 Well, welcome this afternoon. I am Michael Dauphiné. I have been teaching theology at Ave. Maria University. Is that better? Everybody prefer less lights? More lights? Okay, we'll stick with it, so. And so I've been teaching at Ave. Maria University for over 20 years. I've also been the director of the Aquinas Center for Theological Renewal. One of the fun things we did back in 2001, actually, we did it in October of 2001, which you may remember was right after September of 2001. And so we had an international conference on reading John with St. Thomas Aquinas and Scott Hahn was one of our speakers and we eventually did a book and it really kind of dedicated a lot of my life to integrating biblical wisdom and Thomistic study, so that we don't have to choose between the Bible and Thomas. We don't choose between scripture and theology. We don't, you know, right, this is all one. It's all in a way Christ coming to us through his own revelation, through the apostles, through scriptures, but then received by the fathers and then articulated in a way that becomes wisdom, right? And I think we have a really hard time recovering wisdom today. And that's what I want to talk about in a way, because I think what we tend to do is we tend to focus on reason. And what reason does is reason focuses on those things that we can reason about, that we can reason to, that we can master. Reason, in a way, looks down, okay, at things that we study. Wisdom looks up. Wisdom receives. It's a very important point, just a start point before we even jump into this, how does Christ's suffering save us? We, when we get into the habit of trying to reason to the cross, why did God do that? We're then trying to get above God, which we feel very comfortable doing, by the way, in our modern age. We love being above God and putting Him on trial, finding Him wanting. You can kind of think the whole history of the West, by the way, is after trusting in God's providence, we got frustrated. So we decided to put the world in our own hands, right? We'll create utopias and dystopias, because we're in charge now. It's totally different to reason to the cross versus receiving wisdom from the cross, reasoning from the cross. The cross is the starting point. Aquinas, by the way, great theologian, one of the most brilliant, he and Bonaventure, two of the most brilliant, perhaps some of the most brilliant men who've ever been in the church, both saints, rare, by the way, for medieval schoolmen. Once we took over the universities and started the universities, we lost a lot of great saints. It's hard to be a saint in a university, let's put it that way, but it's hard to be a saint and a scholar. But Aquinas and Bonaventure did this. Both of them said that they learned the most theology from the book of the crucifix. Right? Yeah. It's kissing the crucifix, it's loving the cross, it's reasoning from the cross is going to be the starting point. So those are just some starting points just to set us up on why this title wisdom is very important. Now, I want to begin with a prayer that we use all the time at the end of the Rosary, the Hail Holy Queen. But I just want us to attend to how central the path of suffering is in this prayer. Right? And just notice it because I think sometimes we glide over it. And we just say that thing about Mary and expect Mary to fix our problems. Instead of recognizing that we're living in the midst of the valley of tears, mourning and weeping. So let us pray together in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Hail Holy Queen, Mother and Mercy, I life our sweetness and our hope. Do we cry, poor banished children of Eve? Do we send up our sighs mourning and weeping in this valley of tears? Turn then, oh most gracious advocate, on eyes of mercy towards us. And after this our exile, show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb, Jesus. O Clement, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary, pray for us, O holy mother of God, that we may be worthy of the promises of Christ. Amen. Holy Mary, our hope, seed of wisdom, Saint Thomas Aquinas, pray for us. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen. So I want to begin with this just basic question, which is how can the how can the blood of Christ be good news? And I grew up in the church and I also grew up away from the church. My parents introduced me to the faith, introduced me to the sacraments and I didn't find it compelling. I became an atheist at a very young age and I used to think in a way that Christians were fools because how could there be such a good God if there was such a bad world? As C.S. Lewis put it in mere Christianity, it never occurred to him until much later that how did he know the world was so bad unless there was a standard of goodness beyond the world. And right, how do we know that a line is crooked unless we have an understanding of a straight line? Why is it that the injustices and sufferings of this world inspire us with sometimes anger, frustration, complaint, right? If this were the only thing there is, we would know that it was bad. A fish doesn't know it's wet because it's made for water. So if we feel wet, if we feel like something's wrong with this world, it's a sign in a way that we were not meant to live in the water. We were meant to live on land. We were not meant to live in this fallen world. We were meant to live in a world beyond. But to get there, right, we have to go through the blood of Christ. And just to show a couple of these passages here. So how can the blood of Christ, because what's interesting with the blood of Christ is that it becomes ubiquitous in the New Testament. The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a sharing in the blood of Christ? Well, like, that kind of takes all the fun out of the blessing, right? I mean, if it's, we're sharing in the blood of Christ, through him, God was pre-leased to reconcile to himself whether things on earth or in heaven by making peace through the blood of his cross. To him who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood. There are about a dozen passages or more that you can list. But it's almost as though the New Testament says the standard way in which we are saved, in which the plans of God have been revealed, is through the blood. Through not just any blood, right, but the blood of Christ. So if we don't find a way to recover this meaning in this, then we don't understand the gospel. I think in a way, if you've seen some of those studies that say like 60 to 70% of people don't believe that the Eucharist is the body and blood of Jesus Christ, well, I think it's partly because they just don't believe in the body and blood of Jesus Christ. The blood of Christ no longer has a meaning for them, so why believe that it's in the Eucharist? If you believe that Jesus Christ's blood saves you, then it's not that hard to believe that that blood is communicated to you. It'd be very strange for the blood of Jesus to save you and then for you not to be able to receive it. So this is kind of the bigger picture that I think when we recover, we can do it. So I want to look a little bit at why did Jesus suffer. Now, in part, we just begin with, well, Jesus' own words. Be a good place to say. What did he say when he spoke to his apostles, and this is a well-known verse from Luke 24. He said to them, oh foolish man, this is on the way to Emmaus. He's appearing to the two disciples. Slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken. Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory? By the way, we're going to notice there something that always is present in the gospel, which is that it's always the suffering and the glory. We'll talk more about that. Beginning with Moses and the prophets, he interpreted to them all the things, both about his suffering and his glorification in the resurrection. So this is Jesus' own words on why he had to suffer. And then we have Galatians 4. Galatians 4, 4, 6. It's about two sendings. God sent forth his son. It's a mission. Jesus was on a mission. Aquinas will describe this, by the way, as the missions of the Son and the mission of the Spirit. How do we know about the Trinity? Well, we know about the Trinity because the Father sent his son on a mission and the Son sent the Holy Spirit on a mission. From those two missions, we discover then the eternal processions. Augustine does this as well. God sent forth his son. Remember, what was that mission? Why do you go on a mission? You go on a mission to rescue someone. Fundamentally, all missions, but in its core idea, it's a search and rescue. There's somebody in distress, somebody who is lost, somebody who is... And then we go on a mission to find them, to rescue them. Christ went on a mission to rescue us. He was born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law that we might receive adoption of sons. Because you are sons, God has sent the second mission, the Spirit of his son, into our hearts crying, Abba Father. The interesting thing here is the second son, the second mission is related to the first mission. The first mission makes the Son present in the world. The second mission is the Spirit of the Son that makes the Son present in the world in us. We're going to talk more explicitly about the principle that makes that possible, but I want us to note it here. And these are just the early proclamations of the gospel. This is not in the medieval universities. This is just Paul and Luke and Jesus struggling around the Mediterranean to share the good news. So when we look at Aquinas on salvation, what I want to do again is say Aquinas pulls together the biblical and patristic revelation and he helps us to understand it so that we can not, again, reason to it, but we can receive wisdom from it. We can let its reality change the way we think. Now, one of the problems we have is that we're 800 years after Aquinas. So we have had a lot of things happen since then. We've had the Reformation, the splitting of the church, we've had kind of modernity, this thinking we can do everything by reason, and then we've had post-modernity, which says, well, reason is simply fake. Reason is just power. So we can't really just pick up Aquinas and read without looking at some of the first principles. So I want to, I'm going to highlight some of them. Just to give you, they're going to, I picked seven kind of steps for today's talk. And the first one is the idea of communion versus competition. We always presuppose that we are in competition with one another. We're in competition with God. Is it grace or free will? Is it Christ's human nature or divine nature? Is it me or my parents? We're always in competition with one another, but fundamentally the world is made in communion. The world is made in communion. The fact that I am speaking right now is both 100% my actions and 100% God who is sustaining me. Right? It's 100% both. We're not in competition with one another. We're in communion. Second idea is we're going to look at the notion of perfection and reproduction. Perfection is very strange. Father Charles Samson, who's also speaking here, wrote his whole dissertation on be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect. And we were talking about the fact that in Hebrew, the word perfect means to be fully grown. Well, when you're fully grown, what do you get to do? You're mature. What do you do? You get to reproduce yourself. Well, let's look at how does that again impact? You have a world that's in communion and you have a God who wants to reproduce himself, wants to make things like himself. Third one is going to be Jesus and his members are ultimately one. Aquinas presupposes this throughout. Because Jesus is one with us when he has died and has been glorified, Aquinas will even say where his where the head went, the members have to go. So when Jesus ascended into heaven, well, we just we're kind of just stuck. We have to ascend to heaven with him. Right? That's the beauty because he believes that we are genuinely united with him. We're not orphans anymore. That's the good news. So we're going to look at how Jesus is suffering. Aquinas talks about how it perfects the law. Specifically, he even goes through the three parts of the old law that we'll talk about the ceremonial, the judicial and the moral. But it not only perfects the law by making us righteous, making us into a holy people. Scott, I was talking last night about the idea that right of righteousness where we obey the law, but it also makes us a temple in which God dwells in us. And that in a way is fully revealed in the resurrection. Again, we can't cut off that Jesus is death and suffering from his resurrection and glory. It's in the resurrection that then we know that he now that human nature of Jesus is dwelling with God. Heaven is already and Ratzinger describes this beautifully in his Jesus of Nazareth where he just says, heaven is just Jesus. That's it. Heaven is Jesus. His created human nature is with the Father and is with the eternal Trinity. And then all the rest of creation, insofar as it enters into Jesus, becomes heaven. So this becomes then the resurrection. How does this suffering and resurrection that happens in Jesus that perfects the law and the temple come to us? Through faith, charity and the sacraments. By the way, it's interesting, if you've ever read C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity at the end of book two, which is really the first two books, which was originally published as the case for Christianity, he talks about the Christ life that has entered into the world. He says, how do we get it? He says, through things, faith, baptism and communion. It's why a friend of mine who was actually had left the Baptist church, the Baptist friend gave him Mere Christianity, read it, and then he became a Catholic because that's a very Catholic understanding of receiving Jesus. But this is the key thing, whatever Jesus does, we somehow have to receive it. And the last point is the one that I'd like to skip over, but I don't think I can, is that we receive Jesus through accepted suffering. Accepted suffering turns out to be there. And just to give you a little tip in case you fall asleep during the talk, accepted, if you look up the word in the dictionary, it doesn't mean resigned to. It doesn't mean, okay, I'll give up. What accepted means to receive as a gift, to accept something. It's why, you know, when a judge accepts a bribe, it's a bad thing, right? But that's what it means, so it's to receive as a gift. Okay, so those are going to be, and what it says, if we attend to these seven things, and it kind of stretches us a little bit, we're going to, in a way, be in a much better position. Because when we look at Jesus' death atomistically as though that happened, why did it happen, I wouldn't have done it that way. My suffering atomistically as though it's separate from everything else, I'd be like, well, I wouldn't do it this way. When I look at the suffering of a grandchild, right, the suffering of a loved one, I wouldn't do it this way because we see it all divided. To get to that point, we have to go through this. Okay, so now we'll go through these seven ideas. Okay, so communion rather than competition. C.S. Lewis, screwtape letters, 18. The whole philosophy of hell rests on the recognition of the axiom that one thing is not another thing. To be means to be in competition. In many ways, this view that to be means to be in competition is twofold in its origin. First, it's the notion of pride. Pride says mine. It's the two-year-old. Mine. No. What does Satan say? Well, basically, mine. No. Nonservium. I want my little kingdom, my little will. I will not be part of yours. So this is an element of pride, but what's another element is that it is also rooted in our contemporary view of the world. If you're familiar with the term empiricism, empiricism is the idea that we only, reason only knows what it can measure and touch. This goes back to Thomas Hobbes, who says that reason