Easter Thursday

Christ’s New Birth from the Tomb5

From “The Names of Christ” by Luis de León

…There was no natural force that could give heat and life to a cold body enclosed in a grave, nor was there any normal way to bring blood back to His veins, humors to His body. It was only the wonderful powers of God that could bring heat where ice was, fullness where emptiness reigned, tie together what had been set apart and broken. Christ’s soul was full of God’s essence, which helped God’s movement toward Christ: Christ’s soul became full to the brim with God’s presence, warmth, and glory, penetrated every pore of Christ’s body and made both body and soul shine with His glory to the point that they outshone the sun’s rays, the sun’s golden light… For God’s infinite light reverberated in Christ’s soul,and the soul shed its light into the body, and the body then became a beacon of God’s ever-expanding light.

And we read that Christ was born then ‘in adornment of holiness,’ because when He was thus born out of His tomb He was not the only one born, as had happened when He was born out of Mary, but rather with Him and in Him many other people resplendent in life, glory, and holiness were also born. He brought into a wider horizon of light and freedom many people who were imprisoned in the old law of Abraham and… managed to gather together all His friends and disciples in a spiritual embrace, and He gathered all of them into Himself in such a way that in the death that His mortal flesh was to suffer all the evil and sinful part of their flesh would also die. Condemned to die, it was to be reborn into glory and justice… This is why in a beautiful metaphor and paradox Christ says about Himself and His new birth, ‘Amen, amen, I say to you, unless the grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it remains alone. But if it dies, it brings forth much fruit’. Because when a grain has been sowed, if it becomes full of soil’s humidity and the juices of the earth, it becomes pregnant, rots, and out of its womb come a thousand others seeds, a whole ear of corn or of wheat…

We see then that when Christ rose like the sun from His sepulcher this meant that it was not only a ray of sunlight that was arising and shining at that moment, but rather many rays, many shining splendors, life itself, and the very future of the world, being embraced and enhanced by Christ. Joy, birth, a new birth for all of us: a wonderful birth in which we were all reborn, and moreover one that overcame death, anguish, despair. By contrast with darkness light shines brighter. The anguishing hours before such a birth, hours of despair and death, enhance such a birth, since out of suffering, misery, grief, came out victory and life. A paradox: By falling down Christ rose up, out of death life arose and conquered the heavens. In such a manner, we conclude that the deeper the roots, the higher the plant that grows out of such roots, and in a parallel way out of an experience, so deep and poignant, of agony and despair, Christ came to know an existence of bliss