Wednesday of the Twenty-third Week in Ordinary Time
Where are you? St Paul provides the answer in our first reading. It may surprise you! Paul exhorts us, “If you were raised with Christ, seek what is above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God . . . For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” So, where are you? Your answer, partly, is wherever you find yourself geographically at this moment in time. The deeper reality, however, is that your life is hidden with Christ in God. This truth sounds abstract and esoteric, doesn’t it? It’s mysterious and perhaps not easy to understand. How can Paul make these statements so categorically? It’s because of our Baptism! We died with Christ in the waters of our Baptism and were raised by the Holy Spirit to a new life in Christ.
For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. Pause and consider that statement. What is God saying to you? What implications does this truth have for your everyday life? We tend to hide ourselves due to our insecurities, don’t we? We hide those parts of ourselves that we don’t want anyone else to see, those aspects that sometimes we even suppress from ourselves because they’re too ugly to face. We put on a false front, displaying to others what we want them to see, creating an image we hope they’ll associate with us. But you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.
If [then] you were raised with Christ, seek what is above . . . Our Baptism calls us to a different view of ourselves and our lives. “Think of what is above,” Paul adjourns us, “not of what is on earth.” God invites us to a heavenly perspective, a Kingdom focus, because our location, the arena in which we operate, is heaven itself “where Christ is seated at the right hand of God.” If we’re dead in our sins, then our only focus, the only lens through which to view the world and life itself is a limited earthly one. But since we’ve been raised with Christ, His perspective becomes our perspective. United with Him, hidden with Him in God, we see ourselves, our neighbor, and every aspect of our lives through this heavenly lens.
Paul goes on to exhort us to put to death the parts of us that are earthly – the sinful aspects of our lives that are falsely rooted in the kingdom of this earth. The list of vices that he offers is representative of the totality of our sin. It might be helpful to pause and do an examination of conscience. Allow the Holy Spirit to convict you of any sins you need to confess. When we forget who we are, Whose we are, and where we are, we lose our heavenly perspective and distractedly focus on the wrong things. Basically, I hear Paul say, stop sinning “since you have taken off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed, for knowledge, in the image of its creator.” Put on the new self . . . What imagery does that evoke in you?
In Baptism we are clothed in the white baptismal garment, symbol of our new true self, our redeemed life, our new life in Christ. This new self is the one who has been raised, who is hidden with Christ in God at the right hand of the Father. Take a moment and picture yourself in this way. Hidden with Christ, your only vantage point is heavenly, your only focus is the Kingdom of God, your only lens on self and neighbor is holy, pure, and loving. It’s impossible to sin from this position. When Paul says, “Put to death, then, the parts of you that are earthly,” I hear him implying don’t you know who you are? Don’t you know where you are? Confident in your identity and location in Christ, how could you possibly continue to cling to an earthly identity, to sinful passions? How can you continue to locate yourself in this world? Back to our tendency to hide our brokenness. Confidently, let us shed any need to hide our earthly tendencies and let us embrace the paradox that hidden in Christ we are free to display Him boldly by our lives.
—Elizabeth Wells