is a calculator. It can add and subtract and multiply and divide. That's it. And it multiplies and divides sense impressions of empirical data, which means everything that I experience only as a part. It's all parts. If you really want to be a little more technical, you can call this nominalism, which means names, just name individual things. They don't name natures. We have a hard time understanding human nature today because we look at it as an empirical thing. And if it's an empirical thing, then I ought to be able to study it. And when I measure it, I just see, well, matter, that I can rearrange and reorganize however I want. I don't see that it has an inner intelligibility. Therefore, this idea of to be means to be in competition is, one, rooted in our pride, and secondly, it's rooted in our modern way of viewing the world. By the way, it's fine if I'm going to do physics. It's a great way to do physics. If one thing is causing it, it's not another thing causing it. But how does that work for love? You can think about a little example. If I want to talk about the piece of a cake, then everybody gets a private good of the piece of a cake, because if I get more cake, you get less. You ever have a family and cake, birthdays, people start fighting over the pieces of the cake, pieces of the pie at Thanksgiving dinner, whatever it is. If I get more piece, you get less piece. Now, if I switch to the piece of the cake, though, P-E-A-C-E, then the more piece I bring, then the more piece you have. Well, in a way, our science is awesome for learning how to divide and manipulate the material universe, which is a blessing. But it's not good at all for seeing things like communion among families for seeing peace, because peace is a shared good that's not material. Now, let's just look at Dante. Of course, Lewis loved Dante. What does Dante say in his Paradiso? Think carefully what love is, and you'll see such discord has no place within these rounds since to be here is to exist in love. So one thing that's interesting is just to notice how Lewis, of course, in writing his screw tape letters is actually quoting Dante without telling you. And the devils quote, they invert quote Dante. Dante says to be in heaven is to be in love. Fundamentally, being is love and communion versus that. Now, again, if we see Jesus's death as something from which we are separated and in competition with, it doesn't, it's not really going to save us. And if all of our suffering is in competition, what's the first thing we feel when we suffer? Well, how I will feel better if other people are suffering. And is my suffering more or less? Some people say, well, well, at least this didn't happen. Usually, by the way, whenever you're talking to somebody who's suffering, whatever you say after at least, just don't do it, right? It's like when you say something, and then you say, but just stop. Don't don't do it. It's just so but this and it's really rooted then in both our fallen nature out of pride and then also rooted in our modern tendencies to see everything as parts. So just to give you a little example about this. What's a B? Okay, does a B exist? Yes. But does a B exist? What I would want to suggest is a B is an abstraction. B's never, a B never exists. We're so used to thinking about a B that maybe you could imagine in a textbook. I could study it. But what do bees exist in? They exist in a broader environment. They exist as part of a whole. They exist as part of a larger communion. You're never going to have one bee. It has to be part of a hive. You need to have flowers. You notice they're all working together with the flower, with no flower, no bees. So to have a flower, to have bees, you need flowers. You also need water. You also need warmth. You also need oxygen. You need carbon dioxide. You need dirt. You need sun. You need, well, God. You need the first cause bringing all the other causes into being. So, but we think it's normal to talk about a B, which is fine. But we got to remember when we do that, we're abstracting apart from a larger whole. So I really want us to kind of get, because once we begin to get that idea, we're going to begin to recover this kind of classical notion that came from Plato and Aristotle was received in the biblical revelation of creation, and then Aquinas pulls together. So again, we want to see in competition of all parts with one another. They're just parts. Whereas if we're in communion, then all things create together. The word universe means a turning to one, a turning around one. So a universe means that the whole is everything, and then the creator of the universe and everything else is part of it. We belong to a larger whole. We are not individuals. We are members of families, members of communities. Yes, we have individual dignity, but as parts of a larger whole. Okay, next key principle. Perfection is reproduction. Perfection in a way means maturity, the capacity to reproduce. Aquinas, well, you may know Aristotle. Aristotle wrote a commentary, he wrote a book on meteorology, because, well, he was also a biologist and a scientist. And Aquinas wrote a commentary on Aristotle's meteorology. And so he asks, what happens when things become ripe? It's an interesting question, because they're thinking about the created world as living and moving. Not just a bunny that I'm going to dissect on a stage, but a bunny doing bunny things, making more bunnies. That's what they're thinking about when they're thinking about living natures. So they talk about ripening as perfect when the seeds in the fruit are able to reproduce the fruit in which they are found. Everything that lives has a kind of perfection because it's able to pass on the life that it has received. By the way, if you just step back for a minute and you think about, what does this mean if you're a human being? Your fundamental purpose is to receive life and pass it on. Like that's, you don't have to solve, you don't have to cure cancer, you don't have to solve climate change, you don't have to solve whatever other, you don't have to solve nuclear warheads or arms race. All you have to do is receive life and pass it on. You can do that spiritually, morally, physically. You can do it in all sorts of different ways in which we receive life and pass it on. You're much less anxious if you feel like you've lived a good life because you received a little life and passed it on to a few people. And I don't mean just, you know, through your progeny, but just through love. That's all it really takes. For in all other cases as well, this is what we mean by perfect. Well, if perfection is reproduction, then this, uh, Rubelev's work on the Trinity, De Patencia on the power of God, is there genitive power or fatherhood in God? And according to the philosopher, that's Aristotle, a thing is perfect when it is able to produce its like. Again, perfection means reproduction and be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect means God became perfect by, well, he's perfect by producing a son. And then he's perfect by creating a world that's going to imitate him. We become perfect by, well, of course, sharing the life we've received from God with others. So God, the father is therefore perfect when he can produce his like and beget a son. This is very important by the way, because what it's going to mean is that why did Jesus die on the cross? Well, yeah. And why did he rise again? Well, in part, so he could make more of Jesus's. That's just, it's not that it's like it's not that complicated. God wants to make a lot of himself. He wants to make a lot of replicas of himself. So the son becomes the son of God becomes the son of man. So the sons of man might become the sons of God. So Aquinas will call, we'll see in a little bit, he'll call the sacrifice of Jesus the most perfect sacrifice, the perfect Tisumum. Well, the perfect sacrifice of Christ is perfect because it can replicate itself in every, in the entire cosmos in all of us. Turns out the only beings that can