Mystery as Focus: 15th Week of the Liturgical Year, July 10-16, 2011

"Mystery as Focus"
Fifteenth Week of the Liturgical Year, July 10-16, 2011
Exodus, chapters 1-12; Matthew, chapters 10-12

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I just gave a retreat on the five mysteries of Baptism that Immersed in Christ is based on. Saint Paul took us all to another level.

The new identity as Christians we receive at Baptism is not, for Paul, a matter of a “religion”—doctrines, rules and practices—we accept. Paul preached the mystery of identification with Jesus himself: “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” We all need to say with the awareness he had, “It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me!”

For Paul, to be a disciple was not, just to read and reflect on Scripture or to learn what Jesus taught and try to live by it. Paul said, “We have received the Spirit that is from God, so that we may understand.... these things in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit.” True discipleship is a mystical experience of intimate union with the mind and heart of God by the enlightenment of the Holy Spirit.

Baptism consecrated us prophets. So we never ask again just whether what we are doing is right or wrong, but whether it bears witness to the values Jesus taught. But for Paul it is more radical and rooted in our baptismal resurrection: “If you have been raised with Christ.... set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God….” Paul welcomed challenges and difficulties, “so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us.... While we live, we are always being given up to death for Jesus' sake, so that the life of Jesus may be made visible in our mortal flesh.” Our lifestyle should be a constant manifestation of the “Gift of the Spirit” empowering us.

Baptism consecrated us to ministry as priests. We can see this, rightly, as all the things we do for other that express our faith, hope and love. But Paul saw this as the mystical work of bringing Christ himself to birth and to full maturity in those who believed. It was an ongoing, intimate experience of Jesus in him forming Jesus in others.

Finally, as sharers in and stewards of Christ’s kingship through Baptism, we work for change in family, Church, culture and social structures in order to realize the “kingdom of God” on earth. But Paul looks beyond this to the fulfillment of God’s plan, which is the mystery of Christ himself, the Alpha and Omega of creation, come to completion as the “perfect man” in whom everything in heaven and on earth is “brought together” under himself as head. In the light of this mystery, we live and work to give shape to the Christ who is to come, in whom the light of God will shine out through all the human characteristics we have helped to develop in ourselves and others. We are “stewards of the Christ who is to come.”

At the end of the retreat, the consensus was that people should read Reaching Jesus before getting into Baptism on Paul’s level