CCC 459 The Word became flesh to be our model of holiness: “Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me.” “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me.”1 On the mountain of the Transfiguration, the Father commands: “Listen to him!”2 Jesus is the model for the Beatitudes and the norm of the new law: “Love one another as I have loved you.”3 This love implies an effective offering of oneself, after his example.4
CCC 472 This human soul that the Son of God assumed is endowed with a true human knowledge. As such, this knowledge could not in itself be unlimited: it was exercised in the historical conditions of his existence in space and time. This is why the Son of God could, when he became man, “increase in wisdom and in stature, and in favor with God and man”,5 and would even have to inquire for himself about what one in the human condition can learn only from experience.6 This corresponded to the reality of his voluntary emptying of himself, taking “the form of a slave”.7
CCC 474 By its union to the divine wisdom in the person of the Word incarnate, Christ enjoyed in his human knowledge the fullness of understanding of the eternal plans he had come to reveal.8 What he admitted to not knowing in this area, he elsewhere declared himself not sent to reveal.9
CCC 557 “When the days drew near for him to be taken up [Jesus] set his face to go to Jerusalem.”10 By this decision he indicated that he was going up to Jerusalem prepared to die there. Three times he had announced his Passion and Resurrection; now, heading toward Jerusalem, Jesus says: “It cannot be that a prophet should perish away from Jerusalem.”11
CCC 572 The Church remains faithful to the interpretation of “all the Scriptures” that Jesus gave both before and after his Passover: “Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?”12 Jesus’ sufferings took their historical, concrete form from the fact that he was “rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes”, who handed “him to the Gentiles to be mocked and scourged and crucified”.13
CCC 649 As for the Son, he effects his own Resurrection by virtue of his divine power. Jesus announces that the Son of man will have to suffer much, die, and then rise.14 Elsewhere he affirms explicitly: “I lay down my life, that I may take it again. .. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again.”15 “We believe that Jesus died and rose again.”16
CCC 1615 This unequivocal insistence on the indissolubility of the marriage bond may have left some perplexed and could seem to be a demand impossible to realize. However, Jesus has not placed on spouses a burden impossible to bear, or too heavy – heavier than the Law of Moses.17 By coming to restore the original order of creation disturbed by sin, he himself gives the strength and grace to live marriage in the new dimension of the Reign of God. It is by following Christ, renouncing themselves, and taking up their crosses that spouses will be able to “receive” the original meaning of marriage and live it with the help of Christ.18 This grace of Christian marriage is a fruit of Christ’s cross, the source of all Christian life.
CCC 2544 Jesus enjoins his disciples to prefer him to everything and everyone, and bids them “renounce all that [they have]” for his sake and that of the Gospel.19 Shortly before his passion he gave them the example of the poor widow of Jerusalem who, out of her poverty, gave all that she had to live on.20 The precept of detachment from riches is obligatory for entrance into the Kingdom of heaven.
1 Mt 11:29; Jn 14:6.
2 Mk 9:7; cf. Dt 6:4-5.
3 Jn 15:12.
4 Cf. Mk 8:34.
5 Lk 2:52.
6 Cf. Mk 6 38; 8 27; Jn 11:34; etc.
7 Phil 2:7.
8 Cf. Mk 8:31; 9:31; 10:33-34; 14:18-20, 26-30.
9 Cf. Mk 13:32, Acts 1:7.
10 Lk 9:51; cf. Jn 13:1.
11 Lk 13:33; cf. Mk 8:31-33; 9:31-32; 10:32-34.
12 Lk 24:26-27,44-45.
13 Mk 8:31; Mt 20:19.
14 Cf. Mk 8:31; 9:9-31; 10:34.
15 Jn 10:17-18.
16 I Th 4:14.
17 Cf. Mk 8:34; Mt 11:29-30.
18 Cf. Mt 19:11.
19 Lk 14:33; cf. Mk 8:35.
20 Cf. Lk 21:4.