I Am Crucified in the Death of Christ

We began our Lenten meditations taking up expressions from the prayers of the sacrament of Baptism to focus our perspective on truths proposed by the Church.

The sacrament of Baptism initiated us on our journey of conversion. Now, we have reached the milestone where we must contemplate death. What is this unfailing reality? What is this unambiguous and firm proof of our limited and fleeting physical existence?

Death is usually seen as an end; a reality at which point life stops; it is us reaching a point of no return. In the normal course of nature, death puts an end to the reality which we call life. Death generates the pain of a loss, even if it arrives at an advanced age, say beyond nineties. It causes grieving pain particularly when it arrives to sever a blooming life at a young age, leaving in our hands the brutal proof of a rotting body, a spoiled nature, a broken lyre unable to play the sunny song of life. 

For many, death is a hopeless gate humans pass through without reaching a restful goal—onto a road which lacks all trappings of assurances and of markers, leaving a trail “the way of an eagle in the air, of a serpent on a rock, or of a ship in the midst of a sea,” maybe not even a memory in the heart of a virgin love (Proverbs 30.19).

Life—all life—does not leave behind traces of only material decomposition, contrary to those who proclaim otherwise in their defeated intellectual and spiritual demise. Life made in the spiritual and intellectual image of God does not perish; that would be an obvious contradiction if we only had a ray of reason.

But what is the foundation of the Christian for such a certain understanding of life overflowing with hope? That firm foundation is the calling of God, the Creator establishing us as holy realities by infusing us with his Holy Spirit, through whom we each receive our bodies preserved for holiness (1 Thessalonians 4.7–8) and preserve it holy even in death. Paul the Apostle preached this pure and clear good news received from the Lord and remarked that those who lack this hope will succumb to grieving (1 Thessalonians 4.13), because not everyone has our faith (2 Thessalonians 3.2).

Indeed, our faith is founded on and receives its life from the crucifixion of the Lord, through which he brought to completion everything (John 19.30) and gave up his spirit in the hands of the Father (Luke 23.46)—the same hands with which the Father gave form and existence through His Holy Spirit to the entire creation, to the first man, and to the incarnated Jesus—with full faith in the promise of the Father not to allow His Holy One to see corruption (Acts 13.35), and that the Father would raise Him from the dead and would take Him up to Himself (John 20.17) to be with Him forever (1 Thessalonians 4.16).