Jesus and John the Baptizer both began their preaching with the headline: “Change your mind about everything (the meaning of “Repent!”) — the reign of God is beginning.” Not so the Apostles. Their headline was, “Jesus Christ is risen from the dead! And we have risen with him.” This is the headline news, the “big story” of the Good News. It is — it has to be — the key to the “New Evangelization” that is beginning in our day.
The Apostles just preached the resurrection of Jesus himself. Beginning with Peter on Pentecost, they spoke as eyewitnesses of its reality:
Listen to what I have to say: Jesus of Nazareth... you crucified and killed.... But God raised him up, having freed him from death, because it was impossible for him to be held in its power....
This Jesus God raised up, and of that all of us are witnesses. Being therefore exalted at the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out [on us] this [gift of the Spirit] that you both see and hear (Acts 2:22-33).
Paul, as “theologian of mystery,” went further. He proclaimed the mystery of Baptism, that when Christ rose, we rose in him:
When you were buried with him in baptism, you were also raised with him through faith in the power of God, who raised him from the dead.... God made you alive together with him, when he forgave us all our trespasses, erasing the record that stood against us with its legal demands. He set this aside, nailing it to the cross....
And Paul drew the logical conclusion from this, which gives the key to the whole of Christian life on earth:
So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. 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 (Colossians 2:12 – 3:3).
We have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life (Romans 6:3-4).
We haven’t preached this. We haven’t taught it. We haven’t explained it. We grew up thinking we were living like Christians if we just kept out of sin. No one told us that to be Christian means to become Christ. (Shocked? See Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 795). Baptism means we let Jesus Christ rise from the dead in our bodies to continue his life and mission in us.
To “die with Christ” in Baptism and rise with him means we have nothing on this earth to live for except to let Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, live and speak and act in us. With us, in us and through us. That is all. To live for anything else is a denial and rejection of our Baptism. It is to refuse to live the new life we receive through union with Jesus Christ as his risen body.
We never heard this. And because we haven’t heard it, we are not living it. Because we are not living it, we are not evangelizing. No one sees the Good News made visible in us.
That is why four popes in a row have said we need to be “re-evangelized.” Catholic life today has to begin with hearing the Good News.
That is what these blogs are going to present. Stick with them if you have the courage for it.
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