Jesus Christ, Source of Life
By scientist and priest Emmanuel M. Carreira, S.J.

Emmanuel M. Carreira, S.J.

A simple lecture of texts dealing with life, in the entire New Testament, would already be a sufficient development of the subject indicated by the title of this essay. Nothing will be added to the ideas found in the biblical quotes, but we might profit from a systematic presentation of those ideas and a study of their place in the theological context of our entire Faith.

In the Encyclical The Gospel of Life (1995) Pope John Paul II refers to the Christian people as "the people of the Life and for the Life", a people meant to live forever in the happiness of God's own life. Even if the reason for the Encyclical is the protection of natural life for every human person, the concept of life that is developed in its pages is wider, enclosing the full wealth of meaning shown in Christ's teaching and in the entire revelation and theological doctrine through twenty centuries. It would be meaningless to present life as something precious, a gift from God and the presupposed condition for every other gift, if we had only to deal with an ephemeral biological fact.

The coming of Christ into the world clarifies the meaning of human life, now understood within the design of the living God who created us as his Image and Likeness. Even if death came into the world through sin and it seems to destroy the divine plan, the theme of life continues to be underlined throughout the Old Testament, reaching the clear statement of destiny to an eternal life (that includes the human body) in the heroic confession of faith of the Maccabee brothers and their mother. God is alive, constantly contrasted with the inert idols; his actions in regard to Israel are life-giving, especially when He forgives and "raises" a people that abandoned the living God to follow dead and fictitious gods.

The same message, in multiple ways, expresses Christ's own mission. He came to give life to all those who believe in Him, because He is the true Life. "I am the Way, the Truth and the Life": a saying that includes everything regarding Man and his destiny.

The ideological development from the Old Testament to the Gospel revelation takes us from a first idea of some kind of life after death, possibly imagined as a revival to the same type of activity of mortal existence, to the marvelous and surprising belief in a new way, proper of God and taking place in union with God. A life of divine activity, supernatural, that no creature - even angels- could ever reach or deserve as due to its nature or efforts: a life that is the opposite of the total death corresponding to sin.

Because sin is the rejection of God, it breaks the tie with essential life; through forgiveness and the redeeming death of Christ, ending with his glorious resurrection, we are again grafted into God through Christ's human nature that is now in the very throne of the Trinity. Since sin negatively affects even what is purely human and material in the sinner, making Man subject to eternal death, the revivifying power of Christ has an effect even in our body, so that it will have life through the sacramental virtue of the Body of the Lord.

A new level of life implies new levels of activity: this is true in the step from merely sense life (animals) to rational life. It must be still more obvious if we speak of the incomprehensible step from human to divine life, that must drastically change our way of knowing, loving, acting. We now know God in Christ, not only by the acceptance of his teachings but also when we see the Father in Him, when we are face-to-face with the Truth in the Word made Flesh.

This knowledge, even if it is found "in figures and in a blurry mirror", already entails eternal consequences: our Faith clarifies for us the essence of God, with an analogical but true insight that will never be lost. It is true that Faith will no longer be needed in heaven but not because we will find it in error, but rather because we will see God and will know Him as He is, as we are known by Him. This will entail sharing the joy proper of the Son, whose definition as a Person is to be the reflection of the infinite perfection of the Father.

Through Christ's own life, through his human intelligence united to the Word, our intellect will be able to see the blinding light of the divinity without being crushed by its glory. Thus will we satisfy forever our thirst for Truth that defines us as rational beings: we will know as God knows, at all levels of being, from the most elementary atomic particle to the intimate and eternal life of the Trinity. In his light we will see the Light.

God is Light, but not an abstract and cold light; just the opposite. He is living Light, He is Love, using the daring definition given by John. In his Gospel and his letters, the beloved disciple constantly presents the marvel of our union with God playing with the opposite concepts of light and darkness, life and death, love and hate, grace and sin. To know the infinite perfection and goodness is to know Love, to experience it by responding to it with a love that will totally fill our entire being, now and forever.

The Father loves us because we have accepted his Son, the Beloved: the first commandment of the Law is now possible with human love, towards his Son, our brother. Only by loving can we truly approach the source of life, and without love, Man is dead with respect to God. Love has to fill us in such a way that lacking love for a brother is incompatible with divine life: "We know that we have risen from death to life because we love our brothers".

