The month of July finds us firmly in Ordinary Time, and our Gospel readings are from Matthew. Our second readings, however, are from the Letter to the Romans, and they encourage us to continue thinking about the big theological issues I have covered in the last couple of months: the meaning of the Resurrection, Ascension and Pentecost, and how this relates to the revelation of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This is especially the case as we reach Romans chapter 8.
On July 9 we will hear: “if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, then he who raised Jesus from the dead will give life to your own mortal bodies through his Spirit living in you” (Rom 8:11), and we see how all three persons of the Trinity and the Resurrection are linked to each other and to the difference that Jesus’s Resurrection has made to our lives. St Paul continues to develop this theme in the subsequent verses of the chapter, as he expounds what scholars like to call his “realised eschatology”.
What does this abstruse-sounding expression mean? Simply this: the resurrection of the dead was an important part of the hope that sustained the people of Israel in the dark days of Roman occupation. Certainly Paul, as a former Pharisee, would have believed not only that God would, at the appointed time, save his chosen people from their oppressor and definitively vindicate them as his own, but would radically re-create the whole cosmos. As part of this, those who had died trusting in him would themselves be re-created, born anew in a resurrection of the just.
Thus, the next Sunday we are told: “The whole creation is eagerly waiting for God to re- veal his sons … From the beginning till now the entire creation, as we know, has been groan- ing in one great act of giving birth” (Rom 8:19, 22). However, if Jesus Christ has indeed been raised from the dead by the Father, then that act of new creation has already begun, and the end-times are in some sense already here. As Paul says elsewhere in Romans, “the night is far gone; the day is near” (13:12).
Now in his First Letter to the Thessalonians, which is probably the earliest of his writings that we have and therefore likely to be the oldest existing piece of Christian literature, Paul has told his readers that they are “all children of light and children of the day; we are not of the night or of darkness” (1 Thess 5:5). There is some real change that has come upon every Christian that has, as it were, moved us from the night of the pre-resurrection age and made us a part of the new creation. Here he agrees with St Peter, who writes that God has “called you out of darkness into his marvellous light” (1 Pet 2:9).
What has effected this change in us is the gift of the Holy Spirit, as we see from the quotation above from Romans 8:11. St Paul characterises the Spirit as “the Spirit of him who raised Jesus”, and at the same time as the creative and recreative power of God – it is this same Spirit, of course, that hovered over the waters at the very beginning of creation (Gen 1:2). But the Spirit is no longer merely hovering, no longer (so to speak) acting upon the world from outside it. Now the very life of God dwells in the risen Christ, and it dwells also in the believer through baptism. This is what St Paul tells us on the first Sunday in July, in fact: “When we were baptised in Christ Jesus we were baptised in his death; in other words, when we were baptised we went into the tomb with him and joined him in death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the Father’s glory, we too might live a new life” (Rom 6:3-4).
This new life is nothing less than the divine life that the Father and the Son share from all eternity, and our last reading from Romans in July confirms that it was always God’s will to share this with his people: “those he has called according to his purpose … are the ones he chose specially long ago and intended to become true images of his Son, so that his Son might be the eldest of many brothers” (Rom 8:28-29).
The Spirit then, is the Spirit of our adoption, and by the power of Christ’s Resurrection we have been adopted into the family of the Trinity.
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