“Behold we live”: Msgr. Ronald Knox on the power of the Cross

Ave crux spes unica. Hail to the Cross, our only hope.

What are the implications of this hope for Christian discipleship as it is lived in this world?

The English priest and apologist, Msgr. Ronald Knox (1888-1957), whose death anniversary is August 24, preached a series of six sermons on the Cross of Christ in 1928. Knox meditates upon the contrast between the world’s perception of Christians and the reality of those whose lives are conformed to the Cross. For his preaching, Knox selected a Pauline text, 2 Corinthians 6:4:

In all things let us exhibit ourselves as ministers of God…by evil report and good report, as deceivers, and yet true; as unknown and yet known, as dying and behold we live, as chastised and not killed, as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing, as needy, yet enriching many, as having nothing and possessing all things.

Knox begins with St. Paul’s list of three identifying traits of a servant of God: his suffering, the “perfections of his own character”, and being misunderstood by others. Why should a servant of God be identified by such qualities as these? Because God has taken human flesh, and offered that flesh in sacrifice on the Cross for our salvation.

“The servant is not greater than his master; if they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you,” Knox quotes John 15:20. To “exhibit ourselves as ministers of God” means to be like Christ who suffered. He is Perfectus Deus et Perfectus Homo (Perfect God and Perfect Man), and yet was profoundly misunderstood and rejected: “He came to what was his own, but his own people did not accept him” (John 1:11).

In his six sermons, Knox considers the six accusations against Christians named by St. Paul. The title of each sermon and a commentary follow.

“The Travesty of Truth”

“As deceivers, and yet true.” What does it mean for Christians to be thought of as “deceivers”, who are nonetheless “true”? “The Christian, like Christ, will be called a deceiver by those around him precisely in proportion as he loves the truth, and wishes to spread it,” Knox writes.

On Holy Saturday, Christ himself was referred to as “this deceiver” (Matthew 27:63) by the chief priests and Pharisees, who had demanded his crucifixion the day before. Knox presents the “trilemma” that C.S. Lewis would later make famous and which had been used in a similar form three years earlier by G. K. Chesterton in The Everlasting Man.

“Only three comments were possible on (Christ’s) career,” Knox writes. “One is this. His friends went out to lay hands on him, for they said, ‘He is become mad” (Mark 3:21). Another is this, ‘Nay, but he deceiveth the people’ (John 7:12). And the third is, ‘Thou art Christ, the Son of the living God’ (Matthew 16:16).”

In considering the accusation of Christ that He was a deceiver, Knox points out that no motive was ever postulated for this supposed deception. And all evidence pointed away from any earthly motive, as, for example, Christ lived and died a poor man with no seeming political or professional aspirations of any great magnitude. Knox also highlights the disregard for truth to which Pilate gives explicit testimony. The people, for their part, bear implicit witness to their indifference to truth, accusing Christ at one moment of claiming to be the Son of God, in order to charge Him with blasphemy according to their own law, and at another moment with claiming to be the king of the Jews, knowing this alleged act of political usurpation would hold more sway with Pilate.

As it was for Christ, so it is for His Church. She is accused of deceiving by the inveterate deceivers of the world. Throughout her history, the Church has stood firm on her claim to know the absolute truth about God and His creation. In every age, the world has accused her. “Today,” Knox writes. “When the world has become so fuddled with its own philosophies that men cannot be sure whether two and two really make four, whether black is not really white under another aspect, they all agree on one thing–that the Catholic religion can’t be true. They will tell you one moment that it is impossible to discover whether truth exists, and the next moment that the Catholic religion is certainly false–such is their logic.”

Despite these accusations, Catholics remain firm in their belief, rooted in the truths of the Faith and in Him Who is the Truth. Knox writes:

We are committed to a creed. The Catholic religion is very much more than a creed; it is a life, a warfare, a loyalty, a romance. But it is a creed too; and the assertion of it involves us in an intellectual responsibility. Man’s intellect is part of himself, and must be represented, consequently, in the scheme of his salvation…we, whom the world thinks liars, have on the contrary the duty of being true.

“The Charm of our Obscurity”

“As unknown and yet known.” In what sense will a minister of Christ, or any disciple, be thought of as unknown and yet be known? And why does St. Paul consider this to be a point worth making?

In the world, knowledge and stature are closely intertwined. In the Kingdom of God, knowledge and love are even more closely bound together. To the extent that Christians are unknown to the world, worldly people will ridicule and dismiss them as unimportant. But the true minister or disciple of Christ is one who craves worldly obscurity, and places all of his hope on being known and loved by God.

