#christopher powers

C.S. Lewis

If I live for myself, it is in myself that I fester and die. If I live for others, the world is enlarged, and I grow along with it.

Fr. Albert Paretsky, O.P., homily for Wednesday of the Third Week of Lent, 2026

Dale Allison, Jr. (The Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus, page 117)

Cosmic Centrality, by Chris Powers

Pauline theology takes the idea of Jesus as first-born two steps further. In the Letter to the Romans, Paul calls Jesus the “first-born among many brethren” (8:29). Having risen, he is now “first-born” in a new way, and at the same time the beginning of a host of brethren. In the new birth of the resurrection, Jesus is no longer merely the first in dignity, he now ushers in a new humanity. Once he had broken through the iron doors of death, there are many more who can pass through with him — many who in baptism have died with him and risen with him. In the Letter to the Colossians, the idea is developed further: Christ is called “first-born of all creation” (1:15) and “first-born from the dead” (1:18). The concept of first-born takes on a cosmic dimension. Christ, the incarnate Son, is —so to speak— God’s first thought, preceding all creation, which is ordered toward him and proceeds from him. He is both the beginning and the goal of the new creation that was initiated with the resurrection.

He cancelled the record of death, by Chris Powers

Come and ask me now: "If God wanted to damn me, why did He create me?" [...] In a hundred places in Holy Scripture, God tells us that it is truly His desire to save all men. Is it My will that a sinner should die, and not that he should be converted from his ways and live? . . . As I live, saith the Lord God, I desire not the death of the sinner, but they be converted and live [Ezekiel 18:23, 33:11]. When someone wants something very much, it is said that he is dying with desire; it is a hyperbole. But God has wanted and still wants our salvation so much that He [actually] died of desire, and He suffered death to give us life. This will to save all men is therefore not an affected, superficial, and apparent will of God; it is a real, effective, and beneficial will; for He provides us with all the means most proper for us to be saved. He does not give them to us so they will not obtain it; He gives them to us with a sincere will, with the intention that they may obtain their effect.

In Christ, YHWH Himself Becomes the Accursed One, by Christopher Powers.

According to the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, nothing good happens to Jesus once he is put on the cross. All the signs are against him. He has been mocked, and the mockers have asked for a sign that he is the Son of God. Well, the sign has been given. Here is the sign that Jesus is the Son of God: darkness. God has pulled back.

Reader, do not miss the point. Everything turns against Jesus: the cosmos, the political world, his compatriots, his fellow religionists, his chosen companions, nature itself. There is no mercy. There is no grace. There is not even a fragrant breeze.

And have you ever thought about this? There is no silence.

One might hope to come to one's death in peace, to have a calmness and quiet about you within which you could compose yourself to face your end. Jesus had no peace. Not only did he have the pain from the nails and the agony of suffocation; he had the horror of screams. A crucifixion scene is a scene of screaming. Raymond Brown says that crucifixions were "particularly gruesome" because of "the screams of rage and pain, the wild curses and the outbreaks of nameless despair of the unhappy victims." There was screaming around Jesus for hours from the others, only a fragment of which is recorded in the Gospels (their taunting of Jesus). And finally, in the end, Jesus himself screamed.

Yes, Jesus screamed out in the midst of his pain, not in rage, not in a curse, but in a loud cry. The Word of God incarnate does not merely speak; it is a screamed-out question, and it is his death cry. My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? What does it mean?

It means, I think, the obvious thing: that Jesus died in the worst way possible, that he died in unimaginable pain, and that his physical pain was accompanied by the mental and emotional pain of being abandoned by God. He entered into our human condition; he came down from heaven and was begotten by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary and was made man. And then he went down further. He entered into the saddest and lowest human conditions; he entered into griefs and degradations and betrayals and tortures. He entered into them, he went down, and then he went down further. Jesus plumbed the absolute and literal depths of what it is to be human. He wept, sometimes with us and sometimes over us. He visited our tombs. And —it sounds trite but it's literally true— he shared our pain.

This, to be honest, is good news for us. There are no depths to which we may have to descend that Jesus has not already descended. However bad your life gets, Jesus will be with you. He can be with you, because he has gone down even further.

