WORKS

'To fret about the quality of our love is to miss the point. Yes, we examine ourselves, confess our failings and pray for grace to offer the best. But it will never be good enough, unless with all its flaws it is handed over and taken up into his love for the Father. Foolishly we rummage through what Yeats called the "rag and bone shop" of our hearts to find a love that is pure, untouched by self-interest or pretense. It is an endless and futile search, compunded by complexity the more rigorously it is pursued. Among the things we give up, among the things we hand over, is that futile search.'

Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon, p.235.

 

THE CROSS

'Justice requires that satisfaction be made; we were and we are in no position to make such satisfaction. Jesus Christ actively intervenes on our behalf; he freely takes our part in healing the breach between God and humanity by the sacrifice of the cross. To speak of a collusion between the persons of the triune God suggests the word "conspiracy." It is a helpful word when we remember that conspire means, quite literally, "to breathe together." In the beginning God breathes life into Adam; Jesus breathes life upon the disciples and says, "Receive the Holy Spirit." The triune God conspires for our salvation. The entire plan is love from beginning to end, and the fullness of God  - Father, Son and Holy Spirit - is engaged every step of the way. It is not an angry Father punishing an innocent Son, with the Spirit on the sidelines helplessly watching. No, it is the Father, Son and Spirit conspiring together to save us from ourselves. At the Father's command, the Son goes forth in the power of the Spirit to become one of us. On our behalf, as Representative Humanity, he lives the life of perfect obedience that Adam - and all of us "in Adam" - failed to live. And he completes that life by dying the perfect death.'

Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon, p.221.  

THE CROSS

'Remove the idea of sacrifice, the reality of sacrifice, from Christianity and it becomes something other than Christianity.

The concept of expiation, of making amends by sacrifice, is indeed primitive. It is primitive in the sense that it is deeply rooted in human nature and variously expressed in all cultures that we know about. Once again, to say that something is primitive does not mean that it is naive and should be outgrown. That which is most deeply rooted in human nature and culture - whether it be attitudes toward sexual relations, property and theft or the love of children - reflects a wisdom that we ignore at our peril.' 

Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon, p.216. 

THE CROSS

'This "exemplification theory" of the atonement - the crucified Jesus as the supreme example - is strong on challenge but weak on comfort. It has little to say about what the crucifixion actually did, what it actually accomplished in terms of reconciling God and humankind. That we are alienated from God and in need to reconciled is the premise of the entire biblical story, without which it simply makes no sense. In this liberal theory, it is hard to know what is mean by "It is finished." Perhaps that Jesus lived to its conclusion an extremely good, even uniquely good, life. That might elicit our admiration and our efforts at emulation, but it doesn't say much about our inability to be what we strive to be. It doesn't say much about the ways in which we are what we hate. In short it doesn't say much about our salvation. Christianity is about salvation.' 

Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon, p.212. 

THE CROSS

'...the paradox at the heart of the muddle - God's loss of everything on the cross, his taking our place, is our only hope that all is not lost.' 

Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon, p.203. 

LONELINESS

'From now on, in the abandonment of Christ the alone are never alone. That is because, as paradoxical as it may sound, aloneness is no longer alone, but has been brought into the good company of God.' 

Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon, p.198. 

EVANGELISM

'The Christian life is about living to the glory of God. It is not a driven, frenetic, sweated, interminable quest for saving souls. It is doing for his glory what God has given us to do. As with the Olympic runner in the film Chariots of Fire, it is giving God pleasure in what we do well. Souls are saved by saved souls who live out their salvation by thinking and living differently, with a martyr's resolve, in a world marked by falsehood, baseness, injustice, impurity, ugliness and mediocrity.'

Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon, p.180.

SUFFERING

'When Jesus calls us, he calls us to come and die. We will die anyway. The question is whether we die senselessly or as companions and coworkers of the crucified and risen Lord.'

Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon, p.160.

IDENITITY

'...the only definition of the self to be trusted is the self that is on the far side of being crucified.'

Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon, p.130.

THE CROSS

'The passion narrative is not simply a playing out of a script that begins with the cathechism statement that "Jesus died for our sins." His dying is not just a necessary preliminary to the good news of the resurrection. The cross is not just what happened to him - it is who he is. "We preach Christ crucified," Paul declares. The God whom we worship is a crucified God.'

Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon, p.117.

GOOD FRIDAY

'If what Christians say about Good Friday is true, then it is, quite simply, the truth about everything.'

Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon, p.xi.

MARY

'Mary is the model of discipleship in her total availability to the will of God. She had no business of her own. She was always on call. To the angel's announcement, she says, "Let it be as you say." She was dependent on others, on Joseph, for example and now on John. By saying yes to the angel and agreeing to be the mother of the Messiah, she had created a situation beyond her control. Who was to pick up the pieces? God provideds by sending an angel to say, "Jospeh, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife." Now at the cross she is once again alone in the world. God provides. "Son, behold your mother. And from that hour John took her to his own home." In her total availability to God, Mary is totally dependent upon God's providing. True availability to God overcomes the fear of being dependent on others, for God provides. It is our determination to be independent by being in control that makes us unavailable to God.'

Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon, p.90.

HOPE

'Hope is the form that faith takes in relation to the future.'

Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon, p.63.

DOUBT

'Look at him who is ever looking at you. With whatever faith you have, however feeble and flickering and mixed with doubt, look at him. Look at hime whatever faith you have and know that your worry about your lack of faith is itself a sign of faith. Do not look at your faith. Look at him. Keep looking, and faith will take care of itself.'

Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon, p.41.  

HEAVEN

'For paradise we long. For perfection we were made. We don't know what it would look like or feel like, but we must settle for nothing less. This longing is the source of the hunger and dissatisafction that mark our lives; it drives our ambition. What we long for is touched in our exaltations; in our devastations it is known by its absence. This longing makes our loves and friendships possible, and so very unsatisfactory. The hunger is for nothing less than paradise, nothing less than perfect communion with the Absolute - with the Good, the True, the Beautiful - communion with the perfectly One in whom all the fragmnets of our scattered existence come together at last and forever. We must not stifle this longing. It is a holy dissatisfaction. Such dissatisfaction is not a sickness to be healed, but the seed of a promise to be fulfilled.'

Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon, p.40.

FAITH

'Jesus does not reject any who turn to him. At times we turn to him with little faith, at times with a mix of faith and doubt when we are more sure of the doubt than of the faith. Jesus is not fastidious about the quality of faith. He takes what he can get, so to speak, and gives immeasurably more than he receives. He takes our faith more seriously than we do and makes of it more than we ever could. His reposnse to our faith is greater than our faith.'

Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon, p.38.

THE PROBLEM OF EVIL

'The philosophical problem of theodicy is that of trying to square God's ways with our sense of justice. This assumes that we know what justice is, but the entire story the Bible tells begins with the error of that presumption. It is the original error of wanting to name good and evil. Right from the start Adam tried to put God in the dock, making God responsible for the fall because, after all, God gave him the woman who tempted him to sin. From the beginning we see the argument building up to humanity's cry, "God is guilty!" - building up to the derelict nailed to the cross.'

Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon, p.30.

GOD'S LOVE

'The perfect self-surrender of the cross is, from eternity and to eternity, at the heart of what it means to say that God is love.'

Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon, p.29.

SIN

'I may think it modesty when I draw back from declaring myself chief of sinners, but I think it more likely a failure of imagination. For what sinner should I speak if not for myself? Of all the billions of people who have lived and of all the thousands who I have known, whom should I say is the chief of sinners? Surely I am authorized, surely I am competent to speak only for myself? When in the presence of God the subject of sin is raised, how can I help but say that chiefly it is I? Not to confess that I am chiefly the one is not to confess at all.'

Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon, p.8.

THE FALL

'This page of Genesis is rewritten every day in the living out of the human story. Each of us has been there when we, godlike, decided that we would determine what is good and what is evil - at least for our own lives. Perhaps we shied away from the godlike pretension of making a universal rule that applies to all. Modestly - or so we said - we limited ourselves to deciding "what is good for me" and "what is wrong for me." "I can speak only for myself," we say. We would not think of "imposing" our judgment upon others. Under the cover of modesty, we deny the truth about the good and evil that does not require our permission to be true. Thus we would evade the truth of good and evil that brings us to judgment. The truth is that we do not judge the truth, the truth judges us.'  

Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon, p.13.