DAILY MEDITATION (MONDAY, AUGUST 31)
MEDITATION OF THE DAY
Loving the Liberator
In an ancient Easter Vigil homily…we hear what we may imagine to be the words of Jesus Christ. He says to Adam, “I am your God, yet I have become your son. I am in you, and you are in me. We together are a single, indivisible person.” Thus it is clear that this Adam does not signify an individual in a dim and distant past: the Adam addressed by the victorious Christ is we ourselves—“I am in you, and you are in me.” Having taken human nature, he is now present in human flesh, and we are present in him, the Son. [The homily] quotes and expands a passage from the Letter to the Ephesians: Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give you light. I have not created you to be in prison forever. I did not make you for the dungeon. This pronouncement contains the whole Christian message….
The Church’s real contribution to liberation, which she can never postpone and which is most urgent today, is to proclaim truth in the world, to affirm that God is, that God knows us, and that God is as Jesus Christ has revealed him, and that, in Jesus Christ, he has given us the path of life…. Let us ask the Lord to visit the dungeons of this world; all the prisons which are hushed up by a propaganda which knows no truth, by a strategy of disinformation, keeping us in the dark and constituting our dungeon. Let us ask him to enter into the spiritual prisons of this age, into the darkness of our lack of truth, revealing himself as the Victor who tears down the gates and says to us, “I, your God, have become your Son. Come out! I have not created you to be in prison for ever. I did not make you for the dungeon.” In his play No Exit Jean-Paul Sartre portrays man as a being who is hopelessly trapped. He sums up his gloomy picture of man in the words, “Hell is other people.” This being so, hell is everywhere, and there is no exit, the doors are everywhere closed.
Christ, however, says to us, “I, your God, have become your Son. Come out!” Now the exact opposite is true: heaven is other people. Christ summons us to find heaven in him, to discover him in others and thus to be heaven to each other. He calls us to let heaven shine into this world…. Jesus stretches out his hand to us in…the mystery of the sacraments…so that the light of heaven may shine forth in this world and the doors may be opened. Let us take his hand! Amen.
Pope Benedict XVI
His Holiness Benedict XVI reigned as pope from 2005 to 2013. [From Behold: The Pierced One: An Approach to a Spiritual Christology, Graham Harrison, Tr. © 1986, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, CA. www.ignatius.com. Used with permission.]
