This was the second talk of the 1996 Christ in You series. The testimony of Scripture and the Church Fathers points to the mystery of “Christ in you.” A hologram can be used to illustrate why Christ is sometimes easier to see when the whole body is gathered together.
Transcript
This document is a direct transcript of an audio recording, and may contain transcription errors and other minor edits for the sake of clarity.
[Editor’s Note: This talk includes several quotes of early Church Fathers, all taken from Easter readings in the Divine Office. In the body of this transcript, citations will be marked by “D.O.” and the page numbers from the following translation: The Liturgy of the Hours: According to the Roman Rite II, Lenten Season-Easter Season, trans. International Commission on English in the Liturgy (New York Catholic Book Publishing Co., 1976).]
PAUL: This evening I want to talk some more about the life of Christ. The way has been opened for us to live the life of the Son of God.
St. Paul knew this. To the Galatians he says, “I have been co-crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” [Galatians 2:20].
And to the Colossians he says, “the mystery hidden for ages and generations but now made manifest to his saints” is “Christ in you, the hope of glory” [Colossians 1:26–27, RSV].
And to the Corinthians: “When anyone is in Christ, he becomes a completely different person. His old life is over and a new life has begun” [2 Corinthians 5:17].
And behind all his letters is the experience on the road to Damascus. In Acts 9:
But Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest and asked him for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any belonging to the Way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem. Now as he journeyed, he approached Damascus, and suddenly a light from heaven flashed about him. And he fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” And he said, “Who are you, Lord?” And he said, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting; but rise and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do.” [Acts 9:1–6, RSV]
Saul was persecuting Christ.
By now you might be thinking, Paul didn’t really mean what he said. It’s just a poetic way of talking.
Recently, one of the teachers at Trinity [School] was talking to one of the students about life after death. It was in class, and the student said—gave a good accounting for how the person will die and the soul will go to heaven, and so on. And the teacher said, “Well, that’s very good. And then what happens?” And the student said, “Well, what do you mean?” And nobody in the class knew. Well, what could she mean, this teacher? And she said, “Well, what about when your body is raised from the grave and rejoins your soul?” And the child said, “Oh . . . Oh . . . I don’t believe—my church doesn’t teach that. I don’t believe that.” So the teacher said, “Well, does your church—do you say the creed in the church?” The child said, “Yes.” “Would you repeat the last part of the creed?” Which she did. And when she got to “And I believe in the resurrection of the body,” she stopped. And everybody’s jaw dropped. And she said, “Well, my church teaches all kinds of things it doesn’t really believe.” [Laughter.]
It’s not just a poetic way of talking. It’s true. Christ is in you. He lives in you.
John reports Jesus himself saying things just like the things Paul says: “On that day”—that is, after the resurrection—“you will understand that I am in my Father and you in me and I in you” [John 14:20, TJB]. A couple of verses later, Jesus says that he and the Father “will make our home in you” [John 14:23].
John comments many years later, in his first letter, that, “We can know that we are living in him, and he is living in us, because he lets us share his Spirit.” [1 John 4:13, TJB]. “Whoever keeps his commandments lives in God and God lives in him. We know that he lives in us by the Spirit he has given us” [1 John 3:24, TJB].
Finally, the author of 2 Peter boldly proclaims that we “share the divine nature” [2 Pet. 1:4, TJB].
The Church Fathers, too, along with St. Paul, made “the word of God fully known, the mystery hidden for ages and generations, but now made manifest to his saints.” They knew “how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory” [Col. 1:25–27, RSV].
Let me read a few selections from the Church Fathers.
From a sermon by Saint Leo the Great:
My dear brethren, there is no doubt that the Son of God took our human nature into so close a union with himself that one and the same Christ is present, not only in the firstborn of all creation, but in all his saints as well. The head cannot be separated from the members, nor the members from the head. [D.O., 660]
From a commentary on the Gospel of John by St. Cyril of Alexandria:
The Lord calls himself the vine and those united to him branches in order to teach us how much we shall benefit from our union with him, and how important it is for us to remain in his love. By receiving the Holy Spirit, who is the bond of union between us and Christ our Savior, those who are joined to him, as branches are to a vine, share in his own nature. . . .