Again, this charge against Christians was first made against Christ. According to Knox, one of the primary accusations made against Jesus was that He was a nobody. Christ was thought to be the son of a carpenter. He had not graduated from any rabbinical school. He came from Nazareth, a proverbial backwater. Even Nathaniel, who was to become an apostle and saint, wondered whether anything good could come from such a place (cf. John 1:46).

Unknown by the world, Jesus was nevertheless known more deeply than the human mind can comprehend. Knox quotes John 10:15, “As the Father knoweth me, I also know the Father.” Knox comments, “He, who to the world’s eyes seemed friendless, without influence, without honor, had been from all eternity, was then, as he would be to all eternity, the unique object of his heavenly Father’s loving regard, knowing and known with an intimacy of which all our earthly knowledge is but a shadow.”

As it was for the Lord Jesus, so it is for His Church and for the individual Christian. Here it would be tempting to recount specific places and historical circumstances in which the Church has been obscure, humble, and small in the eyes of the world. But Knox makes a deeper point than one contingent on specific circumstances: “The point is that it is the instinct of the Catholic genius at its highest to court obscurity, to shun publicity, and, if it can do so without prejudice to the salvation of souls, to live and to die unknown.”

Unknown, and yet known. “I am the Good Shepherd. I know mine and mine know me” (John 10:14). According to Knox, the “mutual intimacy” of this text finds eschatological expression in 1 Corinthians 13:12. In heaven, St. Paul writes, “I shall know even as I am known.” Showing both sides of the eschatological coin, Knox quotes Matthew 25:12. He writes: “What greater consolation than to be certain, however little the world knows or understands us, of being known to him? What more terrible formula of rejection than that with which he threatens the impenitent, ‘Amen, I say to you, I know you not’?”

“Joy in Sorrow”

“As sorrowful, yet always rejoicing.” In order to harmonize his preaching with the thematic progression of the Season of Lent, Knox rearranges the order of St. Paul’s litany of the accusations Christians endure. Particularly, Knox sees the special value of preaching on suffering during Passion Week and death and resurrection during Holy Week.

It was also fitting to meditate on joy and sorrow in the Christian life during a week begun by Laetare Sunday, a day of rejoicing in the midst of Lent’s pervading sorrow and solemnity. Knox begins by presenting Christ as the Man of Sorrows, sorrowful despite the truth that He enjoyed the Beatific Vision. This, Knox writes, is “a mystery we shall never understand on this side of the grave.”

There is an inverse mystery that exists in the Sacred Heart, however. Knox considers how it can be that He who knows the tragedy of sin and its eternally fatal consequences better than anyone–in other words, He who had more cause than anyone for sorrow–could at the same time feel joy. Citing Luke 10:21, which says that Jesus “rejoiced in the spirit,” Knox calls this rejoicing by Christ “the most astonishing proof of his full humanity.”

Christ rejoices in seeing the Father’s will accomplished in those disciples who believe in Him and persevere in their fidelity. And He invites others to come and be refreshed at the same fountain of joy.

Knox proceeds to consider that, in different ages, the Church has been regarded as more or less sorrowful. He shares Chesterton’s supposition that in the Patristic Age and shortly thereafter the Church was focused on atoning for the sins of the pagan world that had preceded it, whereas the Middle Ages brought new freshness, innocence, and a corresponding measure of joy.

In the lives of individual Christians, the virtuous coexistence of joy and sorrow needs to be contrasted with two extremes: a light-heartedness rooted in hard-heartedness, one that fails to sympathize with the plight of others, and that mere melancholy that passes itself off as Christian sorrow.

The true disciple will find in his own heart the sentiments, the joy and the sorrow, found in his Master’s Sacred Heart:

In proportion as we are good Christians, the world will find us dull dogs, a little removed from its insensate pursuit of pleasures, a little obsessed with thoughts of death and of judgment, a little sceptical about its facile optimisms. But, again in proportion as we are good Christians, this seriousness of character will not reflect itself in empty brooding on the wickedness of the world, will not make us morbid, self-centred, disillusioned. Rather, we shall find that Christian sorrow and Christian joy have their roots nearer together than we fancied; that the desire for God’s will to be done perfectly in us and in all creatures, which is the Christian religion, bears a double fruit of sadness and of gladness. For so it must be, until our earthly Lent is over, and we rejoice for ever in the triumph of the eternal Easter-tide.