fully share in this are human beings. Even the angels can't, because the angels can't repent. Okay. Third principle is the idea of Christ and his members are one, the whole Christ, the totus Christus. Interesting. Scott had just mentioned this. This goes back in a way to Paul himself. When he encounters Jesus on the road, Jesus says to him, I am Jesus whom you are persecuting. Well, he's not persecuting. Jesus, he's persecuting the followers of the way. I am Jesus whom you are persecuting. Jesus is identifying himself with his members. Aquinas writes this, the head and the members are one mystic person. And therefore, Christ's satisfaction belongs to all the faithful as being his members. So all that Christ does belongs to us, just as all that I do belongs to my body, we have a unity here. Notice the way Aquinas deepens this point. Christ's works are referred to himself and to his members in the same way as the works of any other man in the state of grace are referred to himself. I mean, it's like if Luther hadn't exaggerated this idea, you would think this was Lutheran. What this means is that what Christ did are mine in the same way that what I do with my hands and my feet are my works. Be like, oh, I didn't steal that. My hands stole it. Be like, I did that. Well, what we're seeing here is that what Christ does in offering himself and in loving one another is mine. It's referred to me just as much as what I do is referred to my body. That's the level of intimacy. So again, those are three things. Communion, not competition. Perfection as though we're not isolated from one another, but life can be reproduced in one another and then the whole Christ. Now let's look for a second how Christ's suffering perfects the law. The law, of course, is that which is meant to make us righteous, make us a holy people so that we can become, we can dwell in a holy land. Romans 5.8, as one man's trespass led to the condemnation for all men, so one man's acts of righteousness leads to the acquittal and life for all men. So Aquinas writes this, Christ's passion wrought our salvation properly speaking by removing evils. We have a kind of evils and it's not like there's just like weight on our shoulders that needs to be taken off, there's a kind of crookedness to our heart. Aquinas will say one time that one of the punishments of sin is its pleasure. Just think the pleasure we feel when we judge someone harshly. Maybe we feel like we have power. We don't feel like we have any power, but then all of a sudden when I get really angry at somebody else, I have the illusion that I have power over them. So it's very hard not to hate. Perfects the law by removing evils, but the resurrection also wrought salvation as the beginning and exemplar of all good things. And again that's going to be the perfection of the temple. So let's look, how does he perfect the law? Well Aquinas says this, when John at the end of, or Jesus at the end of John says it is consummated, it is finished. He says it's understood that by this suffering Christ fulfilled, Implemet, by the way you can use the same word, he perfected all the precepts of the old law. And we're going to see that there are three main kinds of precepts, the ceremonial that by which we worship God, the judicial that by which we relate properly to one another, and the moral that by which we love God and neighbor. It's interesting when he speaks about the judicial order here, just I want to quote this for a second. He says, the judicial order is based upon making compensation to those who have suffered wrong. Making compensation to those who have suffered wrong. This is very important. We tend to think about when God is judge or when we go to a judge, like does that do any of you want to go to a judge? No, like we all have basic idea. I don't want to go to the judge because we usually think of the judge is when I do something wrong, I get taken to the judge and the judge punishes me. Now in part that's just because that's partly the modern legal system. And it's also because we tend to live in a relatively safe and secure environment. Okay, now let's imagine you don't live in a safe and secure environment. Like you live in ancient Israel. Okay, and let's say you have some flocks and you have some land, but let's just say you have a bully of a neighbor who keeps taking your flocks. They just keep taking them, and when you go and they just they like beat up your servants. What do you do? Well, you go to the judge and you say, judge restore to me what has been stolen. My neighbor keeps stealing my sheep. And then the judge who is more powerful but also wise and meant to instill order tells the other person you have to give them the sheep back. So you want God to judge. It's very interesting to create. It says we want, you know, we, Christ will come to judge the living and the dead. Usually we're like, but no, we should be excited because you know what? We are, we've had our identity stolen, right? We've had our identity as children of God stolen by the devil. And Christ wants to give it back to us. And worse than that, we were complicit. We were like Esau who sold his birthright for a bowl of porridge. And we were like the prodigal son who took our inheritance on our own egos. So this idea, it makes compensation to those who have suffered wrong. So the judicial precepts are meant then to restore. So one of the things we're going to see is what's Christ going to do? He's going to restore to us what was, what we lost. Okay. So let's look at a few of these. And again, remembering that all that happens here is something that is, we're in communion with it. It's perfect. So whatever Christ does in the, when he perfects the ceremonial law, he doesn't end it. He makes it now powerful to reproduce itself. He takes the circumcision of the Old Testament and he turns it into baptism. He takes Passover over the Old Testament and he turns it into the Eucharist. What a baptism Eucharist do? They make more little Christs. But he just keeps making more of himself. He loves himself so much. He just wants to make us all like him. Now, just so we understand these three parts are not three parts. They're really one whole. What we have here is the, I wasn't able to get it in the right order. Sorry. Anyway, so now we have it. The moral is fundamentally love of God and love of neighbor. It's the 10 commandments, the first three, love of God, the second seven, love of neighbor as oneself. All the ceremonial precepts of the Old Testament are our specifications of how to love God and all the judicial precepts are specifications of how to love neighbor. This is why in the New Testament, Aquinas goes through in his theology of the old law and the new law, he can show that the moral law never changes. The ceremonial precepts change, but those were just specifications for a given time. That's why in a way we follow the Decalogue, but not all the laws of animal sacrifices. This is so obvious to us, I think, as Catholics that we don't even understand it. But every now and then you run into people that are really confused by why why do we follow one thing in the Old Testament and not another? Why Paul can say that love is the fulfillment of the law in Romans? Well, because all of the precepts were meant to help us love God and love neighbor. So they are fulfilled in Jesus Christ. Okay, so now let's jump into the ceremonial precepts. Now remember the ceremonial precepts are above all, say the animal sacrifices, those sorts of things. How does Christ perfect them? Well, in Hebrews, we see that he offered for all, not fall all, but for all time a single sacrifice for sins. He sat down at the right. So Christ offers a sacrifice. He said, we have this language, by the way, the sacrifice of the mass. It's not accidental that Protestants want to call typically their activity on Sundays of worship, right, worship or service. No, it's a sacrifice because Christ offered a sacrifice because Christ wasn't inventing a new religion, but he was completing