Episode 69: Year B – 5th Sunday of Lent
In this episode of the Sunday Catholic Word, we focus on five details from the readings for the 5th Sunday of Lent, Year B that relate to apologetics. The first two come from the second reading, which is taken from Hebrews 5:7-9. Each detail gives rise to questions concerning Christ’s perfection and the extent of his knowledge in his human nature. The remaining three details all come from the Gospel reading, taken from John 12:20-33. Two of the three don’t relate to any specific common apologetical topic. However, they do give rise to possible objections that need to be answered, and thus take on an apologetical value. The last detail relates specifically to the veneration of the saints.
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Hey everyone,
Welcome to The Sunday Catholic Word, a podcast where we reflect on the upcoming Sunday Mass readings and pick out the details that are relevant for explaining and defending our Catholic faith.
I’m Karlo Broussard, staff apologist and speaker for Catholic Answers, and the host for this podcast.
In this episode, there are five details that we’re going to focus on that relate to apologetics. The first two come from the second reading, which is taken from Hebrews 5:7-9. Each detail gives rise to questions concerning Christ’s perfection and the extent of his knowledge in his human nature. The remaining three details all come from the Gospel reading, taken from John 12:20-33. Two of the three don’t relate to any specific common apologetical topic. However, they do give rise to possible objections that need to be answered, and thus take on an apologetical value. The last detail relates specifically to the veneration of the saints.
So, let’s get started with the second reading from Hebrews 5:7-9. Here’s what the author writes,
In the days when Christ Jesus was in the flesh,
he offered prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears
to the one who was able to save him from death,
and he was heard because of his reverence.
Son though he was, he learned obedience from what he suffered;
and when he was made perfect,
he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him.
The first detail that I want to highlight is the fact that Christ “learned obedience.” The question arises, “How can Christ learn obedience? Don’t Christians profess Jesus is Divine? How can Jesus be Divine, which means he wouldn’t be ignorant of anything from all eternity, and yet at the same time be ignorant of something, which learning obedience implies? There seems to be a contradiction here.”
The short answer is that there’s no contradiction. For there to be a contradiction, Christ would have to have the relevant knowledge and lack the relevant knowledge at the same time and in the same respect. But there are different respects, or senses, in which we can speak of Christ’s knowledge.
For example, Christ had divine knowledge, knowledge had in virtue of his divine nature, and human knowledge, knowledge had in his human nature. Such a distinction opens a path to show how there’s no contradiction: Christ had the relevant knowledge in virtue of his divine nature but didn’t have it in virtue of his human nature. To gain human knowledge doesn’t conflict with the belief that Christ had it via divine knowledge.
Now, some Christians might want to preserve the belief that Christ had knowledge of obedience even within his human intellect. But even on this supposition, the objection still doesn’t work. And I think we can use St. Thomas Aquinas as our guide here.
In his Commentary on the Letter to the Hebrews, when he deals with this objection, he points out that there are two kinds of knowledge: simple recognition and knowledge gained through experience. By “simple recognition,” Aquinas means conceptual knowledge—that’s to say, intellectually knowing the natures of things and facts about the real world. By “knowledge gained through experience,” Aquinas means coming to know something through the human mode of experiencing it.
Perhaps an example might help. Consider a baseball. I might know what a baseball is conceptually—it’s a round little ball that’s pitched and hit within the sport of baseball—but not know it through experience—that’s to say, I’ve never seen or touched one.
Similarly, Christ knew what obedience was conceptually. He had such knowledge in virtue of being God, and, according to Aquinas, he also had it in his human intellect by way of infused knowledge from the moment of his conception.
But Jesus didn’t have the experiential knowledge of obedience until he obeyed in the difficult matter of his passion and death. And the evidence is found in the text itself. Notice the author doesn’t just say, “Christ learned obedience,” leaving ambiguity as to precisely which kind of knowledge he gained. Rather, the author specifies that Christ learned obedience “from what he suffered.” In other words, Christ experienced obedience.
Now, someone might ask, “Wait a minute! Why would Christ learn obedience only from what he suffered? Didn’t he experience obedience while obeying Joseph and Mary in Nazareth?”
The answer is “yes.” Christ did begin to learn obedience experientially by obeying Joseph and Mary. But there’s a sense in which Christ didn’t experience the full meaning of obedience until he had to obey in the difficult circumstance of suffering and dying. Aquinas explains,
[T]hose who have not experienced obedience and have not learned it in difficult matters, believe that obedience is very easy. But in order to know what obedience is, one must learn to obey in difficult matters, and one who has not learned to subject himself by obeying does not know how to rule others well. Therefore, although Christ knew by simple recognition what obedience is, He nevertheless learned obedience from the things He suffered, i.e., from difficult things, by suffering and dying (Commentary on the Letter to the Hebrews 5-2).
With this in mind, we have another way to answer the objection, at least for those Christians, like Aquinas, who want to hold that Christ had conceptual knowledge of obedience in his human intellect. Christ didn’t “learn obedience” in the sense of gaining conceptual knowledge of obedience. Rather, he grew in his experiential knowledge of obedience. Given these two senses of gaining knowledge of obedience, the objection fails in its assertion that a contradiction exists.