From Christ and in Christ, we have been reborn through the Spirit in order to bear the fruit of life; not the fruit of our old, sinful life, but the fruit of a new life founded upon our faith in him and our love for him. Like branches growing from a vine, we now draw our life from Christ, and we cling to his holy commandment in order to preserve this life. Eager to safeguard the blessing of our noble birth, we are careful not to grieve the Holy Spirit who dwells in us, and who makes us aware of God’s presence in us.
Let the wisdom of John teach us how we live in Christ and Christ lives in us: the proof that we are living in him (John says) and he is living in us is that he has given us a share in his Spirit. Just as the trunk of the vine gives its own natural properties to each of its branches, so, by bestowing on them the Holy Spirit, the Word of God, the only-begotten Son of the Father, gives Christians a certain kinship with himself and with God the Father because they have been united to him by faith and determination to do his will in all things. [D.O., 833-4]
From a sermon by Blessed Isaac of Stella:
Those who by faith are spiritual members of Christ can truly say that they are what he is: the Son of God and God himself. But what Christ is by his nature, we are as his partners; what he is of himself in all fullness, we are as participants. Finally, what the Son of God is by generation, his members are by adoption, according to the text: “As sons you have received the Spirit of adoption, enabling you to cry, Abba, Father.”
Through his Spirit, he gave men the power to become sons of God, so that all those he has chosen might be taught by the firstborn among many brothers to say: “Our Father, who are in heaven.” Again he says elsewhere: “I ascend to my Father and your Father.”
By the Spirit, from the womb of the Virgin, was born our head, the Son of Man, and by the same Spirit, in the waters of baptism, we are reborn as his body and as sons of God. [D.O., 856-7]
From [once again] a commentary on the Gospel of John by Saint Cyril of Alexandria:
There is also another way of showing that we are made one by sharing in the Holy Spirit. If we have given up our worldly way of life and submitted once for all to the laws of the Spirit, it must surely be obvious to everyone that by repudiating, in a sense, our own life, and taking on the supernatural likeness of the Holy Spirit, who is united to us, our nature is transformed so that we are no longer merely men, but also sons of God, spiritual men, by reason of the share we have received in the divine nature. [D.O., 891]
And from a treatise on the Holy Spirit by Saint Basil the Great:
Through the Spirit we acquire a likeness to God; indeed, we attain what is beyond our most sublime aspirations—we become God. [D.O., 976]
From [yet again] a commentary on the Gospel of John by Saint Cyril of Alexandria:
After Christ had completed his mission on earth, it still remained necessary for us to become sharers in the divine nature of the Word. We had to give up our own life and be so transformed that we would begin to live an entirely new kind of life that would be pleasing to God. This was something we could do only by sharing in the Holy Spirit.
. . . It can easily be shown from examples from both the Old Testament and the New that the Spirit changes those in whom he comes to dwell; he so transforms them, that they begin to live a completely new kind of life. Saul was told by the prophet Samuel: “The Spirit of the Lord will take possession of you, and you shall be changed into another man.” And Saint Paul writes: “As we behold the glory of the Lord with unveiled faces, that glory, which comes from the Lord who is the Spirit, transforms us all into his own likeness, from one degree of glory to another.” [D.O., 990-99]
Now, why have I spent so long reading these passages to you?
I want you to think back to when you were baptized in the Holy Spirit. Each one of us knows what we were like before we were prayed with. We probably knew the Scriptures, had read all these things before, but we didn’t know that it was possible to be baptized in the Spirit! Until somebody said to you, “You can be baptized in the Spirit. You can receive the spiritual gifts. You can live like a spiritual person, a man of the Spirit.” And we all said, “I didn’t know that. Nobody told me that.” Well, they may have told us, but they didn’t tell us in such a way that we believed them, or that they believed it, or whatever. At any rate, for each of us here I’m sure it was like a brand new message. “I didn’t know that.” “Sure, I want that!”
Someone had to tell you it was a possibility.
It’s this reality that St. Paul was getting at when he chides the Galatians, “Let me ask you this: Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by the proclamation of the gospel?” [Galatians 3:2]. The proclaimed message is the means by which the Spirit is given.