[... A]ll of us know that we have untested limits. For Jesus there were no untested limits. And with trembling in our bones we can voice the sacred truth, that it is . . . good . . . that Jesus was so completely tested. For when Jesus screamed, it was, as I said, not in anger, not in rage, but in: a prayer. Although screamed out, the words My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? are a prayer.

Jesus feels nothing but abandonment from God, and yet nonetheless he prays to God. He no longer feels any intimacy with God — less than twenty-four hours earlier he was praying to his "Father" that he be spared of all this; now he cannot pray to his Father, but he can still pray like any human being can pray, to "God," to indeed "my God." He screams, yes, he cries out, yes, but it is a question that he cries, and a question rests upon a relationship, on the reality of one to whom a question is addressed. Jesus goes all the way down to the very bottom of human existence, and even at the bottom, even in the midst of all the pain in the universe, even in the absence of any sign at all that he has a divine Father, even there at the bottom a human being can still pray to God, can still ask, if nothing else, why this God, to whom he is speaking, why this God has forsaken him.

We find God by going down this road, down the road that goes down. Leonard Cohen, in his song "Suzanne" (which Susan used to sing to me), saw deeply, if not perfectly, when he said Jesus realized "only drowning men could see him." Jesus saw this from the cross (I think this is what Cohen means by "his lonely wooden tower"), where, Cohen says, he was "forsaken, almost human."

No, that last modifier is wrong: forsaken, fully human is the point. Yet it may be true that only drowning people can see Jesus. We who have suffered the depths can catch sight of him, I think, because Jesus was fully human all the way down: in the darkness, beyond the darkness, forsaken, fully human, he sank (as Cohen almost says) beneath God's wisdom like a stone.

Rev. Canon Victor Austin (Losing Susan: Brain Disease, The Priest's Wife, and the God Who Gives and Takes Away, pages 135-136, 137-138). Italics original.

There is no pit so deep that He is not deeper still.

The Head of the Body, by Chris Powers

By uniting Himself with every human being through His Incarnation, Jesus Christ confirmed that each person possesses an immeasurable dignity simply by belonging to the human community; moreover, He affirmed that this dignity can never be lost. By proclaiming that the Kingdom of God belongs to the poor, the humble, the despised, and those who suffer in body and spirit; […] by affirming that whatever is done to these individuals is also done to Him because He is present in them: in all these ways, Jesus brought the great novelty of recognizing the dignity of every person, especially those who were considered "unworthy." This new principle in human history —which emphasizes that individuals are even more "worthy" of our respect and love when they are weak, scorned, or suffering, even to the point of losing the human "figure"— has changed the face of the world.

Image by Chris Powers

Christ has two natures: what does that have to do with me? If He bears the name of Christ, magnificent and consoling as it is, it is because of the ministry and the task He took upon Himself; that is what gives Him the Name. That He is by nature both man and God, this is something for Himself. But that He consecrated His ministry and poured out His love to become my Savior and my Redeemer, that is where I find my consolation and my good.

- Martin Luther

Christ has two natures: what is that to me? — But the substantial reparation of humanity lies in that very fact. But this joining of the divine and human touches what is most profound and most inalienable in me, my very nature. Christ has two natures: what is that to me? — But every living intelligence is directly, personally, profoundly involved in this central fact of the history of being, which brings divinization of creatures. At the moment that affects the very depths of being itself, it affects the depths of my own being.

- Fr. Pierre Rousselot, S.J., in a lecture given on the passage above in 1909-1910.

On occasion [Luther and Melanchthon] freely express themselves in a paradoxical, antithetical way which one should not always take literally. Still, their language does indicate a tendency. Neither Luther nor Melanchthon —nor Calvin, for that matter— "pauses to analyze the being of the eternal Son of God made man, i.e., to describe the hypostatic union; rather, they proceed directly to the explanation of his redemptive work"; their entire perspective remains soteriological. With Luther most particularly, his customary language manifests a thought which is "less concerned about knowing Christ's inner mystery than about hearing his promises and the sovereign call of his voice" — and even, we must admit, "a certain scorn for all intellectual dogmatic statements, which he considers as only a side issue in true religious life." [...] We may, however, observe that this consequence is logical enough: if one begins with an experience in which the person of Christ tends to disappear behind his gifts, if the Incarnation is looked upon as a simple prelude to the redemption, it is quite natural to find oneself being carried away to a more and more subjective theology[, ...] an anthropocentric withdrawal.