“The Wealth of Our Poverty”

“As beggars, yet enriching many; as having nothing, and possessing all things.” Two chapters later, in 2 Corinthians, St. Paul will declare that Christ, “though he was rich, for your sakes he became poor” (8:9).

Knox notes how easy it is to sanitize and enrich each Gospel scene as it appears in the imagination. Yet most Gospel scenes, truly depicted, would show a poor Man leading a band of poor disciples, preaching to and serving the poor. Such poverty is a fitting sign, according to Knox, of the vastly greater impoverishment involved in the Incarnation itself. Having emptied Himself, to use the expression of St. Paul’s kenosis hymn in Philippians 2, Christ could never fill that space in Himself with earthly riches. Knox asks, rhetorically, “How could gold or jewels or purple have made a home for incarnate Godhead here?”

Once again, Knox builds upon a Christological foundation the edifice of a disciple’s life and virtues. Not only is it characteristic for a Christian to be poor, but rather to be a beggar. Knox points out that of the two most common Greek words for poverty, ptochos, a kind of crouching, beggarly poverty, is used in the vast majority of instances in the New Testament.

Christians are called not only to accept poverty if and when it comes their way, but to embrace an attitude that in Christ they have true and superabundant riches. Knox writes of this attitude:

We seem to have nothing, yet in reality we possess everything, because we possess Christ…The point is that it is the instinct of our religion at its best not merely to distrust money, as the root of all evil, not merely to despise money, as something perishable and indifferent, but actually to love poverty, to preach poverty, to undertake voluntary poverty even when there is plenty of money to be had.

Such poverty has many benefits, including freedom from worldly cares, growth in humility, and a clear sense of dependence on God’s providential care. The deepest benefit is simply that of following Christ in HIs poverty.

Knox acknowledges that relatively few are called to the evangelical counsel of holy poverty in the way of religious brothers and sisters, but all Catholics are called to lives of detachment. Such a life has as its animating force a true, clear-sighted sense of the scale of earthly and heavenly riches, and chooses the latter wholeheartedly and without hesitation.

“The Triumph of Suffering”

“As chastised, and not killed.” Is there any quality so distinguishing about a Christian and to a Christian as that he suffers? Among all religions, Christianity shows to the world the true meaning of suffering, and the Church has had plenty of opportunity for practical demonstration, down through the ages.

The true meaning of suffering is to be found, of course, in Jesus Christ, the Suffering Servant prophesied in Isaiah, who was chastised from the beginning of His earthly life all the way to Calvary. Denied a room at the inn of Bethlehem, hunted by Herod, doubted, accused, and mocked, threatened with death in His hometown of Nazareth, nearly stoned in Judea, plotted against, betrayed, and denied, all before His Passion truly began.

And yet, just as suffering is a constant theme of Christ’s life, and the lives of His disciples in the New Testament, so too is deliverance from trials and chastisements of all kinds. The Holy Family escapes to Egypt. Christ passes through the midst of the people of Nazareth who sought to cast Him off of the brow of the hill. On another occasion, while Jesus was teaching in the Temple area, some sought to arrest Him, but they did not and could not lay a hand on Him, because His hour had not yet come.

In the calming of the storm, the disciples feared that they were perishing, but at a word of command Jesus calmed the storm. The public ministry of Jesus involved countless acts of deliverance, from possession, sickness, hunger, and even death.

The key to deliverance by Christ is faith in Him. How many times did Jesus say, “Your faith has saved you”? For what did He rebuke His disciples before calming the storm at sea? For their lack of faith. So faith has been the key to deliverance in every age of the Church.

Knox cites all of the great historical examples of the persecution of the Church, from the incalculable repression of the first centuries of her history, through barbarian invasions, heresies of all kinds, attacks by Muslim armies, the Protestant Reformation, the horrors of the French Revolution, and so on, down to the present day.

“For nineteen centuries,” Knox writes, “men have been trying to repress the Catholic Church, and she emerges from the persecution chastised but not killed.” He continues, writing of the trust all Catholics must have in the Lord’s care for the Church and for them, in the midst of trials:

As chastised, and not killed. Servants of Christ, we must embrace, with sublime confidence, his assurance that not one hair of our heads can fall to the ground without the will of our heavenly Father (Matthew 19:30). The providence that watched over our Lord in his helpless infancy, the providence which he trusted so utterly amidst the dangers which surrounded him, has watched over his Church all through the ages, will watch over us when all hope seems lost and all prayers unanswered. The eternal God is our refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms.

