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Live
Letters Fourth Sunday of
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The Catholic Telegraph
March 31, 2000This Sunday offers us another reading from John’s gospel on the subject of Jesus’ glorification through His passion, death, and resurrection. Jesus tells Nicodemus that His being "lifted up" would become the source of eternal life to everyone who believes in Him. Here and elsewhere (cf. Jn. 8.28 and 12.32) Jesus seems to use this phrase to signify not only His physical elevation above the earth on the cross, but also His resurrection and final glorification in heaven. The evangelist goes on to explain that this "lifting up" of Jesus is God’s gift, a gift that brings life, liberation, and illumination to all who would respond to Him.
Our second reading is a commentary on the gospel passage. It comes from the letter to the Ephesians which, as we will see later this year, is about the Church, about oneness in Christ, and about the Church’s universal mission. In chapter 2, Ephesians is dealing with the generosity of God’s plan of salvation. Our passage is connected with the gospel reading through its reference to our being raised up with Christ and through its insistence that salvation is God’s gift.
Our text points out that the same things that happened to Christ have happened to us through our association with Him. We were dead because of our sinfulness. God brought us back to life with Christ and raised us up with Him and brought us triumphantly into heaven with Him. Why? It was not to reward us for our virtuous works, so that we could brag about what we had done. It was because of His mercy, His love, His grace, His kindness, His generosity. (It’s almost as if the author can’t find enough words to describe the motivating force of what God did. Note that "grace" which occurs three times in our passage has overtones of undeserved benevolence.) God did all this for us as a kind of demonstration of the boundlessness of His generosity and so that we could carry out as extensions of Christ the plans that God has in mind for the world.
Two things require our attention in this passage. One is that the author looks on our life in Christ as "realized eschatology." That is to say, becoming a believer, beginning to live the life of Christ is not a question of starting off on a new way of life to give God a chance to see how we work out so that He can then decide whether we belong in heaven our not when our earthly life is over. No, the big questions of our life have already been answered. It’s all settled. Just as we share Christ’s death and resurrection here and now, so also we share His glory in heaven here and now. We already have a place in heaven, we already belong there simply because we are joined with the risen life of Christ. However - and this is the second point that we have to be attentive to - our claim on life in heaven, our actual citizenship there does not entitle us either to take credit for ourselves or to sit back in leisure on the pretext that we have already arrived. Our participation in Christ’s passion, death, resurrection, and exaltation in heaven is totally and exclusively gift. This is a point that the author of Ephesians makes over and over again in our passage. We have no claim on achievement. Nor can we let our Christian life develop into a kind of spiritual effortlessness and euphoria because we have already reached our goal. On the contrary, because our lives, even here on earth, have been so infused with the life of the risen Christ, we are called to strenuous moral effort, to the hard work of carrying out the agenda that God planned for the risen and glorified Christ to bring to completion through us. The salvation brought by Christ is not a past event. It’s something that is still going on, and, because we are in Christ, we are participants in bringing it to completion.
Most of the New Testament is about salvation in one way or another. We have already begun to see how often the subject comes up in our live letters. Today our reading again offers us some of the basics about salvation: salvation comes from Christ alone and consists in our being made participants in the life of the risen and glorified Christ; there’s no way we can earn salvation, but we are called to respond to its consequences in us; salvation is not merely an event of the past nor just a promise for the future but a present relationship with Christ that determines the meaning of our life today by its association with His once-and-for-all death and resurrection and with His never-ending, on-going glory in heaven.
When the Church calls us during these weeks of Lent to be attentive to the significance of baptism for the Church and for us, to refocus and rekindle our own baptismal fervor, to prepare to celebrate again the central events of the life of Jesus, it is calling us to be attentive to salvation. Salvation is what Jesus is all about, what the Church is all about, what we are all about. Without salvation, nothing makes any sense.
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Conversation Questions
Do I look on salvation as a gift or as a personal accomplishment?
Has my baptism - my sharing in the life of Christ - made any difference in my life today?
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