and perfecting the Israelite religion. Now the passion of Christ Aquinas will call it a most perfect sacrifice. I said perfectesimum. It's so perfect. And again, it's so perfect, we might like a less perfect sacrifice, by the way, because this perfect sacrifice will be reproduced in us. So who offers the sacrifice? That's the first thing. Well, Christ offers the sacrifice. Of course, it was because of the people that hated him, who killed him on the cross, Judas, the high priests, the soldiers, Pontius Pilate, but it was his own that was the sacrifice of one suffering out of charity. Hence it is said that Christ offered the sacrifice, not the executioners. It's kind of an obvious point, but it's very important to understand it's Christ who offers the sacrifice by accepting suffering out of love. So I want to go back there. So I want us to think a little bit about this notion of sacrifice and animal sacrifices and how Christ perfects it, because I think it's something that's, it's often kind of somewhat mysterious. But let's go back to the Old Testament. Well, animals are your wealth. They're your assets. They're your food. Animals are your pantries and your 401Ks. Okay? Well, and it turns out, in Egypt, we know you tended to worship those same animals because you worship the bull because bulls were awesome because you could make more cattle from a bull. Right? And what do you want? You want your land's fertile? You want your family's fertile? And you want your animal's fertile? Well, it's kind of like, you know, what do we want? We want, what do we want? We want our 401Ks to be fertile now. It's kind of actually even less interesting. But by the way, it's still that same principle. So what God does is say, no, I want you to sacrifice those things that other nations worship. So sacrifice the rams and the bulls. Sacrifice them. One, because they, you're inclined to worship them. Secondly, because, well, you're inclined to worship them because they're your possessions. Possess me and don't be possessed by your possessions. Be a people that are mine. Let me possess you when you let go of your possessions. Now let's think a little bit about this notion of sacrifice. Okay, well, I can give money to God. I could give an animal to God. And in a lot of ways, when I give things to God, I'm kind of somewhat expecting things in return. This is kind of somewhat God, the great vending machine. It's the natural pagan way of worshiping that is near and dear to all of our hearts, right? If I do this for you, you'll do this for me. This is not a healthy relationship with the creator. But the reason why is because we don't know what we genuinely want. If something happens and something goes wrong, I might have to make a sacrifice to make it right. Well, let's imagine the sacrifices that I, let's say I take your iPhone. I don't know what I would do with it. I don't know if you can sell an iPhone, but let's just say I'm inclined and I take your iPhone. Well, at some point I'd have to give it back. I'd have to make the sacrifice of giving it back. Maybe I have to make a little additional sacrifice. But let's say I take your dog out for a walk. It's in Florida and I don't have the dog on a leash. Gator gets the dog. Well, so I just, I get you a dog that looks like it, go to the pound. Like just what do you do? How do you, like there's sometimes where you just can't make things right. You know, sometimes we've done things that we can't make right. What kind of sacrifice can we do? And so part of it is just to realize sometimes Jesus does for us what we can't do for ourselves. We can't offer the sacrifices. If you break somebody's trust badly, you can behave better. You can say you're sorry. You can never take away the fact that you hurt your beloved, that you wounded your beloved in their hearts. No amount of sacrifice will ever take away that. Also, any sacrifice that we choose to make is still an act of our own ego. But part of the thing we learn is it's our ego that's the problem. So what kind of sacrifice can we offer that would be of our ego? Well, I can't offer that sacrifice. So Christ has to do it for us. We kind of forget that Christ on the cross gives up everything. He gives up money, marriage. He gives up any more time with his apostles who clearly hadn't learned a lot. I mean, just hadn't. I mean, he had a plan to send him the Holy Spirit, right? But he no more time to try to convince the Pharisees one more time. Maybe I could win him over. He had plans. He wanted to convert Jerusalem. He wept over Jerusalem. Maybe he wanted to spend more time with Mary and Martha and Lazarus. He had a great mom, an awesome mom. He was going to spend time with her in heaven, right? But you know, but he gave up any more earthly interactions. He gave up everything on the cross because we couldn't. So that's what Christ does. Christ then offers that sacrifice, that willingness to suffer. He sacrifices his ego, right? Again, Christ does for us what we couldn't do for ourselves. So I want to shift now to the judicial precepts. Not just our relationship to God, but our relationship to God and to one another. Fundamentally, in justice, we owe God everything, and in injustice, right? We give God very little. So when we go to Romans, again, we see one man's disobedience. Many were made sinners. So by one man's obedience, many will be made righteous. Aquinas said this. Aquinas has said to have paid the price of our redemption his own precious blood, not to the devil, but to God, right? Aquinas, I'm sorry, Jesus pays the price of our redemption to God. We walked away from God. We turned away from God by disobedience, right? That needs to be restored. Jesus's perfect acts of obedience restores it for us. But I want to pay attention to the second theme of the devil. Sometimes we don't overly discuss this, and it's always hard when somebody gets obsessed with the devil, usually want to draw them back to Jesus. But part of the way that the fathers at the Bible, the fathers and Aquinas talk about what Jesus does is that he rescues us from the devil, right? Hebrews 2.14, through death, Jesus might destroy him who has the power of death. That is the devil. The devil has the power of death. The devil has power in this world. This world as we experience it is under a curse. It's under a dark prince. And deliver all those who, through fear of death, were subject to lifelong bondage. Again, it's interesting. How does the devil hold us in bondage by fear of death? When you're afraid to suffer and die, you will kind of do anything. Christ's passion, Aquinas writes, delivered us from the devil and as much as Christ's passion, the devil exceeded the limit of his power assigned to him by God by conspiring to bring about Christ's death, who being sinless did not deserve to die. The basic idea here is that the devil has some kind of just claim on the death of the unjust. Those who, the wages of sin are death, and therefore the devil has a claim to the death of sinners. But God tricks the devil by looking like a sinner, by looking weak, by going up on the cross. And then when the devil kills Christ on the cross, who is innocent, he loses his power to everyone else. If you ever had to see us, Lewis is lying in the witch in the wardrobe. The deep magic is that all traitors, the witch has a right to kill all traitors. But the deeper magic before the beginning of time, which is the deeper magic of mercy, is that when an innocent victim suffers in place of another one voluntarily, then death itself will begin working backwards. So this is a key principle. And if you ever listened to Father John Ricardo, I recently had a chance to interview him on the podcast, and he just does an amazing job of capturing this idea that we're not redeemed, we're rescued. And he says sometimes we have a problem with redeeming because the only time we use redeeming is when we redeem a coupon. But we understand what it means to be rescued. And he uses the example by the way of Jesus as a stealth