Gift Outweighs the Cost: Resurrection, Ascension, Pentecost III
Resurrection is the guarantor that death does not have the last word.
Carrying one’s Cross leads not to ignominy but glory.
Sane eyes see past the trials to purpose, a path, and victory.
The grave did not stop God’s purpose for Christ or for us. The worst human evil ever perpetrated, the death of the God- Man, which became an occasion for the greatest act of liberation, that of the human soul in bondage to sin.
Central truth of the Christian faith.
Proclaimed by angelic witnesses to grief-stricken friends.
These same dumbfounded friends touched, eat, and spoke to Jesus. These eyewitnesses endured sufferings, worked miracles, and died cruel deaths (except St. John) as a testimony to this historical and transcendent fact.
Historical place & time
Transcendent outside of space & time
Paul blasphemy to Jews folly to Greeks. Death of God-Man never considered. From God and return to God. Only concrete and sure path to joy.
Pretender gods did not lay out plan, and then live out that plan. Concretely lived by His followers.
Most sure path to goodness, conviction of resurrection being true.
The eyewitnesses direct experience of the risen Christ, prompted by divine grace, is the tradition, trader, that has been handed down through the ages.
Objection: How can Jesus die for our sins and also give to our human natures the gifts commensurate to His own resurrected body?
It is through the hypostatic union divine God and sinless human that Jesus paid the price of our sins by His obedience and through this obedience the Father makes us like His Son.
‘Pretender gods’ did not have fullness of God.
Creature is not a small, insignificant from God, Because God is source of happiness, goes beyond His goodness, and a severe cost to Himself, we become sons & daughters of light
Eve not content to be as created, thinking God withheld some good to her
God wants more for us, we must cooperate
The Resurrection validates the goodness of the human body.
His body is filled with the Holy Spirit which does not merely resuscitate his body but in the words of Ratzinger produces ‘an evolution’ in the body. At the final judgment Christ will change our lowly body to be like His glorious which is a spiritual body Phil 3:21, 1 Cor 15:44
CCC 658 Christ, “the first-born from the dead” (Col 1:18), is the principle of our own resurrection, even now by the justification of our souls (cf. Rom 6:4), and one day by the new life he will impart to our bodies (cf.: Rom 8:11).
Spiritual body receive in the beatific vision
Sanity, happiness, beatific vision
Ensouled bodies in heaven. Loving more, understanding opened more.
Ex/ saints elements of right reason, we become more endeared to them, desire to help us, capable of helping us.
Heaven opens mind, true comprehension of charity, nothing withheld from su.
Develop friendship with saints, they possess what we desire, rightly ordered
Saints in heaven long to shower graces on us.
Christ never loses the tangible but moves beyond the limitations of it.
