Easter Weekday

THE NEW AGE OF THE RESURRECTION
By Thomas Merton 4
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The “new life,” the life of the Spirit, life “in Christ,” is communicated to
the human spirit by the invisible Mission of the Holy Spirit — a direct
consequence of the Resurrection of Jesus. Therefore the “new creation”
instituted by the second Adam is in fact a prolongation of his Resurrection.
The new world which is called the Kingdom of God, the world in which God
reigns in us by his divine Spirit, the world of the Second Adam is, in fact, the
Eon of the Resurrection — the new age that begins to dawn with the rising of
Christ from the dead, which reaches out to touch, with the pure spiritual light
of that dawning, each soul newly incorporated into the Risen Christ, until all
the elect are gathered together in him and the Kingdom is openly and
definitively established without question and without opposition in the
general resurrection of all the dead.
“If,” says St Paul, “by reason of the one man’s offense death reigned
through the one man, much more will they who receive the abundance of
grace …reign in life through the one Jesus Christ.” That is exactly the Pauline
concept of the Kingdom of God — a Kingdom of superabundant spiritual life,
in which the saints “reign in life through the one Christ.”

To reign in life is to have domination and autonomy by union with God
as the source of life. It is to have and enjoy the sublime liberty of the children
of God, the freedom of the Spirit by which Christ has come to make us free.
The early Church was entirely penetrated with this doctrine of liberation,
plenitude and life. Wherever the authentic Christian spirit has prevailed, it
has always been marked by this same perfect liberty and vitality in the Spirit.
For always and everywhere the Spirit of Christ teaches this message to those
who are his own: “For whoever are led by the Spirit of God, they are the
children of God. Now you have not received a spirit of bondage so as to be
again in fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption, by virtue of which
we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ The Spirit himself gives testimony to our spirit that
we are the children of God.”

In this view of Christ’s role as second Adam, establishing the final
victory of life over death, we are still confronted with the ideas of death and
life together. The liberation from sin and death is effected by the death of
Christ. The communication of life to our souls is effected by the resurrection
of Christ. “Jesus… was delivered up for our sins, and rose again for our
justification.” We shall see that in order to enter fully into communion with
the life brought to us by Christ we must in some sense — sacramentally,
ascetically, mystically — die with Christ and rise with him from the dead. The
whole life of the Kingdom of God consists then in the gradual extension of
the spiritual effects of the death and resurrection of Jesus to one soul after
another until Christ lives perfectly in all whom he has called to himself.

4  THE NEW MAN, Thomas Merton (Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, NY 1961) pp. 152-154.