November 19

I still have many things to say to you” (Jn 16:12). If we are to understand these words correctly, we must interpret them in conjunction with those other words that Jesus spoke to his disciples as he was about to leave them and that only seem to be contradictory. “I do not call you servants any longer, … but I call you friends …” (Jn 15:15). That means that he has been the first to give his friendship and without any reciprocity on our part and that, in doing so, he has told us all things. John of the Cross once expressed this thought in the following words: “God gave us his Son, who is his Word, and in doing so gave us everything at one time in this one Word, and there remains nothing further to be said” (Ascent of Mount Carmel, 1, 23, 3). Granted, all of history will not be long enough for us to penetrate the meaning, to express in words, to love as he deserves, and to share the sufferings of this one Word of God, his Son, in whom he became our friend even unto death. For that reason, there is always something more to be said of him. For that reason, he is, for every generation, the new word that flows from the inexhaustible spring of friendship. But this does not signify the institution of a more exalted Christianity that will gradually reject the Faith of the apostles as something naïve and inconsequential. Nor does it signify the gradual accumulation of a multiplicity of doctrines that will ultimately become inscrutable. On the contrary, all these words which spring from the reality of his love and from our association with it are only words of the one Word in which everything is revealed. Therein lies the unity, the simplicity of Christianity, and therein lies its historical inexhaustibility. God’s unending friendship toward us is the one unending theme of history, the one new theme that is given us and that surpasses all that we can say of it. Therein, too, lies the fact that Christianity belongs to the simple as well as to the complex—that it is neither too demanding for the one nor too trivial for the other: the friendship of the Word of God for us is the most understandable, the most intimate, yet at the same time the greatest and most incomprehensible, theme that could possibly exist. It is only this oneness, moreover, that is able to reconcile our multiplicity. Our many words are all concerned with the one Word in which everything is revealed. The more we live in this one Word, the more we remain one despite the diversity of our words. That is why it is so important that, given this diversity, we continue to seek unceasingly for the one Word. That is why it is so important that we seek his friendship with all our heart, because it is also the true locus of our mutual friendship.

From: Ordinariatskorrespondenz, January 20, 1981

 Ratzinger, J., Co-Workers of the Truth: Meditations for Every Day of the Year (ed. I. Grassl) (San Francisco 1992) 365-366.