predator, right? Alligators, other ones. How do they hunt? They lie still. They camouflage themselves, and then they wait. How does Jesus hunt the devil? He lies still on the cross, and he waits for the devil to exercise his power. But when he does, he loses all of his power. And this is very, this is mentioned a lot by Athanasius, Augustine, Ephraim. It's very present in the fathers. So anyway, so that's that idea that we are rescued. So I want to look now at the perfection of the moral precepts, which is really one of charity. Go to John 15. Greater love has this, has no man than this, than a man laid down his life for his friends. Jesus fundamentally shows an infinite amount of love by dying for us. Romans 5.8, right? God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Aquinas will say that Christ's love was greater than his slayer's malice. Christ's love was greater than all the malice of the entire universe. Aquinas says this, man cannot fulfill all the precepts of the old law unless he fulfilled the precept of charity. So fundamentally, to perfect the old law is to perfect charity. And this is then what he says. By suffering out of love and obedience, Christ gave more to God than was required to compensate for the whole human race because of the exceeding charity from which he suffered. And if ever, by the way, you've kind of heard a little bit of say the satisfaction theory of atonement or the penal substitution theory of atonement, Aquinas will speak of satisfaction and how Christ makes satisfaction on the cross. But he does it not because he suffers an immense amount of punishment. He does it because he suffers out of an infinite amount of charity. It's the charity of Christ on the cross that makes satisfaction, that restores us in love of God. So now let's shift to this idea of the resurrection as perfecting the temple. One thing I want to really highlight is it's always the suffering and the resurrection. It's one perfect whole Christ. You can see this, by the way, in part if you go to even things like the Mysteries of the Rosary. We do the joyful, we do the sorrowful, and then we do the glorious. We do the luminous too. But we need to, we don't just do the sorrowful. You can't understand the sorrowful without understanding the glorious. The Trituum. We need Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter, Easter Vigil, Easter Sunday. It's one liturgy. It's one whole that because we live in time, we have to experience in parts. Because I can only think of one idea at a time, I have to think of the death and then think of the resurrection. I have to think of the Son and then the Father and then the Holy Spirit. But I have to remember, they are all one. The death and the resurrection are one mission, one mission by which Christ saves us. So let's go on again, no resurrection, no cross. There's no meaningful cross without the resurrection. Acts 3, you killed the author of life, whom God raised from the dead. That's what we are witnesses of. Again in Acts, we bring you the good news that what God has promised to our fathers, he has fulfilled to us his children by raising Jesus through this man forgiveness of sins is proclaimed to you. So the apostles went around preaching the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. They never denied the death, but they preached the resurrection. Romans 10, 9, if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. So we can't separate this question of Jesus's suffering from his resurrection. Here is Jesus appearing to the apostles. By the way, for those who are like that other verse from 1 Corinthians 2, at least I thought I'd throw it in here, Paul says, I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ named crucified. Well, what about that? Dr. Dauphiné, that sounds like he just talks about the crucifixion. Well, it's interesting. Paul also in 1 Corinthians 15 gives the best defense of the resurrection. He actually says, I delivered what I handed, what I received. Christ died for our sins and was raised on the third day in accordance with the scripture. So not only did he die in accordance with the scriptures, but he rose in accordance with the scriptures. And he appeared to Peter end to the 12th. Now he says, and if Christ is preached as raised from the dead, so even when Paul says, I knew nothing but Christ crucified, he fundamentally says, I preach Christ resurrected from the dead. We need to again restore it to a whole, not to let it be parts. Okay, now let's consider not only the resurrection, but the ascension. This is Aquinas does is here you have St. Stephen being stoned. But what does he do when he looks up? He sees Jesus is fundamental core memory of the church. He looks up and he sees Jesus at the right hand of the father where Jesus said he would come at the right hand of the father fulfilling Daniel. So he gave full of the Holy Spirit. He saw Jesus standing at the right hand of God. So we don't just remember Jesus on the cross or just remember the resurrected Jesus. We remember Jesus at the right hand of the father. Of course, what did Jesus do on his way to heaven? Well, let's remember in first Peter, he went and preached to the spirits in prison. And here's an image I really want us to think about whenever we think about Jesus's suffering and we think about Jesus's rescuing us, I want us to remember these icons and images of Jesus going down with two big, strong hands and pulling up Adam and Eve. Whenever you introduce the Genesis story to children or to high schoolers or in a parish or an RSA or something, people are always like, if only they hadn't done it, why didn't God do something? Why didn't God do something? It's like he did. He's done everything. He's already got Adam and Eve taken care of. Right? See this image here. Pulling up Adam and Eve, our first mother, our first father, and all the rest of those who formerly didn't obey, those who were sinners. But through Christ's mercy, they were willing to turn. Here we have another image of Jesus pulling up Adam and Eve. This is, by the way, on a church in Istanbul from the 13th, 14th century. You can't quite see it here, but Jesus is actually standing on Satan. Satan is tied up in knots, right, underneath it, which is pretty cool. Because again, he fell for the trick. So in a way, why did Jesus suffer to rescue Adam and Eve, to rescue us? This is the image. And in a way, if we're dead, how is Jesus going to get us other than being dead? And if we're in sin, how is Jesus going to get us then to kind of go into the effects of sin? So this is a strong point. And then what does Aquinas say about the resurrection unto glory? He says, Christ's resurrection is the cause of ours. Because remember, just as though his suffering becomes ours, his resurrection becomes ours. Because the principle of life-giving is the word of God, the word of God bestows a moral life upon that body, which is naturally united to himself. Of course, the word of God being dead can't stay dead because the word of God is alive. So the body that died has to rise again, because it's connected to the divine life. So also, through that body, all other bodies will rise again. So why did Jesus suffer so that he could capture my suffering body in suffering and death so he can rise it again? This, by the way, thinking about Christ, if you know much about Aquinas as the proofs for God's existence, you may know the understanding of the first cause. God is not just the first, but he's really the primary cause. He's the prima causa. Well, he's not just the first cause of our being. He's the first cause of our resurrection. He's the first cause of our natural life, but he's the first cause of our resurrection in Jesus Christ. So by his ascension, he prepared the way for our ascent into heaven. Since he is our head, the members must follow where the head has gone. Again, if we genuinely believe in communion and perfection and the whole Christ, this is just logically follows. See how important it is to set aside some of our empirical