Saint Paul testifies to the intimate, accessible vitality of the Risen Christ when he
exclaims to the Galatians: “I live, now not I, but Christ lives in me.” Did he
understand what he was saying? Probably yes and no. No, because he would be the
first to admit that this is a mystery too vast for the mind to comprehend, the
eye to see, or the imagination to have dreamed up. But yes, because he knew on some level; he
recognized with the certainty of faith the Risen Christ in his very life- as the
greatest gift to celebrate and live from. This gift is not just what Jesus said
and did, but who he personally is: namely, the Word who reveals by giving himself to us, and who speaks to
our hearts simply by being. This is
the Risen Christ, spoken once into history, and now eternally alive. He is the event of faith who gives us an
experience of God.
And this is no ephemeral, ghostly, “spiritualized”
Christ that Easter morning brings us. On the contrary, all that Christ
experienced in his earthly life is alive in him. His earthliness is risen; but being risen, its vitality is
infinite. As John of the Cross says in his Spiritual
Canticle, the Risen Christ makes even the divine “always new and
increasingly amazing.” (Cant.14:8)
Photograph by Brother Brian. Meditation by Father Dominic.