Joseph Ratzinger (Benedict XVI) is one of my favorite writers. Almost everything he produced is gold: joyful, wise and saturated in Jesus. Here he is on great form, preaching about suffering, joy and Christian evangelism:
“When a person receives a great love, when he is privileged to know that he is loved by someone who is good and powerful and absolutely reliable, then this is no guarantee that something terrible will not happen to him, too, and remain terrible. Nevertheless, it will not be able to destroy him, because there is something in him that all these terrors cannot touch: a light and a strength that are stronger than all that. The Christian, though, is such a person; for to him is granted the gift that he is loved by God, who is absolutely kind and powerful, whose love does not depend on any moods and whose fidelity never wavers. And therefore resignation, joylessness, sullenness, humourlessness, and cynicism do not suit one who is Christian… Joylessness in this most profound sense is the repudiation of the faith, the repudiation of the God whose Yes is still the foundation of our life, whatever may happen. “Rejoice” therefore means: be believers, immersed in the certainty of what the Gospel has proclaimed to us: God loves with a love that is not fickle…
But someone who is resigned or embittered himself cannot be a bearer of Good News. The Gospel can be proclaimed credibly only by someone who, on the one hand, has suffered, who has not evaded reality, the difficult reality of this world, and has stood fast in his faith in the love that is stronger than suffering. Only someone who is an evangelist in this way can hand on the joy that we need, which is not a surrogate, a brief anesthesia, but withstands the truth of this world.”
Teaching and Learning the Love of God, p.139-140
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