individualistic, isolating mindsets and the ascension and Pentecost. The key idea here, I'm going to go over this kind of quickly, but again, Christ's ascension is the cause of our ascension. And within this, then, he sends the Holy Spirit. So why did Christ die so that he could send the spirit of his son into our hearts so we could cry Abba Father? And it's just interesting here the way he describes the Holy Spirit as the premium donam. The first gift means it's also then the cause of every other gift. So how then does Christ enter into us? First with faith. He says, those who share, commune. We communicate. We share in. We are in communion with his passion by faith and charity in the sacraments. Through the gate of heaven's kingdom is thrown open to us through Christ's passion. So Christ's passion and resurrection open up heaven for us. We receive them by faith and charity in the sacraments. If we just look at baptism here for a minute, we can see the perfect Son reproduces his perfect, his likeness. That's what we become. We become sons of God in baptism. Roman, when Aquinas comments on Romans 828 that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. He says this, well, in John it says he's the only begotten. How can he be the only begotten but also the firstborn? Well, he's the only begotten by nature so that he can become the firstborn in us. The Son of God willed to communicate to others conformity to a sonship so that he would not only be the Son, but also be the firstborn. Because remember, to be perfect is to communicate your like. The whole Christ and the members again through baptism, this is what Aquinas says, the passion of Christ is communicated. And remember, using that word communion, it's shared in to every baptized person so that he is healed just as if he himself had suffered and died. Do you feel that forgiven? You know, Teresa LaSue said this beautiful thing where she said once that she wished that she had committed every sin possible so that she would know how much God's mercy was, right? You know, she didn't actually say do it, of course, which is why she's a saint. But this idea that do I believe, do I believe that Jesus's suffering death on the cross was a perfect sacrifice? Yes, kind of. Do I believe that that is in me just as if I had offered that sacrifice? No. Because I have a hard time receiving this truth. But that's what Aquinas is telling us. That the love with which, right, in Romans 5, 5, the love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit. We no longer live with the ego love, we now live with the love of the Holy Spirit in us. So that I am healed by baptism as if I had suffered and died with perfect charity. Christ's passion is sufficient satisfaction for all the sins of men. Consequently, he was baptized as freed from the debt of all punishment due to him for his sins. Just as if he himself had offered sufficient satisfaction for his sins, right? It really is that powerful as if all of your senses, when Jesus, when God looks at us, he sees us as if we were Jesus Christ. But it's not fake. We actually are. Christ is actually replicated in us because the God who created the universe can recreate the universe in us. In the Eucharist, I'm going to go over this kind of quickly, but the key idea for Aquinas on the Eucharist is just that the entire Christ is present in the Eucharist. The sacrament is nothing other than the application of the Lord's passion to us because it contains the Christ who suffered, right? Everything that Christ has done is the Eucharist because the Eucharist is nothing other than Christ. The Eucharist and Christ are not in competition with one another. The destruction of death, which Christ accomplished by his death and the resurrection to life, which he accomplished by his resurrection. Again, Aquinas holds them both. He says both of those are effects of the sacrament. So how do you get connected to the death and resurrection of Jesus through the Eucharist? How do I get rid of my ego driven? I need a blood transfusion and I get one. So this is when he says the Eucharist is the most perfect sacrament of our Lord's passion. I just want us to think about that perfect sacrament because it contains Christ crucified and what does it do? It replicates Christ crucified in us, but that also means when Christ, when the Father looks at us, he sees us on the cross. The Catechism says, I think it's in 617, that Jesus saw each one of us and loved us on the cross. We thought he was going to love us at a distance, but as Father spoke about it, he overcame that distance and he brings us right with him onto the cross. So the Eucharist then becomes the sacrament of Christ's passion as man then is made perfect in union with Christ who suffered. Christ is the perfect sacrifice. He's the perfect sacrament, and then he makes us perfect through the Eucharist. And it's the act of divine friendship by which Jesus keeps company with us, as Aquinas puts it. So now I want to turn to the final section on accepted suffering. Lewis's problem of pain has a famous quote, God whispers to us in our pleasure, speaks to us in our consciences, but shouts to us in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world. But what I want to point out is that it can only become a megaphone to rouse a deaf world if we also remember what he mentions at the beginning, that the Son of God suffered unto death, not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferings might be like his. This is the powerful understanding. For those who are interested, I think there's a distinction that Lewis makes in the problem of pain that really gets that a Thomistic understanding of creation, fall, and redemption, but I love the way he does it. He just says this, in the fallen and partially redeemed universe, we distinguish four levels of suffering and God, because it's always hard. So is God, is God turning the screws on us? Right? It's like it's hard to figure this out. But he says this, there is the simple good descending from God. God is good and he can only create good. There is the simple evil produced by rebellious creatures. There is the exploitation of that evil by God for his redemptive purpose. God is never causing evil. He's never the direct cause of suffering. The complex good to which accepted suffering and repented sin contribute. So it's the complex good to which accepted suffering and repented sin contribute. So at least for me and for a lot of students I've worked with, it's not that we're going to be able to see from God's perspective how all this works out. St. Josemaria Scriva one time described that if you see a beautiful tapestry from the front, it's beautiful, but behind it's full of knots. And we live behind. We live in the valley of tears in which we see knots and things that are cut off and pain and suffering. But all of that is somehow being woven together to create a beautiful work that will be manifested in the resurrection. But how do we do this? The complex good we're going to get is through accepted suffering and repented sin. Now Maurice Bering who was a convert to the Catholic Church and a friend of G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Bellock wrote a story called Darby and Joan. And in it, he says this, one has to accept sorrow for it to be of any healing power. That is the most difficult thing in the world. A priest once said to me, when you understand what accepted sorrow means, you will understand everything. It is the secret of life. And I want to make a suggestion here that you may have heard St. Michael the Archangel says, Servium, I will serve. And the devil says non-Servium, I will not serve. I would want to suggest in a way, the devil not only says non-Servium, but says non-Patsyam, I will not suffer. And I think our modern age is an age that doesn't want to suffer. When something is suffers, we want to blame someone because we believe if only we could create a world without suffering, we're this close. We're not, but we think we're almost