Now, there’s another detail that I want to highlight—namely, the statement that Christ “was made perfect.” This is yet another detail that seems to introduce some tension in Christian belief. We believe that Christ was perfect in his human nature, both naturally and supernaturally. Yet, the author of Hebrews says that Christ “was made perfect.” So, which is it?
Aquinas addresses this question as well. In his same commentary on Hebrews, he writes,
In Christ the fruit was glorification; hence, he says, and being made perfect, for from the instant of His conception He was perfectly consummated as to the happiness of His soul, inasmuch as it was drawn to God; but he still had a nature that could suffer, although after His Passion He could not suffer.
Like with the previous objection, there’s a need to make the proper distinctions: the distinction between perfection in Christ’s soul and the perfection of Christ’s corporeal nature that involves freedom from suffering and death, also known as “glorification.” Once this distinction is made, the conflict dissolves. There’s no tension in saying Christ was “perfect” in the happiness of his soul, having the beatific vision, and yet attained the “perfection” of glory.
Interestingly, the “glory” of Christ comes to the fore in the Gospel reading, particularly verse 23 of John 12. Jesus says of himself, “The hour has come for the Son of man to be glorified.” Given what we’ve said so far, we now know what Christ means here.
With that, let’s now turn to the details in the Gospel reading. I’m not going to read the whole passage. Rather, I’m just going to highlight the relevant verses.
First, Jesus says, “Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will preserve it for eternal life.” The question that arises is, “How can Jesus say that we must ‘hate’ our lives in this world? That doesn’t seem consistent with other Christian principles.”
It’s true there would be a problem here if by “hate” Christ meant despise or not love. But that’s not what he’s getting at here.
“Hate” can be used as a Hebrew idiom to mean “love less” or “be subordinated to.” For example, Luke 14:26 records Jesus saying, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.” Yet, Matthew reports Jesus saying, “He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and he who loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me” (10:37). Here, Matthew gives the meaning of Christ words as recorded by Luke. By “hate,” Christ meant “love less”—he who doesn’t love mother and father less than me is not worthy of being my disciple. To state it positively, we must love Christ more than mother and father.
The same meaning of “hate” is meant here in our Gospel reading. Jesus intends to say that we must love our lives less than we love him. In other words, to be Christ’s disciples we must be willing to give up our earthly lives for his sake.
Now, there are two more details worthy of highlight from the Gospel reading. One is verse 26, where Jesus says, “if anyone serves me, the Father will honor him.”
This is a good verse to use when having conversations about the veneration (honor) of the saints. The idea here is that the saints in heaven served Christ. And given that they served Christ, the Father honors them.
So, here’s the idea: if the Father honors the saints in heaven, then so should we.
Brief, but important!
Finally, the last detail worthy of highlight is found in verse 27. Jesus says, “I am troubled now. Yet what should I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? But it was for this purpose that I came to this hour.”
One might ask the question, “Doesn’t Jesus actually ask the Father to save him from the cross? There seems to be some tension between what Jesus is saying he shouldn’t do and what he actually does.”
The first thing to say in response is that Jesus doesn’t actually say, “I shouldn’t say, ‘Father, save me from this hour?” He raises it as a rhetorical question, leaving the answer ambiguous. So, we could fill in the blank, “Yes, I should make this request,” which he does.
But how does this reconcile with his statement, “For this purpose I came”?
Aquinas offers us a nice distinction that may be of some help. Again, in his Commentary on the Letter to the Hebrews, Aquinas distinguishes between the sensitive appetite within Christ’s human nature and the will acting as a natural appetite on the one hand, and His will informed by reason on the other. Concerning Christ’s request for the cup of suffering to be removed from him, such a request was consistent with Christ’s sensitive appetite and the will as a natural appetite. It’s perfectly natural for a human, in the words of Aquinas, to “shrink from death.” And that’s what Christ experienced. So, it was fitting that he would ask His Father to remove the cup of suffering.
Yet, he exercised his will, informed by reason (“this is the Father’s will and I want to do the Father’s will), to overcome his natural inclination to shrink from death and willed to die, saying, “Not as I will, but as you will” (Matt. 26:39).
So, once we have this distinction between the will acting as a natural appetite and his will acting under the influence of reason, the tension dissolves.
CONCLUSION
Well, my friends, that does it for this episode of the Sunday Catholic Word. The readings for this upcoming Fifth Sunday of Lent, Year B is a treasure chest for apologetical and theological topics. We have,
- The perfection of Christ in his human nature,
- The extent of Christ’s human knowledge,
- Christ’s divinity,
- The love extent of the love that we need to have for Christ, and
- The veneration of the saints.
As always, I want to thank you for subscribing to the podcast. And please be sure to tell your friends about it and invite them to subscribe as well at sundaycatholicword.com. You might also want to check out the other great podcasts in our Catholic Answers podcast network: Cy Kellet’s Catholic Answers Focus, Trent Horn’s The Counsel of Trent, Joe Heschmeyer’s Shameless Popery, and Jimmy Akin’s A Daily Defense, all of which can be found at catholic.com.
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I hope you have a blessed 5th Sunday of Lent, Year B. Peace!