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Vigils Reading
April 19
THE CRUCIAL CHALLENGE
OF OUR CHRISTIAN FAITH
By Thomas Merton
◊◊◊
The season of Lent summoned us to change our hearts, to effect in
ourselves the Christian metanoia. But at the same time Lent has reminded us
perhaps all too clearly of our own powerlessness to change our lives in any way.
Lent in the liturgical year plays the role of the Law, the pedagogue, who
convinces us of sin and inflicts upon us the crushing evidence of our own
nothingness. Hence it disquiets and sobers us, awakening in us perhaps some
sense of that existential “dread” of the creature whose freedom suspends him
over an abyss which may be an infinite meaninglessness, and unbounded
despair. This is the fruit of that Law which judges our freedom together with its
powerlessness to impose full meaning on our lives merely by conforming to a
moral code. Is there nothing more than this?
But now the power of Easter has burst upon us with the resurrection of
Christ. Now we find in ourselves a strength which is not our own, and which is
freely given to us whenever we need it, raising us above the Law, giving us a new
law which is hidden in Christ: the law of his merciful love for us. Now we no
longer strive to be good because we have to, because it is a duty, but because our
joy is to please him who has given all his love to us! Now our life is full of
meaning.
Easter is the hour of our own deliverance–from what? Precisely from
Lent and from its hard Law which accuses and judges our infirmity. We are no
longer under the Law. We are delivered from the harsh judgment! Here is all
the greatness and all the unimaginable splendor of the Easter mystery. Here is
the “grace” of Easter which we fail to lay hands on because we are afraid to
understand its full meaning. To understand Easter and live it, we must
renounce our dread of newness and of freedom!
Death exercises a twofold power in our lives: it holds us by sin, and it
holds us by the Law. To die to death and live a new life in Christ we must die
not only to sin but also to the Law.
Every Christian knows that he must die to sin. But the great truth that St
Paul exhausted himself to preach in season and out is a truth that we Christians
have barely grasped, a truth that has got away from us, that constantly eludes
us and has continued to do so for twenty centuries. We cannot get it into our
heads what it means to be no longer slaves of the Law. And the reason is that
we do not have the courage to face this truth which contains in itself the crucial
challenge of our Christian faith, the great reality that makes Christianity
different from every other religion.
6 New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1965, pp. 145-146.12