Wednesday, June 10, 2020

God is still incarnate

Source
     "The essential teaching of Scripture, that which [above all others] must continue to elicit faith on our part [(celui que doit retenir notre foi)], is that by the triumph of his Resurrection and Ascension, Christ left this present world, corrupted by sin and destined for destruction, in order to enter into the new world in which God reigns within [(en)] matter, in which the Spirit permeates matter by means of a sovereign and transformative power [(et où l’Esprit pénètre souverainement la matière transformée)].  [A] world real with (like the very body of Christ) a physical reality, but [a] world which, however, exists [for now] in promise—or better in first fruits—only, in the body of the risen Christ alone, a world which will be definitively constituted and revealed only at the end of time, when the 'new heavens' and the 'new earth' will appear.
     "While awaiting this day, the glorified [physical] body of Christ exists somewhere, real, much more real than our ruined [(caduc)] world, because it alone possesses the true Life.  But it is vain to seek 'where,' just as it is wrong to imagine it 'far away.'  This new world, in which Christ reigns and awaits us, is not far from us, it is not outside of our world, it transcends it.  It is of another order than it, is distinguished from it by quality more than by quantity, and we have access to it by faith and the sacraments, in a contact mysterious but more real and more intimate than any contact with this [(notre)] present world can be.
     "When, therefore, we say and believe with the Church that the glorious Christ has ascended to heaven, where he resides at the side of [(près de)] his Father, we understand thereby that he has entered forever into the spiritual, new, definitive world of which he is the first cell, [a] world inaccessible to our senses and to our imagination, but sovereignly real, much more real than this [(notre)] present one.  And we think spontaneously, with the bulk of the earliest of Christian witnesses, that he inaugurated this new world from the day of his Resurrection, when he was snatched from the tomb by the Spirit in order to be exalted at the side of [(près de)] the Father."

     Pierre Benoit, O.P., "L'ascension," Revue biblique 56, no. 2 (avril 1949):  202-203 (161-203).