Sunday After Easter Office of Readings (Col 3: 1-17)
We have been, as St. Paul attests, raised up in company with Christ, and must set our heart on what pertains to higher realms, things above rather than things of earth. Now as earthly creatures, coming from other earthly creatures and set in the midst of terra and all the things on terra, we tend to think spatially, pretty much all the time. We consider being raised up in Christ, and the higher realm, in three-dimensional terms. “Up” is the stratosphere. “Higher” is in the air, or above. And that is not a terrible analogy to the reality Paul is considering, because when we are up at 30,000 feet, we can look out the side window of the aircraft and see things in a new perspective. And, yes, Paul is telling us that in Christ, we have to get a new perspective.
But spatial thinking in Biblical imagery is a pretty incomplete system of philosophy. It led, for instance, the first astronaut, a Soviet cosmonaut, when circling the earth, to comment from his atheist perspective that he didn’t see God up there. So let’s look at Paul’s words more critically.
In the recently proclaimed Gospels, one of the salient points we should note is that Christ’s appearances shocked and surprised His disciples. Over and over we read that they failed to recognize the One who was present to them even more than they were present to themselves. St. Thomas refused to believe the stories he heard over and over until he could put his hand into the nail prints in Christ’s hands and feet and the wound in His side. Yet when Thomas was confronted with the real Christ, when challenged to put in his hands and believe, the disciple did recognize, did believe, and even professed Jesus to be not only His Lord, but His God.
You see, and the Gospel writers attest (Mk 9:10), the disciples really didn’t know what “rising from the dead” might mean. The Pharisees, who inherited the Macabbean traditions, taught that the just would experience resurrection at the end of time, when Christ would appear, but their experience with Jesus and His raising the widow’s son and the daughter of the synagogue official and even Lazarus skewed their thinking. What Jesus did to those three dead people–and probably others as well–is restore them to their old life, maybe healing them of the disease that killed them but certainly leaving them capable of dying again.
The Resurrection of Jesus was entirely different from that. Christ was raised from the dead in power and glory. His “look” was different. He could come and go effortlessly, even disappearing as soon as the Emmaus road disciples recognized Him in Eucharist. And He could not be killed or even injured in His new state. The disciples could imagine a spiritual body like a “ghost,” but Christ’s spiritual body had a very clear physical aspect, to the extent that they could touch Him and share a meal with Him. He was on an entirely different plane of existence, a divine plane.
So when St. Paul tells the church at Colossae to be intent on higher things, he was thinking of works of charity, of praise, of miracle. He instructs them to set aside the passions that ruled them before their conversion to Christ and His Church. They must be ruled by the Spirit of Christ, not their own passions. Lust and fornication and covetousness and anger were their life before Christ. Now that they are one with Christ, those things have to be given up, and given up entirely. They must be devoted to mercy, kindness, humility. They have to be like Christ, both interiorly and in their day-to-day conduct in the world. Their lives must be lives of loving works and right praise.
Isn’t it a terrible crime against the Body of Christ when someone named a pastor of the Church, then, in an attempt I guess to appeal to a culture that has canceled Christ and the Church, tries to revise the teaching of Jesus? One authority said in an off-the-cuff interview that the Church’s teaching on sexuality was “still in diapers.” Two-thousand years of scripturally-based and Jesus-centered reasoned moral theology, teaching that has led millions to holiness, treated as a three month old child in Pampers? One commentator writes, “there is a dangerous underlying premise to this ‘diapers’ business: the idea that, even after nearly 2,000 years, the Church still has only a baby’s understanding of what will make human beings flourish and lead them to salvation, and what will make them miserable and lead them to hell.” We’ll all be better off if we consign such ideas to the garbage bag and bury them where they belong–in the nether regions. And pray for the poor souls who believe that nonsense and fall into the grip of Satan, as well as the leaders who make it up. But “bearing with one another” does not mean allowing their nonsense to remain without dispute. Identifying and combating soul-destroying heresy is an important spiritual work of mercy.
