Monday 29 March 2010

Ronald Knox Palm Sun


Passion(Palm) Sunday

From the writings of Ronald Knox (Stimuli, XIV, The Sowing, 29-30)


Holy Week

ANYBODY would have told you, if you had asked in Jerusalem on the first Palm Sunday, that Jesus of Nazareth was at the height of his popularity. It even looked as if his reputation was destined to go beyond the limits of Palestine. Some Greeks, who had come up to Jerusalem for the feast, expressed a desire to see him. If we may use a modern comparison without irreverence, he was in the position of some popular leader nowadays when the foreign journalists begin to take notice of him. What was the" interview" he gave them? A curious one. "The hour is come for the Son of Man to be glorified. A grain of wheat must fall into the ground and die, or else it remains nothing more than a grain of wheat; but if it dies, then it yields rich fruit."


Our Lord Jesus Christ did not come to earth to share our crowns. The pageantry with which he rode into Jerusalem was not what it looked like, a bid for popular leadership. Rather, it was a kind of satire on worldly success; he would heighten the contrast between that whirl of popularity in which he lived, and the lonely contempt in which he died, by a dramatic gesture. Those palms should lie trodden in the dust for days afterwards, to remind the world how brief are its triumphs. He had come to earth to die. His human body should be lodged in the earth like a grain of wheat, to yield the splendid harvest of his Resurrection. And it was our Resurrection, as well as his; we were to see with our eyes, handle with our hands, the mystery which still baffles our understanding, the law of death in life and life in death.

It would not be difficult to illustrate that moral by an allusion to those many countries in the modern world which lie dead, awaiting their Resurrection. But perhaps the best way of keeping a day of intercession is to look beyond the immediate prospect which drives us to our knees.


Holy week should be a week of holydays-holidays from the problems and fears which occupy our thoughts. Your soul is a grain of wheat which must fall into the ground and die, on pain of sterility; only by a death to self and a Resurrection into the world of grace can it become fruitful for God. We must enter into the joys of Easter by entering into the sufferings and the death of Christ. Entering into them, not by way of artistic appreciation, not by merely feeling sorry about it. We were buried with Christ in our baptism; we are dead, and our life is hidden with Christ in God. Our business this week is to associate our selves with Christ's Passion, to unite ourselves with the dispositions of will and purpose with which he emptied himself, annihilated himself, in our name. Self has to be dragged out and crucified.


New Book:

Ronald Knox and English Catholicism (Paperback)

by Terry Tastard (Author), Gracewing (Oct 2009)

See, Amazon (customer review)

“A welcome new biography", By J. R. Gunsel,15 Dec 2009 " . . .

Knox's abiding legacy is his translation of the Bible which has always had its critics. Every child in my Westminster diocesan school was given a 'Knox Bible' to keep, testimony to the very Edwardian Knox's influence even through the upheavals of Vatican II. On my bookshelf, the AV, RSV, NEB and JB sit alongside my old school Knox which alone is terribly dog-eared; the others have received more respectful but far less affectionate treatment. Perhaps Knox's Evangelical patrimony, so well described by Tastard, accounts for the touching tenderness found so often in Knox's text. The relaxed yet consciously hieratic rhythm in his Job XXII: 21-28, for example, encapsulates sweetly and succinctly the eternal promise of the Christian vocation, conveying such an assurance of love as to comprise a near-perfect form of blessing".

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