In one of his Wednesday audiences, the late John Paul II spoke of the key theological theme of "recapitulation." He said:

God's saving plan, "the mystery of his will" (cf. Eph 1: 9) for every creature, is described in the Letter to the Ephesians with a distinctive term: to "recapitulate" all things in heaven and on earth in Christ (Eph 1: 10). The image could also refer to the roller around which was wrapped the parchment or papyrus scroll of the volumen with a written text: Christ gives a single meaning to all the syllables, words and works of creation and history

The first person to take up this theme of "recapitulation" and develop it in a marvelous way was St Irenaeus of Lyons, a great second-century Father of the Church. Against any fragmentation of salvation history, against any division of the Old and New Covenants, against any dispersion of God's revelation and action, Irenaeus extols the one Lord, Jesus Christ, who in the Incarnation sums up in himself the entire history of salvation, humanity and all creation: "He, as the eternal King, recapitulates all things in himself" (Adversus Haereses, III, 21, 9).

The great mosaic of the Cross as the Tree of Life, in Rome's Basilica of San Clemente, depicts in its swirling branches the world and human history as one great vineyard. It contains not only scenes of everyday life, but also representations of Roman gods, dim intimations of the fulfillment that would come only in Christ's paschal mystery.

One remembers how the early fathers of the Church heard resonances of Christ's coming in the Fourth Eclogue of Virgil, promising "jam nova progenies caelo demittitur alto": "now a new progeny descends from high heaven."

Yet more mysterious is the prediction in Plato's Republic. When Glaucon muses on the fate of the truly just man, he says: "the just one will have to endure the lash, the rack, chains, the branding iron in his eyes, and finally, after every extremity of suffering, he will be crucified."

Georges Rouault, the creator of the great and terrible series of prints, "Miserere et Guerre," remarked:

Jesus dies every hour, smelling sweet on the sandalwood of the Cross;  He perfumes the universe, but man no longer believes except in his misery.