DEAD, BURIED,
AND RISEN WITH CHRIST
By Hans Urs von Balthasar
◊◊◊
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.”