I’m telling you this so you can live the life of Christ more fully. It’s true. “You . . . were spiritually dead because of your sins. . . . God has now made (you) to share in the very life of Christ,” as St. Paul says to the Colossians [Colossian 2:13, JBP].
So I’m testifying to you, as though you hadn’t heard it before, that it is indeed true that Christ lives in you!
Twenty-two or -three years ago, I was at a conference at Notre Dame and Cardinal Suenens was speaking. And I was on the stage along with Kevin and a few other people. I think it was raining or cloudy and all. And Cardinal Suenens was right there talking in front of us to the crowd of about 30,000 people. And I was completely mystified by his address. He talked for about ten minutes, is all. But I couldn’t tell whether he was praying, or whether he was explaining something, or whether he was talking to the people, or whether he was talking to God. It was in and out of a talk, and in and out of a prayer. And finally at one point, he stopped, and it was like—it didn’t seem to fit in, but it explained why I was confused. Because what he said was—he looked around, and he said, “O Christ, you are the only real person here!”
Sometimes Christ is easier to see when the whole body is gathered together, but he’s there in the individual too, only sometimes he seems dimmer.
Let me show this by way of a little analogy. [Paul presumably projects Diagram 1 below, and the crowd laughs.] Quite modest. We should have a real physicist come up [crowd laughs], like Neff or Craig [Paul chuckles].
What we have here . . . are two different ways of imaging objects [see Diagram 1]. You—many of you have no doubt seen this sort of thing sometime in your life, where you have an object which emits light, or light is shining off of it, reflecting off of it. And it goes through a lens, and it comes over and forms an image over here.
And the way this works is that this little portion of the object [Point A in Diagram 2] sends out its light, and that light comes across here and gets bent through the glass, and comes down here and winds up [inverted] there . . . and—on the screen, which we have here. . So, okay? And then the light that comes from here [Point B in Diagram 2] goes through here, gets bent down there, and it comes over there [also inverted]. And the light from the bottom of it [Point C] goes across through the middle and it winds up here [at the top]. So we have this inverted image, right?
Now, the interesting thing about this is that if you were to take an eraser and erase, say, the top of this “arrow” [object in Diagram 3], you erase—when you do that, you erase that [the bottom of the inverted image]. It doesn’t show up anymore. So, if you take off the top [of the object] here, it disappears [in the inverted image] over here. Is that clear? You have one-for-one mapping here. So, if you weaken this [object], cut it in half—you eliminate all this—this comes down like this, and you get less [of the image]. So, when there is less here, you get—when there is less object, there is less image. And as you keep diminishing the object, you shorten the image. Is that clear? [Sounds of assent from the audience.]
Now, with holography, things work differently. And this is a very interesting notion for us. In holography, you have an object, and an image also. And there’s a process that you go through to get the object to be reproduced in the image [see Diagram 4]. And now if you take the top half of the object off, guess what happens? Obviously, you take the top half of the image off, right? No. [Crowd chuckles.]
What happens is that it gets a little dimmer [see Diagram 5]. If you take a little bit more of this off [the object], then the whole thing is still here [in the image], but it’s fainter, grainier. You take it way down here, to a little bitty bit like that [i.e., you take away almost all of the object], and you have the whole object over here in the image. It’s just very faint.
Now this is a wonderful example to explain the one in the many. So, you can be yourself, and be Christ, and you have this—Christ in you is a faint image of the whole Christ. And when we’re gathered together, this thing gets quite bold.
St. Paul then reminds himself and the Corinthians—that is, show and tell is over [the audience laughs and claps] . . . very nice, thank you very much. . . . I’ve run out of my understanding of holography [more laughter].
So St. Paul reminds himself and the Corinthians that “we all, with unveiled faces, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord—we all are being changed into his image, from one degree of glory to another” [2 Corinthians 3:18, Paul’s translation].
What is the mirror in which Christians see reflected the glory of the Lord? It is one another! That’s why sharings at a community meeting are sometimes so powerful. We see Christ, and we are ourselves changed. I am sure you can think of other moments when you have seen in one another the glory of the Lord.
Let’s take heart, then. Through one another, we all are being changed into his image, from one degree of glory to another.
[Recording ends here.]
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