by Fr. John Baptist Pesce, C.P.
The cycle of the church’s calendar which we are now in goes under the title of Ordinary Time. Ordinary Time, though, is no ordinary time. Never mind the name. It is a season of grace. While, for the most part, major feasts of the church are not celebrated at this time, it may be a salutary time to reflect upon what grace means for us and what it does to us.
Grace, the gift of God, sets up a relationship. Grace puts us in the current of the stream of life that has its source in God. Grace gives a share in the life of God. Grace makes us that “new creation” Paul wrote about in his second letter to the Corinthians. The Eastern Church has better maintained the understanding of grace as “divinization” or a sharing in the divine life. Too many of us fail to appreciate the marvel of grace when we limit it to salvation from sin, a sort of passport to heaven. To be graced is to be rendered godlike. Again, Eastern Church uses the term rendered “deification.”
During the Christmas season, the prayers of the liturgy speak of the “marvelous exchange” that has taken place in that the Word has taken our flesh and become a human being and in exchange we have become partakers of the divine. What Jesus is by nature, we become by grace.
What a sublime dignity is ours! When we try to speak about this, we can only babble like babies. It may seem like an exaggeration but the Church says so in one of her official prayers that the Father sees and loves in us who have been graced what he sees and loves in Christ. A transformation has taken place. An initial conformity to God’s Son has been traced on our spirit by the Holy Spirit who becomes the guest of our soul as we become the daughters and sons of God, the sisters and brothers of Jesus and of one another, not in name but in reality. This is all undeserved and unexpected on our part. Truly it can be said, “This is glorious and marvelous in our eyes!”
This comes about through our baptism which gives us our identity as Christians, as the disciples of Jesus. Every baptism marks the birth of another Christ. Washed in the baptismal waters, we are raised up and inserted into the body of the risen Lord to become members of the body of Christ, the Church. The Son of God takes flesh and blood all over again to come forth from the baptismal font another incarnation of himself, a daughter of God, a son of God. From our baptism each of us can make our own the words of St Paul, “I live, no longer I, but Christ lives in me. I still live a human life, but it is a life of faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself up for me.” (Gal 2:20). In the baptized, Christ lives his life, now theirs, but more radically his. When they grow up in him, he waxes strong in them.
The graciousness of God orders us to God as our final destiny. The expression commonly used is “to see God face to face.” But one of the marvels of grace is that God accompanies us all the way, that God is “with” us and, even more, “in” us and “in” is the superlative degree of “with”! In virtue of the Holy Spirit dwelling in us, God is our constant companion, our unchanging friend. Paul writes about our life being hidden with God in Christ and Christ in you, the hope of glory. The apostle may have offended the purists among the Greeks in that he had to introduce neologisms to suggest our union with Christ. These are often rendered in translation by the preposition “with.” Thus, we live with Christ, we suffer with him, are raised up with him, glorified with him.
Without giving us anything near the final word on this subject, St John Eudes who lived in the seventeenth century gave wonderful expression to what it means to be so graced. “It can truly be said that the true Christian who is a member of Jesus Christ and is united to him by grace, continues and accomplishes by every action he performs in the spirit of Jesus Christ, the actions which the same Jesus Christ performed during the time of his life on earth. Christian life is but the continuation and the completion of the life of Jesus in each of us.”
We are privileged. We are gifted. But privilege brings responsibility. Gift suggests task.
The grace that has been given to us is not to be clutched to ourselves to experience a warm inside feeling as though it were a private possession. Rather, God has, in a sense, made himself dependent upon us for the accomplishment of his design for the reign of God. God requires us to bring to fruition his eternal plan for the redemption of the world.
We have to de-privatize our understanding of Christian discipleship. Our understanding of the life of Christ in us may have to undergo a massive alteration. One of our brothers in Christ made the claim, “The whole world is my parish.” This is all of a piece with Jesus understood as a “man for others.” Each of us is to be for the other. Especially the poor, the underprivileged, the marginalized and shunted members of our society. We remember, as well, that there are none so poor as those who are not loved. Those who may be regarded or, even tragically, may regard themselves, as not-a-people with no awareness of their dignity, with no claim upon humanity so bereft are they of the basic necessities of life – all of these, and they are all around us, are as much the people of God as we are! God loves them as much as he loves us. But God summons, invites, charges, empowers us with the mission of communicating the divine gifts of love, caring, compassion to them. And since Jesus came to save human beings, creatures of body and soul, with material needs as well as emotional and spiritual needs, we have the responsibility to exert ourselves in these areas. Gandhi has been quoted as saying, “God comes to the hungry in the form of bread.” To serve such a hungry person is to minister to that individual more than food for the body. And, making the required modifications, the same can be said for other material, bodily, concrete, tangible needs which we satisfy in the lives of our brothers and sisters in the human family, the family of God.
These are but a smidgen of the implications of what Jesus meant when the scripture tells us that before leaving us in his own historical dimension he said, “You will be witnesses to me in Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria and to the very ends of the earth.” You and I with our fellow believers are to be those witnesses wherever we reside by living out the grace that has been granted to us. Simone Weil, who had an appreciation of what it meant to be a Christian although she never was baptized, expresses well, making allowances for a certain rhetoric to make a point, how we who are baptized should live our graced lives in service. “A victim of misfortune is lying in the road, half-dead with hunger. God pities him but cannot send him bread. But I am here and luckily I am not God. I can give him a piece of bread. It is my one point of superiority over God.”
