Vigils Reading

A reading from

FR KARL RAHNER

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Every earthly institution wants to make good; it measures its internal self-

justification in terms of its palpable, immediate chances of total victory. But to

Christianity and the Church her Founder promised not only that she would

endure until the end of time but, just as clearly, that his work would always be a

sign of contradiction and persecution, of dire and (in secular terms) desperate

combat; that love would grow cold; that he, in his disciples, would be persecuted

in the name of God; that the struggle would narrow down to an ever more

critical point; that the victory of Christianity would not be the fruit of immanent

development and widening and a steady, progressive leavening of the world but

would come as the act of God coming in judgment to gather up world history

into its wholly unpredictable and unexpected end.

This permanent state of contradiction, foretold to the Church and the

Christian as a “must,” is something that we must not water down. It does not

simply mean that each generation has to be Christianized afresh, and that this

always comes hard to every member of the human race. It is not only a matter of

contradictions and friction in individual private existence, in which everyone,

being a sinner, is capable of resisting the message of the Gospel. Scripture sees

the contradiction as a fact of public life and universal history, a matter of

peoples and politics. Hence this contradiction is a “must” in the history of

salvation…

This is our starting-point: That the Church and Christianity will be to the

end of time a stone of stumbling and a matter of contradiction; that this will not

simply happen to be so as a matter of fact, but is a part of that mysterious “must”

(appearing constantly in Scripture) in which human guilt, which ought not to

exist, yet remains within God’s plan; that God does not will man’s guilt, and yet

this guilt, which is not willed, is used even “in advance” as a means to the

working-out of the divine plan.

For a believer, who judges things from God’s standpoint, a “must” of this

sort is not merely something with which the believer may reckon, but something

which the believer must reckon; something that we must calmly expect and at

which we must not be surprised.