ILLUMINATION, LIBERATION, DIVINIZATION
THE NEW PERSON

by Bruno Barnhart, OSB Cam

Something has happened in the world: the Christ-event. We have been reflecting on the Pauline texts in which this one great happening is celebrated. The writing often became poetic, hymnic, rhapsodic, circling rhythmically around this axis mundi, the point of entry of divine life and fullness into this world. Something has happened in the person and in the community: the Christ-experience. This is related to baptismal initiation, and is often spoken of as the experience of the Holy Spirit. Paul confidently refers to what the Galatians have experienced.

1. Galatians 3:1-5

The cross of Christ and the Holy Spirit once again appear together (see 1 Cor 1 and 2), as Paul recalls the one event which has forever changed their lives. The Spirit is inseparable both from their experience of Christ and from the undeniable and wondrous things that have happened within them and among them.

2. 2 Cor 3:15-4:6

Paul has been writing of the Old Covenant mediated by Moses, and of the veil with which Moses covered his shining face when he returned, after an encounter with God, to speak to the people. Only when one discovers Christ, Paul continues - writing metaphorically - is the veil which conceals the inner meaning of the Hebrew scriptures removed. When the veil is removed (at once from the scriptural word, from the face of Christ in the scriptures and from the face of the reader!), one is irradiated directly by the divine glory.

This illumination is transforming: we are changed by it into the likeness of Christ and of God. (see Gen 1:26-27 and 1 Jn 3:1-3) Once again, it is the Spirit that works this change.

As Paul writes of his own initiatory experience (4:6), he uses a plural which includes the other Christians. His reference to God's creation of light, at the beginning of the first Genesis creation story (Gen 1:3), suggests that in the event of 'illumination', of initiation into Christ, the person becomes a new creation. This new person is one with Christ. The text is endlessly fascinating, as if within it there were opened to us a shaft of light which pierced through all the strata of biblical history and revelation into the depths of God - as well as into the depths of our own hearts where the divine light dwells. It is important to feel the density of reality which is concentrated in these words: at once dynamic and eternal.

3. Jn 16:23-28

Astonishingly, John's gospel includes no narrative of Jesus' institution of the Eucharist, but its account of Jesus' last supper fills five chapters. At the end of Jesus' long discourse at the supper, he directs the disciples' expectation to a time when even Jesus will have 'gotten out of the way'; when they will relate to God with immediacy as Jesus does. He directs them to ask the Father 'in my name': that is, in his person! We cannot help but remember the name which the Johannine Jesus has repeatedly claimed for himself, at the imminent risk of death by stoning. It is the name of God revealed to Moses at the burning bush: 'I AM.' This, incredibly, is what Jesus - the Son of Man - is now going to impart to his disciples as he leaves them. The new divine immediacy, or union with God, which he is about to impart to them will be nothing less than a real possession, or participation, of divine Being. This is the depth dimension of Paul's 'in Christ.' It is the vanishing point of language, here at the end of this eucharist of the Word. ' "No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you." (Jn 15:15)

4. Gal 3:23-4:11

Paul is forever recalling the one great change in the human person which has come about through faith in Jesus Christ and the gift of the Holy Spirit. Here he draws two neat columns corresponding to the 'before' and the 'after.' The 'before' differs for Jewish Christians - who were under the law - and for Gentile Christians who have been liberated from the 'flesh', depraved impulses, and from the futile customs and religious practices of their former life.

The movement is from law to faith, from slavery - or a child's condition of subjection - to freedom, from alienation to the condition of a child of God and an heir of God. We can feel in the movement of Paul's words the unlimited range, the exultant sweep of this new freedom in the Spirit. It is a matter of awakening and stretching, of becoming oneself in the unbounded space which is God's kingdom.

5. Rom 8:2-23

The divine Spirit has set the human person free from 'the flesh.' This 'flesh' is not the body, the physical being which is precisely the dwelling of the Spirit. It is, rather, the human being without grace and without light, under subjection to its own lower impulses, selfish and without concern for others. There is a very simple continuity here: the Spirit who dwelt in Jesus Christ and raised him from the dead dwells in you, so that you already live beyond yourself in God. You have already begun your eternal life, which will come to full realization in the bodily resurrection.

The Spirit of God and of Jesus Christ that dwells in you and groans within you in longing for this resurrection of the body, is the same Spirit that impels the universe toward a new birth; now the whole creation convulses with the pains of this childbirth. Here, as Paul writes of the universal creative activity of the Spirit, Paul discloses the dynamic unity underlying the death and resurrection of Christ, the personal struggle of the individual Christian and world history as a whole. He will describe the personal struggle more concretely in terms of his own life experience elsewhere, e.g. in 2nd Corinthians chapters 4 to 6 and in Philippians 3. The Christ-mystery which is presented more objectively in Colossians and Ephesians appears here in Romans 8 and throughout Galatians in a more personal and subjective light.

6. Gal 5:1-6

It can be startling, in the light of some of the forms - institutional, cultural and 'spiritual' - which Christianity has taken during the past twenty centuries, to read Paul's letter to the Galatians and to recall that it has been part of the New Testament for all this time. One feels in these words the awakening to one's true self, the expansiveness, the exultant new spiritual freedom, which is the gift of the Spirit in Christ. The difference between the traditional way of the Jewish law, as Paul presents it here, and the new way of faith in Christ, is the difference between a life of conformity to an external code of conduct and living from an interior divine principle - the Holy Spirit - which acts through one's own spontaneity, freedom and creative activity. This is what Paul means by 'faith working through love.'

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