Christ is not a part of the Church; rather, the Church might be called a part of Christ, grafted upon Him, living by Him and for Him, suffering with Him in order to rule with Him.
To say that the Easter observances are the center of the ecclesiastical year leaves much untold: they are the center where all the liturgy converges and the spring whence it all flows. All Christian worship is but a continuous celebration of Easter: the sun, rising and setting daily, leaves in its wake an uninterrupted series of Eucharists; every Mass that is celebrated prolongs the pasch. Each day of the liturgical year and, within each day, every instant of the sleepless life of the Church, continues and renews the pasch that Our Lord had desired with such great desire to eat with His disciples while awaiting the pasch He should eat in His kingdom, the pasch to be prolonged for all eternity. The annual pasch, which we are constantly recalling or anticipating, preserves us ever in the sentiment of the early Christians, who exclaimed, looking to the past, “The Lord is risen indeed,” and, turning towards the future, “Come, Lord Jesus! Come! Make no delay.”
The Christian religion is not simply a doctrine: it is a fact, an action, and an action, not of the past, but of the present, where the past is recovered and the future draws near. Thus it embodies a mystery of faith, for it declares to us that each day makes our own the action that Another accomplished long ago, the fruits of which we shall see only later in ourselves.
St. Paul has persistently set forth this mystery in all his epistles. Writing to the Ephesians, he states simply that the mystery that unites Christ to the Church is great, as if nothing adequate could ever be said of it. A few lines earlier he revealed to us the substance of this mystery: it is that “Christ also loved the Church and delivered Himself up for it, that He might present it to himself a glorious church, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing but that it might be holy and without blemish.” To this end the glorifying action which He has accomplished in flesh like ours and by which this flesh has found life in death must become our own.
The action accomplished of old by Him is the pasch of two thousand years ago; becoming ours today, that action is the pasch we celebrate. The glory that will result therefrom for us as it has resulted for Him is the eternal pasch celebrated by the elect in heaven: the feast of the Lamb, immolated and glorious. For Christ died for us, not in order to dispense us from dying, but rather to make us capable of dying efficaciously, of dying to the life of the old man, in order to live again as the new man who will die no more.
Here is the meaning of the pasch: it points out to us that the Christian in the Church must die with Christ in order to rise with Him. And not only does it point out, as one might indicate with the forefinger something beyond one’s reach (that is what the pasch of the Old Testament did), but it accomplishes the very thing it points out. The pasch is Christ, who once died and rose from the dead, making us die in His death and raising us to His life. Thus the pasch is not a mere commemoration: it is the cross and the empty tomb rendered actual. But it is no longer the Head who must stretch Himself upon the cross in order to rise from the tomb: it is His Body, the Church, and of this Body we are the members.
This death with Christ and this resurrection with Him, giving us the life hidden with Christ in God, who will appear when Christ Himself will appear, is the whole mystery that St. Paul tells us God had reserved for these later times—our own. Writers have often stressed the extraordinary frequency of compounds in σύν (with) in the writings of St. Paul, and have rightly observed that it is a characteristic feature of his whole conception of the Christian life. Indeed, for him, the Christian life, the life of the Church or that of each Christian, is a life with Christ. It is important to grasp all that that implies.
Jesus of Nazareth, who died and rose under Pontius Pilate and is now seated at the right hand of the Father until the day He will come to judge the living and the dead, has never been for St. Paul—nor for any Catholic theologian—a hero whose epic must leave the impression that His achievements are too wonderful ever to be duplicated in ourselves. Surely no poet has dreamed of a hero more sublime than the One of whom the Apostle wrote: “And despoiling the principalities and powers, he hath exposed them confidently in open show, triumphing over them.” But it is for us that He triumphed thus, and we must know that by Him and with Him, dead as we were, “we have been raised up together and seated in celestial places.”
Yes, Christ accomplished all that in us, for, if the sense of our own weakness is what faith, in cutting at the very root of our pride, first thrusts upon us, it does so only to make clear to us that “strength is made perfect in weakness,” and that “we can do all things in Him who strengthens us”—that is, Jesus Christ.
