His Death on the Cross - Our Death to Ourselves

Balthasar continues in the final chapter in Prayer to define the contours of our contemplation of the cross. Our personal crosses are given to us by Jesus. He sheds light on the appropriate attitude toward our sinfulness; by illuminating our abject behavior, unable to be turned around, without the light of Jesus' death on the cross.

from pp. 297-298

This is a fundamental axiom of soteriology… It is the ascending and exalted Head of the Church and of mankind who distributes the charisms and missions of discipleship (Eph. 4: 7f). Out of the fullness of his victory the Son endows the different kinds of men with different modes of sharing in his temporal sufferings…. Such participation, as the Lord wishes, can go to the extremes of powerlessness, spiritual darkness, forsakeness and rejection; since these things are sharing in the cross, they may go beyond what can be experienced and endured at the natural level. They can be so intense that the subject seems to lose all spiritual light whatever all prospect and hope of redemption and resurrection. And yet, infallibly, this is all a result of that light; it presupposes it, objectively and even subjectively. For the light is never withdrawn from a believer unless, having already experienced it, he consents, at least implicitly, to be deprived of it.

All faith is resurrection faith. Hence contemplation of the cross is part of contemplation of the resurrection…contemplation of the cross is the context in which we are to contemplate our own sin and the sin of the world…we cannot reflect fruitfully upon sin unless we do so on the way to penance, and the origin of penance is the cross. Only in the light of the cross and its judgment on sin can the sinner hope to get some idea of what his sin is. Our so-called good or bad conscience…is inadequate on its own, for sin is by nature a lie and thus casts a fog over our insight into ourselves. It is easier than we think to circumvent our consciences and to adopt the standards of the "world". On the other hand, we can be thrown into a sudden despair with regard to the abyss of our own sin, and this despair is not God's will either, but comes from our own attitude of sin. The cross gives the sinner the proper objectivity (a God-given degree of insight into his sinfulness) in the proper subjectivity (a God-given experience of contrition, repentance and sorrow), resulting in an appropriate sense of fear of judgment. There is nothing Christian about unleashing an unrestrained anxiety about judgment which ignores the reality of the cross-indeed, it is totally un-Christian.