Aaron Riches Quotes & Sayings

The specific sufferings of Jesus do not amount to redemption: rather, redemption is wrought through the uniqueness of the person who suffered and the perfect charity for which, in which and by which he suffered. The uniqueness of the suffering of Christ, then, lies in the pro knobs, which is bound to the freedom through which the Son endures "every human suffering" on account of love. To say that Jesus endured "every human suffering" does not mean that he specifically suffered every thing that every person ever did or could suffer, but the he "sums up" in this Passion the suffering so fate world, mystically including them in his own suffering and recapitulating them in the form of perfect love. The whole weight of this psychological and physical dereliction of humanity is, in Christ, suffered and sorrowed now within God himself, in the sense that the human sufferings of Christ are "one" with the divine filial relation that constitutes his unity with the Father. — Aaron Riches

To suggest that the grief of Christ issues from his perfect wisdom and
charity would confirm that true sorrow is human and therefore cannot
correspond to despair, since the hopelessness of despair would yield nothing
about which to sorrow. If life is meaningless, there is no reason to
mourn. Truth is what makes grief authentic and real, and so it follows
that Truth Incarnate, come down from heaven to our vale of tears, would
grieve at the highest pitch. The "tragic experience of the most complete
desolation"49 depends on "the knowledge and experience of the Father."50
Or as Adrienne von Speyr puts it: "The Father is never more present than
in this absence on the Cross. — Aaron Riches

Orthodoxy, however, entails a revolution in our metaphysical conception of the relationship between God and humanity, and therefore between the uncreated Unum and the maior dissimilitudo of the creature before the Unum. Properly understood, the apostolic confession of the unity of Christ does not stand midway between a "too unitive Christology" on the one hand, and a "too differentiating Christology" on the other; rather, it wholly recapitulates the nature of the difference of man before God. — Aaron Riches

In the womb of the Virgin Mary, God "becomes" human, receiving from her the body that makes possible the "passion" of God; while on the Cross, through the Jewish flesh given of Mary, the divine Son is truly crucified. In the same way, in the Eucharist, Christians receive the very flesh the Logos received of Mary and united to himself, that "truly life-giving flesh of God the Word himself." Only insofar as God receives the passability of human flesh does he become crucifiable and sacramentally givable. — Aaron Riches