overcoming death, we're almost overcoming crime. Just give us a little more time and we can fix the world. But it's because we're so afraid of suffering that we just say, no, I will not accept a world in which this kind of suffering occurs. Now there's a little bit of that in all of us. It just usually takes a long time to come out. And God will sometimes find the suffering we need to pull it out of us. So I want to suggest that we have to think about not just accepting suffering, but suffering willingly. And I put here accepted suffering versus accepted suffering. I used to have the kinds of sufferings I could tolerate. My kids were in accidents. Yes. I would even do weird things like imagine being at their funerals saying that I still believe in God and trust in his good work and everything. But God doesn't give you those sufferings, the ones you thought you could accept. He gives you the ones that you didn't want, the ones you wanted to accept from your life. And then all of a sudden, how do you then do that? What if your children wander from the faith? What if they wander from hope? What if they wander into depression, suicidality, drugs and alcohol? What then? Well, that then. Like that too. That too, even when it breaks almost every part of you. Because the beauty of the gospel is that every part of us needs to be broken. I don't know how to put it. We like to think back at the silly Old Testament Jews thinking that offering a sacrifice would be good enough of a ram or something. How silly of them. But we ultimately think our sacrifices are good enough. Especially that, well, I've sacrificed maybe for the church. Maybe I work for the church. Maybe I do this. I do that. Right? All of our sacrifices are not enough. In Christ, right, we can do everything. But Finne may knee hill. Apart from me, you can do nothing, as he says in John. So we really have to get to this idea that when Aquinas says this on Romans 8, he says, God the Father gave him up to death by pointing him to become incarnate and suffer. Basically, why did Jesus come to die? I sometimes wonder why Jesus come, by the way, to cry. So we could understand that Jesus was going to enter into our sorrows. By inspiring his human will with such love that he would willingly, and I just love the fact that this word willingly keeps showing up. This is Aquinas's commentary on Romans, right? Willingly undergo the passion. And he says, for us, it's when our sufferings are voluntarily endured for God out of love, which the Holy Spirit produces in us, then we can merit eternal life. Our own love will run out. It's like if we try to have a wedding without Jesus, we run out of wine. If we try to handle suffering on our own, we will run out of wine. If we try, we will run out of love. Suffering will empty the love out of us. No matter how much love you have, suffering will empty it. But when you become empty, then the Holy Spirit can fill you. Alden wrote this, for the garden is the only place there is, but you will not find it until you have looked for it everywhere and found nowhere that is not a desert. I love this from Elizabeth. So she says, even if my grief is inconsolable and has totally changed my life, I love that because that's how bad grief is at times. It's inconsolable. And it's totally changed your life. I must not give into depression and sadness. I will still try to make my life, my actual life, bruteful for God. Therese LaSue just says a beautiful thing about suffering. She says, I only suffer for a moment. It's because people think about the past and the future that they are becoming discouraged and despair. You can handle any suffering for this moment. Jesus, of course, says, don't be anxious about tomorrow. Tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Let today's own trouble be sufficient unto itself. I also have here John Paul II, Salvifichi Dolores, which it was beautiful to hear Jeff Cavan speak about this morning. He speaks about the gospel of suffering. Not only it's that the revelation of the salvific power and salvific meaning of suffering in Christ's meaning, where that we can endure any how, Frankal wrote this after suffering through the concentration camp, we can endure any how if there's a why. What's the why that we can come home to God through Jesus Christ? We can never suffer alone because God has entered into our suffering. Pope Benedict says this in space salvi. He says the beautiful thing about Jesus is Jesus does the one thing that nobody else could do is he actually died and is alive, which means whenever we die, we will never die alone because there will be one who will be there to shepherd us right through death. And then we see here Colossians. We rejoice. We complete what is lacking in Christ's afflictions. So when we go back to how does Christ's suffering save us? We can go back to these initial passages, right? He does it through. He reconciles us to himself through his blood. It was necessary that Christ should suffer and die. God sent his son and he sent the Holy Spirit into our hearts so that we could cry Abba father and become sons of God. When we go back to these final seven points, I want us just to remember we have to resist the idea that we are in competition with one another. The competition that we feel with our neighbor is from our sins. Solzhenitsyn once said, right, that the battle between good and evil lies in the heart of each person. That's why we're in competition, not in the work, not because the world is built that way. It's because we've messed it up and God wants to restore us to communion. We want to allow God to be perfect and God therefore wants to replicate himself in us. Unites us to Christ as one mystic person. Christ's suffering out of love perfects the old law in the ceremonial and the judicial and the moral. By the way, of course, then what does Christ do in the new covenant is we have sacraments, which are the new ways of loving God and then moral teachings, which are the specified ways of loving neighbor. He rescues us and makes us his temple so much. So I was reading the other day this beautiful, it was a anyway 20th century Thomas, but he was talking about the idea that we think about Jesus wanting to be in the tabernacle to be with us, but Jesus doesn't in a way want to be, Jesus is in the tabernacle because he wants to be in us. I mean, like he's, he's present in the Eucharist so we can receive him. So the tabernacle in a way is kind of like the way station where he's waiting until he can dwell in us. That's how intimate he wants to be in us. We receive his mission through faith, right through submitting and sacrificing our own opinions to the truth of faith as revealed to us and through the sacraments of baptism in the Eucharist. And then finally we receive it through accepted suffering. We allow Christ to be replicated in us. We allow our egos to surrender and die. I heard one time this idea that when we go, when we bear unbearable suffering, suffering in a way that is more than we can bear, that's when we begin to see as God sees and love as God loves. And that's when the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is present in us and that we can genuinely cry out, Abba Father. So thank you very much for being with me this afternoon. I think our time is over. So I think we have a 30 minute break until the next session. And so thank you again very much. If anybody, I do by the way, just for a little fun thing with that podcast that I got started on the Catholic Theology Show. I have an episode with Dr. Bergsma. We do the Eucharist in the Bible. I have an episode with Scott Hahn where we do his whole book and his talk that he did last night on holiness and a lot of other wonderful things. So if you'd be interested in hearing more or help supporting that and sharing that and listening that, I'd be ever appreciative. There's also lots of, it's one of the few podcasts where you can listen to a lot of Aquinas and a lot of C.S. Lewis all at the same time. So anyway, thanks again.