That the Church celebrates Easter, that today she suffers and weeps with her Head, then rises and exults with Him, is the sign that the relation between Christ and the Church, between Christ and us, is quite different from that existing between any historic personages of different epochs, even between a master and his disciples. For the authors of the New Testament, even for the evangelists whose immediate end is to recount the earthly life of Jesus of Nazareth, this Christ can never be considered simply as a man whose life and death might inspire sentiments analogous to those awakened by, say, the life and death of a Socrates, even though those sentiments were incomparably deepened and purified.
If the apostles set out across the world to evangelize it, they did so primarily because the Holy Spirit had given them, after the Resurrection, the certitude expressed in these simple words, “Jesus is the Lord.” The word “Lord” has become so commonplace in our writing and speech that we find it difficult to realize all that this statement expressed. “The Lord” was Adonai, the reverent paraphrase by which the Jews replaced the awesome name of Yahweh; the Kyrios by which the Seventy, so styled traditionally, had religiously translated this same name in their Greek version. To say “Jesus is the Lord” was to declare that He who had been known in the flesh was now known in the spirit; that this man, this “holy child of God,” was the corporal dwelling place of divinity; and that divinity, unimpeded, inundated His risen humanity, forever setting at defiance death and the devil.
But all this still falls short of the whole truth. Paradoxically, it misses the important point—the point in the Gospel which concerns us so directly that the apostles, as soon as they recognized it, set out to disseminate it. The good tidings, in their opinion, were that this Man-God was also the Second Adam; just as men had borne the likeness of the terrestrial Adam, so they were now called to resemble the heavenly Adam. Baptized in Him, they would “put Him on” and would know that if anyone is in Christ, he is a “new creature.” “I live, but it is now no longer I that live, but Christ lives in me,” was the cry of the Church on the days following the Resurrection and Pentecost; such it has remained through the centuries.
In other words, Christ is not for the Church “the individual Jesus” that profane historians attempt to deduce from the sum total of the dogma she teaches; He is rather the divine Head of the Body that is the Church, the Head whence she receives all life and light. He is the Bridegroom and she is the Bride, two in one flesh, for the Bride is only “the fullness of Him who is filled all in all.”
Christ is not a part of the Church; rather, the Church might be called a part of Christ, grafted upon Him, living by Him and for Him, suffering with Him in order to rule with Him. The ultimate end of the Incarnation, according to St. Augustine, is the total Christ: Christ Jesus the Head and we the members constituting henceforth but one in the ineffable interchange of grace between the One who gives all and those who receive all; for this giving of oneself to Him who has given everything to us is but the supreme fruit of His grace.
Rightly understood, the imitation of Jesus Christ is the very essence of the Christian life. We must have in us the mind that Christ had; we must be crucified and buried and rise with Him. This, of course, does not mean that we fallen human beings are to copy clumsily the God-Man. The whole matter is a mystery signifying that we are to be grafted upon Him so that the same life which was in Him and which He has come to give us may develop in us as in Him and produce in us the same fruits of sanctity and love that it produced in Him.
The whole life of the Church is indeed the imitation of the life of Jesus Christ, but it is not a copy of that life. For the life of the Church is the life of Jesus Christ propagated, reproducing itself in men of all the ages, watered by that river of living water that flows forever over this earth, from the throne where the immolated Lamb is seated in the glory of His immolation.
Just as Jesus Christ, in that pasch for which He had come, expressed through His crucifixion the love that animated his whole existence—an obedient love for His Father and a compassionate love of His brethren, so, at each recurring paschal season, the Church externalizes this same love that flowed as water and blood from the heart of Christ to pour itself, through the sacraments, into the hearts of men, becoming for them eternal life. At this time, together with its changeless Head, the Mystical Body, ever renewed, partakes of the Last Supper, is stretched upon the cross, and descends into the tomb to rise again on the third day. This is the paschal mystery.
This essay is taken from from The Paschal Mystery.
Republished with gracious permission from Cluny Media.
Imaginative Conservative readers may use the code IMCON15 to receive 15% off any order of not-already discounted books from Cluny Media.
The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics—we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now.
The featured image is “Christ Carrying the Cross” (between 1520 and 1525), by Jan Gossaert, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.