There is no holiness apart from love: love towards God, to Christ, to his members whom he loves to the point of dying for each one. And since love necessarily seeks closeness in a lasting, endless union, it is love that allows us to live in the Trinitarian family of God. Once more, the human will of Christ, and his Heart that responds to the effects of his infinite tenderness towards the Father, will be the amplifying levers for our weak affectivity so that we can also love as we are loved.

To love is to respond to the attraction of all that is good and beautiful and desirable in every aspect: only in God can we find the adequate object to eternally satisfy that intimate and sublime tendency, that best sums up what God is in his incomprehensible simplicity where all perfections are one.

Thus the life we receive from Christ is, in union with Him, much more than the external psychological togetherness we can find in human love. He describes it by a daring comparison with the essential unity of the divine Persons: we must be one with the Father and the Son as the Son is one with the Father: Using our common language, we can say that those who are in love "cannot live one without the other": the Son cannot live or exist except in union with the Father, and the Christian cannot live without Christ.

But the statement can also be turned around: Christ cannot live without us! He wanted to be so truly ours in the Incarnation that He almost seems to imply, in his priestly prayer at the Last Supper, that He would not be happy in his eternal kingdom without being together with us.

"I am the vine, you are the branches": this way our Lord expresses the intimate union and dependence in the realm of supernatural life that we receive from Him. It is literally true that without Him we can do nothing of eternal value, nothing that will introduce us into the family life of the Trinity. Cut from the vine, one finds only sterility and death, whose destiny leads to the burning despair of an eternal defeat.

Within our fog of passing lights and minimal cares and joys, we can't even imagine the terrible and deathly emptiness of knowing that we were called to be like God, while we would find ourselves, in a crushing contrast, forever enclosed in our nothingness without Him. That is the consequence of refusing the graft of union with the God who came to the world to give us his Life.

The Humanity of Christ, joined to the Divinity, energizes our own humanity now redeemed from deathly sin, even at the material level. It is Christ's own Body, torn by torments and death, the sacrificial Lamb atoning for our rebellions. His glorious Body, risen to never die again, is the sanctifying sacrament that makes possible for our bodies to flower in an unending new life.

And it is His Body, given as food in the Eucharist, the one that nourishes, sustains, heals and strengthens the life that -day after day- is silently making of us "other Christs", his members, until we might be able to say with St. Paul: "I live, but not I; it is rather Christ who lives in me".

We can't really say how the matter of our body will partake of eternal life, outside the limits of space and time, because we cannot imagine how a material structure can exist and act outside of that framework. We might better accept what our Faith teaches if we realize that we don't understand matter itself: we can only infer some of its properties by the activity we observe in a rather superficial and almost paradoxical manner. Still less can we guess what is possible for God when He wants to raise the full reality of the human person -that includes the body- to share in God's own life.

What we believe about the risen Christ, with Body and Soul forever joined to the Divinity, is what our hope offers us with Him, eternally in the Father's home. That will be the triumph of life over death, not only the personal death of each one of us, but also the cosmic death of a Universe destined to the destruction of all structures in its unavoidable evolution according to physical laws. If God's gifts are forever, this applies primarily to the gift of life that proceeds from the Father and leads to the Father. Matter cannot impose a temporal limit to the generosity of God's will.

Transformation into Christ

There is no supernatural life, no holiness, except in our transforming union with the Son, our first-born brother, the highest glory and jewel of humanity and of the entire created world. To know and love Christ are already the vital activities that lead to intimacy with Him and with the Father, and there is no other way outside the one who is "the Way and the Truth and the Life".

Even those who, unaware of the Good News of his coming, in good faith follow their conscience and try to act always towards the good they know, will have life -even eternal life- in a hidden union with Him, who is always near to those who search for God, since He wants that all human beings reach salvation. But -speaking in a human way- how sad it will be for them, when finding God in eternity, to realize that they lived on Earth -the cradle of God- without knowing that He was here, one of us!

Still greater should be the pain of those of us, who have the joy and privilege of knowing that fact, if we have to confess that we lived in just a superficial way -tepid and forgetful- the Faith that gave us a new life in Baptism, and that teaches us about the great gift that God's infinite generosity wants to give us in every instant of our earthly existence.