The mystery of a divinely willed indigence, indeed!
The cycle of the church’s calendar which we are now in goes under the title of Ordinary Time. Ordinary Time, though, is no ordinary time. Never mind the name. It is a season of grace. While, for the most part, major feasts of the church are not celebrated at this time, it may be a salutary time to reflect upon what grace means for us and what it does to us.
Grace, the gift of God, sets up a relationship. Grace puts us in the current of the stream of life that has its source in God. Grace gives a share in the life of God. Grace makes us that “new creation” Paul wrote about in his second letter to the Corinthians. The Eastern Church has better maintained the understanding of grace as “divinization” or a sharing in the divine life. Too many of us fail to appreciate the marvel of grace when we limit it to salvation from sin, a sort of passport to heaven. To be graced is to be rendered godlike. Again, Eastern Church uses the term rendered “deification.”
During the Christmas season, the prayers of the liturgy speak of the “marvelous exchange” that has taken place in that the Word has taken our flesh and become a human being and in exchange we have become partakers of the divine. What Jesus is by nature, we become by grace.
What a sublime dignity is ours! When we try to speak about this, we can only babble like babies. It may seem like an exaggeration but the Church says so in one of her official prayers that the Father sees and loves in us who have been graced what he sees and loves in Christ. A transformation has taken place. An initial conformity to God’s Son has been traced on our spirit by the Holy Spirit who becomes the guest of our soul as we become the daughters and sons of God, the sisters and brothers of Jesus and of one another, not in name but in reality. This is all undeserved and unexpected on our part. Truly it can be said, “This is glorious and marvelous in our eyes!”
This comes about through our baptism which gives us our identity as Christians, as the disciples of Jesus. Every baptism marks the birth of another Christ. Washed in the baptismal waters, we are raised up and inserted into the body of the risen Lord to become members of the body of Christ, the Church. The Son of God takes flesh and blood all over again to come forth from the baptismal font another incarnation of himself, a daughter of God, a son of God. From our baptism each of us can make our own the words of St Paul, “I live, no longer I, but Christ lives in me. I still live a human life, but it is a life of faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself up for me.” (Gal 2:20). In the baptized, Christ lives his life, now theirs, but more radically his. When they grow up in him, he waxes strong in them.
The graciousness of God orders us to God as our final destiny. The expression commonly used is “to see God face to face.” But one of the marvels of grace is that God accompanies us all the way, that God is “with” us and, even more, “in” us and “in” is the superlative degree of “with”! In virtue of the Holy Spirit dwelling in us, God is our constant companion, our unchanging friend. Paul writes about our life being hidden with God in Christ and Christ in you, the hope of glory. The apostle may have offended the purists among the Greeks in that he had to introduce neologisms to suggest our union with Christ. These are often rendered in translation by the preposition “with.” Thus, we live with Christ, we suffer with him, are raised up with him, glorified with him.
Without giving us anything near the final word on this subject, St John Eudes who lived in the seventeenth century gave wonderful expression to what it means to be so graced. “It can truly be said that the true Christian who is a member of Jesus Christ and is united to him by grace, continues and accomplishes by every action he performs in the spirit of Jesus Christ, the actions which the same Jesus Christ performed during the time of his life on earth. Christian life is but the continuation and the completion of the life of Jesus in each of us.”
We are privileged. We are gifted. But privilege brings responsibility. Gift suggests task.
The grace that has been given to us is not to be clutched to ourselves to experience a warm inside feeling as though it were a private possession. Rather, God has, in a sense, made himself dependent upon us for the accomplishment of his design for the reign of God. God requires us to bring to fruition his eternal plan for the redemption of the world.
We have to de-privatize our understanding of Christian discipleship. Our understanding of the life of Christ in us may have to undergo a massive alteration. One of our brothers in Christ made the claim, “The whole world is my parish.” This is all of a piece with Jesus understood as a “man for others.” Each of us is to be for the other. Especially the poor, the underprivileged, the marginalized and shunted members of our society. We remember, as well, that there are none so poor as those who are not loved. Those who may be regarded or, even tragically, may regard themselves, as not-a-people with no awareness of their dignity, with no claim upon humanity so bereft are they of the basic necessities of life – all of these, and they are all around us, are as much the people of God as we are! God loves them as much as he loves us. But God summons, invites, charges, empowers us with the mission of communicating the divine gifts of love, caring, compassion to them. And since Jesus came to save human beings, creatures of body and soul, with material needs as well as emotional and spiritual needs, we have the responsibility to exert ourselves in these areas. Gandhi has been quoted as saying, “God comes to the hungry in the form of bread.” To serve such a hungry person is to minister to that individual more than food for the body. And, making the required modifications, the same can be said for other material, bodily, concrete, tangible needs which we satisfy in the lives of our brothers and sisters in the human family, the family of God.
These are but a smidgen of the implications of what Jesus meant when the scripture tells us that before leaving us in his own historical dimension he said, “You will be witnesses to me in Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria and to the very ends of the earth.” You and I with our fellow believers are to be those witnesses wherever we reside by living out the grace that has been granted to us. Simone Weil, who had an appreciation of what it meant to be a Christian although she never was baptized, expresses well, making allowances for a certain rhetoric to make a point, how we who are baptized should live our graced lives in service. “A victim of misfortune is lying in the road, half-dead with hunger. God pities him but cannot send him bread. But I am here and luckily I am not God. I can give him a piece of bread. It is my one point of superiority over God.”
The mystery of a divinely willed indigence, indeed!
