Vigils Reading

A LIFE WITH CHRIST

by Fr Louis Bouyer

◊◊◊

Our death with Christ and this resurrection with Him, giving us the life

hidden with Christ in God, who will appear when Christ Himself will appear, is

the whole mystery that St Paul tells us God had reserved for these later times.

Writers have often stressed the extraordinary frequency of grammatical

compounds containing the word “with” in the writings of St Paul, and have

rightly observed that it is a characteristic feature of his whole conception of the

Christian life. Indeed, for him, the Christian life, the life of the Church or that of

each Christian, is a life with Christ. It is important to grasp all that that implies.

Jesus of Nazareth, who died and rose under Pontius Pilate and is now

seated at the right hand of the Father until the day He will come to judge the

living and the dead, has never been for St Paul, nor for any Catholic theologian,

a hero whose epic must leave the impression that His achievements are too

wonderful ever to be duplicated in ourselves. Surely no poet has dreamed of a

hero more sublime than the One of whom the Apostle wrote: Despoiling the

principalities and the powers, he made a public spectacle of them, leading

them away in triumph. But it is for us that He triumphed thus, and we must

know that by Him and with Him, dead as we were, God has raised us up with

him and seated us with him in the heavens in Christ Jesus.

Yes, Christ accomplished all that in us, for, if the sense of our own

weakness is what faith, in cutting at the very root of our pride, first thrusts upon

us, it does so only to make clear to us that strength is made perfect in weakness

and that we can do all things in Him who strengthens us – that is, Jesus Christ.

That the Church celebrates Easter, that today she suffers and weeps with

her Head, then rises and exults with Him, is the sign that the relation between

Christ and the Church, between Christ and us, is quite different from that

existing between any historic personages of different epochs, even between a

master and his disciples. For the authors of the New Testament, even for the

evangelists whose immediate end is to recount the earthly life of Jesus of

Nazareth, this Christ can never be considered simply as a man whose life and

death might inspire sentiments analogous to those awakened by, say, the life

and death of a Socrates, even though those sentiments were incomparably

deepened and purified. He is truly the Son of God made flesh for our sake.