Vigils Reading

A reading from “New Horizons” by

FR BARNABAS AHERN

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So often when St. Paul writes of the death of Christ, two expressions keep

recurring: “He loved me,” and “He gave Himself for me.” He loved me, and

therefore He went down to death in order that love, because it was love, could

become dynamically active when He would rise from the dead as the glorious

messianic Son of God. In this He has proven His love for us, because when as yet

we were sinners and unworthy of His love, He laid down His life for us. He died

so that He could become the risen Savior and pour out upon the Church the

fullness of the Spirit.

It is the light of this mystery of our Lord’s death and resurrection, of His

suffering and of His life, of the love which led Him to die and to suffer, and the

love which leads Him to give everything to us today as the risen Savior; it is in

this that we ourselves begin to understand the mystery of our own Christian

life…

The Spirit who guided our Lord, the Spirit who illumined Him, the Spirit

who charged His soul with love, is the same Spirit who reproduces that same

love in our own life through the mystery of our Christian incorporation. This is

why for Paul the whole meaning of the Christian life is love. For Paul there is no

law. All law has been abrogated—not merely the ceremonial, ritual law of

Judaism, but all law…

Even though we are living in the spirit, at the same time we are also living

in the flesh. We bear about with us a certain mortality, a pull of gravity, as it

were, turning us in on ourselves, turning us away from God.

The liturgy speaks of the weight of our poor humanness that is always

twisting us, as it were, to selfishness and away from God. Now, our Lord knew

the same weight, that same pull of humanness. He was “tempted” to give people

what they wanted, to meet their need for excitement and pleasure. This easy way

of meeting needs was opposed by the hard way which the Father required. And

Jesus kept clinging to the Father, which meant a constant cross in His life: the

vertical pull to the will of the Father, the horizontal pull to the desires of His

people.

We are in a similar situation. We know the will of God, the vertical pull in

life, and at the same time we feel the horizontal pull of our mortality, our “flesh,”

the needs of our human nature. The agape is always trying to lift us up in

fidelity, but it is always being dragged down by the pull of our poor humanness.

In such lives the Cross is inevitable. The agape is not only responsible for

introducing the Cross, it also gives it meaning

This is the secret of our Lord’s life, as Paul saw it; and it is the secret of the

Christian life as we must live it. Mortification and self-denial, all those negative

factors of life are without meaning if they are not prompted by agape. Our Lord

could become all things to all men, He could forget Himself completely because

there was this driving urge to love. And those who have followed Him have been

given this same spirit.