Easter Wednesday

CROSS AND RESURRECTION

An excerpt from “On Prayer” by Hans Urs von Balthasar4

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Heaven…in which we can already participate, informs our life on earth

and gives it its meaning; and, in like manner, the resurrection determines our

relation to the cross, setting up a second and final “soteriological” tension. We

are Christians, because the Lord has risen; if he had not, our faith would be vain.

Christ suffered for the sake of glorification and took on himself the cross, the

confession of the cross, that he might obtain absolution from the Father. We

are not at first entitled to go with Christ on the way he walked; otherwise there

would be no qualitative difference between him and us; he would only be…first

among equals, and we could be literally called co-redeemers. But “God

commends his charity towards us because when as yet we were

sinners…Christ died for us…”

“When we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his

Son“. If we walk with the Son, it is because we are carried along by the grace of

the redemption accomplished by him. The sentence that decided our destiny in

principle was pronounced on Christ as representing all sinners. In him we were

crucified and condemned to death; in him justified and accepted as children of

God. In him, without any action on our part, God’s wrath against us has

changed into solicitous love. so then we have to bring to full reality in our

temporal life on earth what is already true in Christ and through him in heaven

with the Father.

In the New Testament what we have to do follows from what we are. We

are justified, and must act accordingly. We are dead, buried and risen with

Christ, and have to live our lives in view of this. We are no longer to live to sin;

we are henceforth to look on the “old self”, who is dead as dead in fact, daily

oppose his resistance to the sentence of death, make him die daily.

One might say that in order to exalt the resurrection St. Paul upsets the

equilibrium between the old and the new… the old and the new Adam, cross and

resurrection, fear and hope. From now on the first member of each pair of

antitheses is comprised within the second; the cross, in the Christian life, is

borne in the strength of the resurrection already accomplished. “In all things

we suffer tribulations but are not distressed. We are straitened, but not

destitute. We suffer persecution, but are not forsaken. We are cast down, but

we perish not. Always bearing about in our body the mortification of Jesus,

that the life also of Jesus may be made manifest in our bodies…

4 “Cross & Resurrection” from the book On Prayer. Hans Uns von Balthasar, Sheed and Ward 1961, pp. 233-234.9