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Live
Letters Fourth Sunday of
Lent |
The Catholic Telegraph
March 15, 2002The gospel readings for Lent and the readings from the Old Testament are on different tracks. The gospels are about initiation, in view of the reception of new Christians at the Easter Vigil. The first readings provide an overview of God’s relationship with His first chosen people. The second readings, our live letters, sometimes relate to the Old Testament reading, sometimes to the gospel. Sometimes they act as a bridge between the other two readings. Yet they still teach us about the nature and the effects of salvation.
On this Sunday, however, all three readings seem to be in harmony. They all have to do with life. The reading from Ezekiel has to do with God’s promise of restoration in the homeland for His people and comes at the end of the account of the prophet’s vision of dry bones coming back to life. The gospel is about Jesus bringing His friend Lazarus back from the dead. The reading from Romans deals with our life in Christ and its implication, both for now and for the future.
Chapter eight, from which our reading is taken, is a climactic chapter in Romans. Paul brings to a conclusion his long treatment about our need for salvation and the nature of salvation with an extended discourse about two ways of life: the way of the flesh and the way of the spirit.
They cannot please God, Paul says, who are "in the flesh," that is, who are self-centered, striving for personal self-sufficiency. (Note that "flesh" for Paul does not necessarily mean our physical body, but a fundamental orientation of our will in which we deny our dependance on God.) Believers, however, are not "in the flesh" but "in the spirit," i.e., in a particular relationship with God, seeing that the Spirit of God dwells in them. Having the Spirit in us is essential if we are to belong to Christ.
If we do belong to Christ, our body may still be vulnerable to the mortality that sin brought with it, but our spirit will be alive. Indeed, we can look forward to the full and final resurrection of our bodies from the dead at the end of time, provided only that the Spirit who raised Christ from the dead remains in us.
We will live in Christ forever.
Life is one of those things that we know about more or less instinctively, but which we have a difficult time enunciating with any precision. We can tell the difference between a dead body and a living body, but we can’t always verbalize that difference.
When I was a seminarian, one of our philosophy professors defined life as "immanent activity." That which can express itself in actions which originate from within itself, actions which somehow contribute to the well-being of the self is alive. That which does not have the ability or resources to do anything of itself and for itself is not alive.
There are all kinds and levels of life. In our own personal existence we have the action of the cells of our body that enable us to keep producing tissue and energy. We also have an emotional and intellectual life through which we relate to the wonders of the persons and the world around us, a relating that results in our own growth and development as well as in the growth and development of those whose lives touch ours.
In our second reading today Paul reminds us that, as believers, we have a certain special level of life in the Spirit of Jesus. We foster and develop that life by striving to live "in the spirit" rather than "in the flesh." Yet that level of life will be changed into a still deeper kind of living when the Spirit’s power brings us to final resurrection.
Being alive means being like God. God is essentially vitality and activity, always expressing the divine being in self-animation and interior movement. But being alive is also being like God because God is the source of life in others, in plants and animals and angels, and every kind of life is somehow an expression of God’s life. God is the One who can bring a whole people back to life when they were as dead as a field full of bones or who can raise a friend after he has been dead for days. Our physical and emotional lives are one kind of reflection of the interior being of God. A more full and exact reflection of God’s life is our sharing of the life of the risen Jesus, a life that will find its most complete and definitive expression when we are united with the life of Christ and the Father and the Spirit after human history has reached its completion.
Over the last few weeks our live letters have been telling us about salvation, about its origins in faith, about how God gives it to us freely and without any deserving on our part. We have heard how salvation brings us peace and hope in spite of our sinfulness. We have learned to appreciate it by looking on it, last week, as light and, this week, as life.
As we approach the annual solemn celebration of the death and resurrection of Jesus, it’s good for us to recall what all that was and is about. It’s about salvation. It’s a great gift for us to be saved. It’s a great gift for us to be alive.
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Conversation Questions.
How many kinds of life do I experience?
How do I know that I am alive?
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