Vigils Reading

DEAD, BURIED,

AND RISEN WITH CHRIST

By Hans Urs von Balthasar

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Heaven, then, 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

according to the time 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

Hans Uns von Balthasar, Sheed and Ward 1961, pp. 233-234.13

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 eon, 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….For which cause we faint

not; but though our outer nature is corrupted, yet the inner nature is renewed

day by day.”