“Undying Death”

“As dying, and behold we live.” It has been said that Jesus was born to die. The coming of His death gave urgency to the whole of Christ’s public ministry. “There is no time to waste in his life, because the shadow of an early death hangs over it,” Knox writes. “He lived, in fact, the life of a dying man–an artist who sees the end coming, and must at all costs accomplish his masterpiece before it is too late.”

Even with the arrival of His hour, which He had so often foretold, Christ drank the cup of suffering and death but was not conquered by it. Knox quotes Revelation 1:18, “I am he that liveth, and was dead, and behold, I am alive for ever and ever.” The command to “behold” is shared with 2 Corinthians 6:4, inviting contemplation of the mystery of Christ’s death and Resurrection, in Him, in His Church, and in each of His disciples.

In her earliest days, the Church knew a sense of urgency comparable to that of Christ’s public ministry. There was a constant, palpable sense that the Lord would soon come again in glory and judgment. Even those New Testament texts that give nuance and context to this expectation were written at least in part to reassure those who were fretful about what they perceived to be Christ’s delay in coming.

Saint Paul’s early advice to the Corinthians was to live as if in the last days. Knox quotes 1 Corinthians 7:29-30, “This therefore I say, brethren, that the time is short; it remaineth that those who have wives be as if they had none, and they that buy as though they possessed not, and they that use this world, as if they used it not to the full.”

This sense of urgency provided some of the fuel for the Church’s early emphasis on virginity. And the witness of the martyrs gave further evidence that Christianity is a dying religion. And yet, behold, the Church lives. “All the time,” Knox writes, “this dying Church was in fact bringing life to the dying world of paganism, was to put new vigour into its failing energies, rescue it from those consequences of physical degradation with which its own vices threatened it.”

Expectation of the Lord’s return, however modified since those earliest days of the Church, persecutions inflicted by worldly powers, and her own sense of existing for the Kingdom of Heaven have all kept the fire of the Church’s urgency burning brightly.

The fire burns brightest in her martyrs, who most perfectly exemplify the dying and living of the Church and her Lord:

When persecution arises, she defies all maxims of prudence, and plunges the most devoted of her servants into a hopeless struggle, which leads to nothing but their imprisonment and death. And still, on the ruin of those types, fresh edifices of faith have been built up, fresh ramparts to defend her from assailants. “As dying”–a hundred times the world has prophesied our imminent dissolution–“as dying, and behold we live.”

Each Christian, then, is called to live a “dying life,” in the words of the Imitation of Christ (Book I, ch. 23). Knox quotes this text, and adds that Pauline declaration, which is also an injunction, “Ye are dead, and your life is hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3). This union with Christ’s dying and rising is sacramentally accomplished in baptism. It is meant to be lived each day of a Christian’s short time in this world:

As the children of Israel passed to their deliverance through the dark waters of the Red Sea, so Christ, our Leader, delivered us by passing, on Good Friday, through the dark gates of the tomb. In baptism, we have all mystically achieved that ordeal by water, we have all been mystically identified with Christ’s death–buried with him (St. Paul says again) in baptism. “As dying, and behold we live”; it is only in proportion as we are dead to the world that we live in him.

Bearing the Cross of Christ Today

The adventure of discipleship requires Catholics again and again to get back to basics. Such a return to the fundamentals of the Faith seems especially important now, when there is so much conflict and confusion within and outside of the Church.

There is nothing more basic to Christianity than the Cross of Christ. And there is nothing more necessary in every age of the Church than for each member of the clergy, religious, and lay faithful to “take up his cross and follow” the Lord Jesus. Just as churches often have a cruciform shape, so the entirety of the Christian life has the Cross as its mold and model, its source of death to self, to sin, and to this world, and its source of life everlasting.

The Cross informs the disciple’s sense of his identity, mission, and destiny in Christ. In the sermons of Msgr. Ronald Knox, the consequences of such cruciform living become clear. The faithful Christian will be accused in many ways. So it was in the time of St. Paul, and in 1928, when Knox preached these sermons, and so it is now and ever shall be.

Understanding the accusations they face and the truth of their identity in Christ, disciples become equipped not only to live in communion with Christ’s dying and rising themselves, but also to bear witness to this Good News of salvation. Saint Paul writes of such witness, “We preach Christ crucified” (1 Corinthians 1:23).

Lamenting the estrangement of the world from Christ and His Church, Knox expresses prayerful hope for those who currently accuse the followers of Jesus, “If only they knew what it means to be a Catholic! God grant that they may come to know.”

God grant that all who long for true life will have the Gospel proclaimed to them, and will seek and find life in Christ, the crucified and risen Savior.