Vigils Reading

THE EYEWITNESS OF THE APOSTLES

By Fr Hans Urs von Balthasar

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The Apostles are the founders of the Church, officially chosen and called

by the Lord, whose first function will be to be eyewitnesses. They are drawn into

living community with the Messiah, a relationship in which they will enjoy with

this man, who is ‘God among us’, a commerce that is fully human, that engages

both their senses and their spirit. They are ‘those with him’, ‘those who

accompany him’, and ‘those around him’. This is what they are, and they will

grow more and more into this way of life in the course of Jesus’ life. They

constitute the original cell of God’s community with us, which had been

promised and is now being realized. All those coming after them who wish to

have community with God must become a part of this original cell. There are

many others who come to the Lord, only to go away again, many others who stay

with him a while only then to leave him, or simply others who have a loose

connection with him without any particular calling.

By contrast, the Apostles enjoy a community with Jesus which has precise

contours, a community which he has consciously established and maintained,

which is founded on the definitive life-long renunciation of all else: it is

something wholly formed, distinctive in shape. And yet it is not something

magical imposed from above, since the son of perdition will indeed fall away;

rather, it is the realization of the covenant-partnership between God and

ourselves.

Eyewitness, in turn, is an association with the Lord in his public life, in his

Passion, and in his death which is the communal, human, and realistic

experience of God which continues and fulfills the Old Testament’s promise of

an earthly God-with-us. But this phase comes to an end with Jesus’ death. The

Apostles’ senses, accustomed to his existence, now fall into the void. There is no

longer anything there to see, to hear, to touch. The Apostles’ whole human

experience breaks off with the three days in death, then to resume anew,

without any traceable continuity, with Christ’s Resurrection, at a place whose

distance from the point of disruption can be known and measured only by God.

And now, during the forty days, the association with the Lord will be

experienced with wholly new senses.

The eyewitness of the Apostles draws all its force from this last phase, to

be sure; otherwise they could hardly bear witness to anything more than an

extraordinary man who was prophetically gifted and who performed miracles.

But it draws its force not, indeed, solely from the witness of the Resurrection,

but from the fact that the man who appeared to them was the same whom they

had known previously from long association and whom they had seen suffer and

die. Seeing him, hearing him, touching him, observing how he eats, the proof of

the wounds” all of this receives its full significance only in that light.