The Church, the community of believers in Christ, is the means chosen by Him to continue his presence among us, until the end of time: whenever two or more are together in his name, He is there as an invisible but vital presence. Once more, it is difficult to take our Lord's words in their strict sense, but what is promised is not simply a human remembrance: that would depend upon us, not due to Him. We certainly admit the active presence proper of the Creator in everything created, but we are promised a human presence of Christ, in a mysterious way, that gives life to his members, the branches of the vine nourished by his redeeming Blood.

With Him and in Him we live from God's Spirit, who in our hearts calls -the same as in the Heart of Christ- with the cry of confident love, "Father!" Our prayers are a dialogue of praise and filial petitions, joined to the prayer of the Son and trusting in his love and his infinite merits: the Father listens to us because He loves us since we have already accepted and loved the Beloved in whom He has his full happiness.

We might say that the Father sees us through his Son, as images of his Word, finding in our voices the family accent that always brings forth the answer of a joyful welcome, even for prodigal children.

This is the only true meaning of prayer -that is not found in a mere recital of worn out phrases or meaningless gestures- as a vital and life-giving exchange where Christ is always joining his voice to ours. He is the intercessor by his very double nature, the bridge that in his Person unites the infinite divine greatness and our weak humanity.

To grow in union with Christ: this is the purpose of everything that is offered in Christian life. To attain this end through all the steps of our earthly existence, the Lord gave to the Church the multi-faceted treasure of the sacraments that, in different ways, bring to us the life that He wants to give.

They are sources of grace -the vital principle- through a symbolism that uses the material elements of the sacrament to produce a supernatural reality of union with God in the redeeming death of Christ. We are born from his death, in Baptism, dying and being buried with Him to rise again, full of life, from water and the Spirit.

Such rebirth cannot be repeated: in the language of Theology, "it impresses a character" that is, it marks forever like a seal the person receiving the sacrament. Even after a life full of sin, the divine seed can be reactivated by forgiveness: God never ceases to see his seal in us, and thus always wants to attract us once more so that that seal might again clearly reflect the beauty of the Son who wanted to be our brother.

Confirmation underlines our growth in grace that must keep pace with the development of a person who is reaching the age of an adult and responsible human life. It offers the opportunity to reaffirm our union with the Head in a conscious way, to avoid leaving in a kind of family or cultural tradition something that must touch us at the most profound level of our being. With this sacramental grace we become -in the best sense of the words- "children of the Law", not of Moses but of the New Law trusting the power of Him who defeated the world and gives us strength to despise its opposition and its false attractiveness.

The Eucharist, "the Most Holy Sacrament" by its nature, offers to us the intimate, personal, physical encounter with the God-Man in his entire divine and human natures. We must read time and again the 6th chapter of John's Gospel, marking each word and phrase, to realize the utmost seriousness and the almost obsessive insistence of the Lord requiring that we eat his Flesh and drink his Blood in order to partake of his life.

With a choice of words that amazes and repels his listeners, Christ promises and declares as necessary for true life a real "grafting" of his Body into ours, a transfusion of his Blood, not by a cannibalistic meal of dead limbs, but by sharing his life: "whoever eats Me will live from Me" just as He lives from the Father.

It is also Christ, making present his redeeming work for each of us, the source of forgiveness and strength in the sacraments of Penance and Anointing. Our sufferings and death itself are part of the redemption: we bring to completion in our bodies the Passion of Christ, not because He might have left it unfinished, but because in his members the total Christ shares what our Head perfectly achieved.

Even the very communication of life is possible for us at two levels, in Holy Matrimony and in the Priesthood. In both we are God's instruments to bring new children to the Father and new living members to Christ. Our partaking of God's plan is so complete that He wants to do nothing, either in the natural or the supernatural order, without our presence: human existence, faith, grace, are given through human means in order for Christ to grow and give life to the whole of humanity.

We see the words of the Lord almost literally fulfilled: "Whoever does the will of my Father…is my mother". That certainly applies perfectly to Mary, the "Full of Grace", Mother of Christ as a Person and also as mystical Body, Mother of all of us in the order of grace by being Mother of the Church.