by this point.
Cy Kellett:
Right. But the thing about their complete dependence on grace, they had no power separated from the grace that Christ bestowed upon them, but still, we honor them as good and holy, brave, and courageous men, because it’s grace that they welcomed, it’s grace that they did not reject. They suffered hardship with Him. The son of man had nowhere to lay his head. They were out there with him in the fields and wherever else he was, so they’re laudable, saintly men.
Rod Bennett:
Oh, absolutely, and the degree to which they are the foundation of the church in a really important sense is neglected. We talked about this in a different broadcast, but they’re the men whose names will be written on the pillars of heaven. Jesus said that the New Jerusalem will have the names of these 12 inscribed on the foundations, that they’ll sit on 12 Thrones and judge the 12 tribes of Israel with these larger spiritual Israel of the end days includes the church, includes us, so it’s very appropriate that we name our churches after St. Peter, St. Paul, St. John, all the rest of it because then in a very important sense, they are to us what the patriarchs were to the Hebrews in the Old Testament. Yeah, well, there’s an analogy there to the patriarchs, that the patriarchs are very fallible, fleshly men many times, and includes liars and fornicators and tricksters, people who in their purely fleshly lives, even though they had great natural qualities of courage and strength and intelligence and all the rest of it needed grace, which came down more sporadically in the Old Testament than it does since Pentecost.
Cy Kellett:
The book is called These Twelve: The Gospel Through the Apostles’ Eyes. I highly recommend it to you. I am so glad I got to have these two conversations that I’ve had with on two radio programs and got to read the book because, one, really, it’s a very helpful thing that you’ve done to help us love the apostles more, really admire them, and love them more, and feel closer to the Jesus who, He loved them, He loved being around them.
Rod Bennett:
Yeah, yeah. I don’t remember, I should remember the chapter and verse in St. John’s gospel, as the events of the passion approach, there’s a verse that I can hardly ever say without tearing up. I may not be able to do it today. He said, “Jesus, have having loved His disciples, loved them to the end.”
Cy Kellett:
Oh, praises God. That’s perfect words for Holy Week. Thank you so much, Rod Bennett. God bless you.
Rod Bennett:
You, too.
Cy Kellett:
We Catholics are all familiar with doing something for Lent, giving up something for Lent, or taking on new prayer, or almsgiving for Lent. Well, Lent’s coming to its end now in Holy Weekend. May I suggest a little activity for the Easter season, something that will really fill up those Easter season days, or evenings, or whenever you do your reading with good and holy thoughts of good and holy men? These Twelve: The Gospel Through the Apostles’ Eyes, Rod Bennett’s new book, is beautiful Easter reading. It’s wonderful to meet the apostles again. Rod does an amazing job of taking what the Scripture says about each of the apostles or all of the apostles together, or about the interactions between Jesus and the apostles and giving it a lot of flesh, a lot of flesh that draws on the history of the time references to the Hebrew Scripture, that the New Testament writers are making that help us understand what’s going on.
Cy Kellett:
What we meet are really 12, very, very remarkable men, not at all the kind of 12 stooges that they’re sometimes depicted as, and of course, we come to a deeper encounter with Christ in his encounter with them, so I will recommend it to you again, These Twelve: The Gospel Through the Apostles’ Eyes, the new book from Rod Bennett. Thanks for joining us. Usually I do all that commercial stuff here at the end but I’m not going to because it’s Holy Week. Say your prayers, go to Mass, maybe do the stations of the cross Good Friday, and we’ll see you in Easter season right here on Catholic Answers Focus.