Christ is the Day

I've been thinking about what it is that makes it all worth it. If someone said to me: "Jesus is God. My sins are forgiven, but so what? Who cares?", how could I respond? This is not an unlikely proposition. It is a question I get asked from time to time in various forms. I think it to be a legitimate question. What compels us to do the will of God and tends us towards him? All my knowledge in apologetics, which talks about the truth, is deficient in answering this. It is challenging to articulate this convincingly through words unless we experience it. I think there is a tendency to focus on the negative aspects of Christianity and relegate the positive to the superfluous–the focus of Atonement for the Sinner as more important then the Resurrection. It is usually expressed in a manner similar to "The Father restored His Son to life to show us that the debt of our sin was satisfied." While this is partly true, there is so much more to the Resurrection. It comes back to the Incarnation–God becoming man. The fact that God who is being itself, the I AM, assumed humanity, is not something that is for him alone. The potentiality of the Incarnation has a universal effect on all of humanity. The Resurrection of the Son of Man is the fulfillment of that potentiality.

As Pope Benedict XVI says in the Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week, "Jesus' Resurrection was about breaking out into an entirely new form of life, into a life that is no longer subject to the law of dying and becoming, but lies beyond it–a life that opens up a new dimension of human existence. Therefore the Resurrection of Jesus is not an isolated event that we could set aside as something limited to the past, but it constitutes an "evolutionary leap"... Is not creation actually waiting for this last and highest "evolutionary leap", for the union of the finite with the infinite, for the union of man and God, for the conquest of death?" Through his death he destroys death by filling it with himself, by resurrecting, he opens up the way to new life for us as sons of God–heirs in him. At Baptism we are supernaturally grafted into the Body of Christ, and through participation in the Eucharist we are transformed more perfectly into complete union with the Risen One, who sits on the Throne in Heaven, with his full humanity incorporated into the Trinity. As St. Augustine says, "'For he has given them the power to become sons of God.' If we have been made sons of God, we have also been made gods." St. Athanasius, in his work On the Incarnation, plainly lays it out: "For he was made man that we might be made God." For my part, if Christianity does not believe this, I would count myself with the ranks of the bored "so what"-ers.

Today's Office of Readings* in the Liturgy of Hours, which I highly recommend participating in, in a sermon recorded over 1600 years ago, St. Maximus of Turin speaks to the heart of this "so what?" question. I included the whole sermon:

"Christ is risen! He has burst open the gates of hell and let the dead go free; he has renewed the earth through the members of his Church now born again in baptism, and has made it blossom afresh with men brought back to life. His Holy Spirit has unlocked the doors of heaven, which stand wide open to receive those who rise up from the earth. Because of Christ’s resurrection the thief ascends to paradise, the bodies of the blessed enter the holy city, and the dead are restored to the company of the living. There is an upward movement in the whole of creation, each element raising itself to something higher. We see hell restoring its victims to the upper regions, earth sending its buried dead to heaven, and heaven presenting the new arrivals to the Lord. In one and the same movement, our Savior’s passion raises men from the depths, lifts them up from the earth, and sets them in the heights.

"Christ is risen. His rising brings life to the dead, forgiveness to sinners, and glory to the saints. And so David the prophet summons all creation to join in celebrating the Easter festival: Rejoice and be glad, he cries, on this day which the Lord has made.

"The light of Christ is an endless day that knows no night. Christ is this day, says the Apostle; such is the meaning of his words: Night is almost over; day is at hand. He tells us that night is almost over, not that it is about to fall. By this we are meant to understand that the coming of Christ’s light puts Satan’s darkness to flight, leaving no place for any shadow of sin. His everlasting radiance dispels the dark clouds of the past and checks the hidden growth of vice. The Son is that day to whom the day, which is the Father, communicates the mystery of his divinity. He is the day who says through the mouth of Solomon: I have caused an unfailing light to rise in heaven. And as in heaven no night can follow day, so no sin can overshadow the justice of Christ. The celestial day is perpetually bright and shining with brilliant light; clouds can never darken its skies. In the same way, the light of Christ is eternally glowing with luminous radiance and can never be extinguished by the darkness of sin.

"This is why John the evangelist says: The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has never been able to overpower it.

"And so, my brothers, each of us ought surely to rejoice on this holy day. Let no one, conscious of his sinfulness, withdraw from our common celebration, nor let anyone be kept away from our public prayer by the burden of his guilt. Sinner he may indeed be, but he must not despair of pardon on this day which is so highly privileged; for if a thief could receive the grace of paradise, how could a Christian be refused forgiveness?"

This is true hope.

*The Office of Readings is part of the Liturgy of the Hours, the official public prayer of the Catholic Church which was started by the Jews while suffering through the Babylonian Captivity and has been adapted since the Ascension of the Risen Christ. The Catholic Church has continued the Jewish practice of prayers seven times a day. This in no small way shows the continuity between Judaism and Christianity. "I came not to abolish [the law], but to fulfill."