Rising With Him

If you were to ask me to sum up in one sentence what it was all for—the descent of the eternal Word from the bosom of the Father into our humanity; his thirty years of hidden life and hard manual work in Nazareth as one more laborer of the human race; his three years of public teaching, together with the performance of endless good works of healing and forgiving; and then, finally, his humiliating condemnation and excruciating Passion, Crucifixion and Death, and, on the third day, his glorious Resurrection from the dead and his return to the Father at the Ascension—if you were to ask me to sum up in one sentence what all of this was for, I would say this: Driven by the Holy Spirit’s goodness and undying charity, the eternal Son of God chose to descend so deeply into our human condition of sinfulness, weakness and death that henceforth no one could fall so low that he did not necessarily fall into Christ. Jesus went below the lowest of the low. You can go down as low as you can into either depression or debauchery and there Jesus will be waiting for you!

In his own person and life, Jesus “hit rock bottom”, so to speak, in order to define the outer limit of human anguish, loss and despair. We say ordinarily that God is greater than all things. But do we ever consider the tremendous implications of this statement? For it implies that, precisely because Jesus was not only a human being but also God, no one can ever suffer greater anguish, loss and despair than the Son of God did in his Passion and Death. Not only that, but it further implies that God’s ever-greater suffering in Christ occurred out of free and deliberate compassion for our own suffering. Therefore, all of our pain and distress—of whatever kind and intensity—are already safely contained within the Passion of our loving and merciful Lord before we even realize it, if we ever do. We do not have to deposit our sufferings within Jesus’ own; that is where Jesus himself has already deliberately installed our whole lives, excluding nothing: at the very center of his Heart. We cannot ever suffer or rejoice without Jesus suffering and rejoicing with us. Why? Because in his Paschal Mystery the Son of God has re-created the world according to his Father’s design so as to ensure that no one will be excluded from the operation of his creative goodness and power, which transforms the whole cosmos into a luminous Temple of vibrant divine Life.

But in this process of glorious cosmic metamorphosis we are not idle pawns who are simply moved about by God’s arbitrary will to save. Being living images of God himself, we are invited time and again humbly to accept and joyously to embrace God’s desire to redeem us, in such a way that we become active collaborators with the Redeemer in his work of re-creating and re-structuring the universe according to the pattern of God’s Kingdom—a Kingdom of truth, justice and peace.

If we wish to rise with Christ and experience fullness of eternal life, beginning right now, we must exit the confinement of our egos and enter the real world that God is continually creating all around us, recognizing that our true freedom, spiritual health and unending joy lie precisely in inhabiting the world of God’s overflowing beauty and grace. We cannot create such a world for ourselves, even though each of us longs for it with all our heart and with the deepest instincts of our whole being; and yet, neither can we be forced to enter and live in such a world against our will or as long as we persevere in attitudes of inaction, indifference or cynical doubt. 

Photograph by Brother Brian. Reflection by Father Simeon.