Vigils Reading – Easter Thursday

THE SECRET

OF THE CHRISTIAN LIFE

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.

Our baptism incorporates us into Christ in such a way that we become

“other Christs.” 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… all law has been abrogated—not merely the ceremonial, ritual

law of Judaism, but all law. Now the Christian knows only one principle of

action, and that principle of action is totally from within—the love, the agape,

which the Spirit is infusing…

“If we live by the spirit, then we must walk by the spirit”… 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.