Vigils Reading

THIS NEW WORLD

By Pierre Benoît

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When inspired writings speak of Christ seated at the right hand of the

Father, they are obviously only using anthropomorphic images which have no

value except their symbolic reference. Commentators have always recognized

this. Similarly, when scripture shows us Christ exalted above all the heavens, it

simply means to indicate that he dominates our present cosmos, and it would be

useless to try and define Christ’s position in relation to the “final sphere.” The

doctors of scholasticism, still bound to Aristotle’s system, could go too far in this

direction; yet the greatest of them, a Saint Thomas for example, were able to

keep a wise and prudent reserve on this point.

The essential teaching of scripture, which is to be retained by our faith, is

that Christ, through his resurrection and ascension, departed from this present

world, a world corrupted by sin and destined for destruction, and entered the

new world where God reigns as master and where matter is transformed,

penetrated, and dominated by the Spirit. It is a world that is real with a physical

reality, like Christ’s body itself, and which therefore occupies a “place,” but a

world which exists as yet only in promise, or rather in its embryo, the single

risen body of Christ, and which will be definitively constituted and revealed only

at the end of time, when the “new heavens” and the “new earth” are to appear.

While waiting for that day, the glorious body of Christ exists somewhere,

real, much more real than our perishable world, because it alone possesses true

life, but it is useless to ask “where,” just as it is mistaken to imagine it far away.

This new world, where Christ reigns and awaits us, is not far away, it is not

outside our world, it transcends it. It is of another order, is distinguished in

terms of quality rather than of quantity, and we have access to it through faith

and the sacraments, in a contact which is mysterious but more real and more

close than any contact with our present world can be.

When we say and believe with the Church that the glorified Christ has

ascended to heaven and is seated beside his Father, we mean by this that he

has penetrated forever into the new, final, spiritual world, of which he is the

first cell, a world which is inaccessible to our senses and our imagination, but

which is supremely real, much more real than the everyday world about us.

And we believe readily, with the mass of the earliest Christian witnesses, that

he inaugurated this new world on the day of his resurrection, when he was

rapt from the tomb by the Spirit to be exalted next to the Father.