Vigils Reading – Office for the Dead

A reading from

FR KARL RAHNER

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The real miracle of Christ’s death resides precisely in this: death, which

can be experienced only as the advent of emptiness, as the dead-end of sin, as

the darkness of eternal night (especially since the supernatural order is the real

order in which there should be no death), and which could be suffered, even by

Christ himself, only as a state of being abandoned by God, now, through being

embraced by the obedient “yes” of the Son, while losing nothing of the horror of

divine abandonment native to death, is transformed into something completely

different: into the advent of God in the midst of that empty loneliness, into the

manifestation of a complete, obedient surrender of the whole person to the Holy

God at the very moment when the person seems lost and far removed from God.

Through the fact of Christ’s death, the justifying grace of God illustrates

and confirms something which previously was not shown but was hidden from

us, namely, that at the very moment in which sin reaches the fullest measure of

its power, the grace of God increases in its power to conquer sin. And through

the death of Christ, when he surrendered himself to this innermost part of the

world (hell), this grace became ours. What he really accomplished in his death,

and what his death really is, may be stated thus: his death, as an act of grace,

helped to offer to God the “flesh of sin” – which death really is – transforming it

into a flesh of grace; so that we now can, through his grace, belong to God and to

Christ in death, despite the fact that death, in itself, means remoteness from

God.

These considerations may make it possible to understand just what the

Christian, in death, achieves through the grace of Christ (in the death which

transpires throughout one’s life); the person experiences life falling into the

emptiness and powerlessness of death as remoteness from God, as the

bitterness of guilt (one’s own and that of the human race), while believing in the

mercy of God, hoping for life in God and yet loving this God so far removed from

one’s self. This Faith, Hope and Charity are not, however, mere feelings

accompanying the brutal reality of death, lasting only until death really occurs,

persisting powerlessly beside the hard reality which is death. They are, rather,

because transformed by grace, the true reality which transforms death but

which, in order that faith should be preserved, transforms it in such a way that

death is still encountered as the wages of sin.

The trinity of Faith, Hope and Charity makes death itself the highest act of

believing, hoping, loving, the very death which seems to be absolute darkness,

despair, coldness itself. These three fundamental powers of Christian existence

(together with grace, of which they are the personal realization), entering death,

transform it into an act of resigning obedience: faith in darkness, hope against

hope, love of God who appears only as Lord and as inexorable justice. In so far

as these fundamental acts become constituents of death as a human act, death

itself is changed; the dreadful falling into the hands of the living God, which

death must appear as a manifestation of sin, becomes in reality: “Into thy hands

I commend my spirit.”