18. The Messiah and New Life

For us then, Jesus is not only a master of wisdom, but first and foremost, He is the One who has risen from the dead, the God-Man who shares His life with the Father. The question then arises: where is He and how can we make contact with Him? We know Him through His life on earth, for that allows us to perceive what kind He is, how He faces up to death and how He lives the Risen life. It is because He lived that way that they killed Him.

Let's make it clear from the start: there isn't "another world". There is only one world, as there is only one Jesus. There isn't a historical Jesus and the Jesus of faith, just as there isn't a human Jesus and a divine Jesus. There is but one Jesus, victim of money and manoeuvre, of street conflicts and power rivalries, victim of what is holy, accused of blasphemy and of profanation. One Jesus, street preacher, thrust outside the Temple and outside the town, put to death publicly and on a hilltop to serve as an example. One same Jesus, in whose hands and feet nails were hammered in, and whose side was pierced by the soldier's lance. One Jesus alone, the same and yet different! Different because truly original.

What can we say? He is not like Socrates the inhabitant of a unique world, that of ideas and the immortals. Nor is He like Lazarus the re-animated corpse who must die again. He is not a ghost for He eats and drinks. It is possible to touch Him, to prove that it is really He, but He is different; He is living as no one else lived before Him. "Jesus risen....Romans 6.9." He is absolutely free with regard to the systems of this world, where victories are always only partial, promotions but relative, and life never without the prospect of death. He is unique in transgressing that unmitigated law which inevitably puts an end to the successes of life, imposes nature's laws on every living thing, and appears to us as nonsense, an unjustifiable negation, a journey into nothingness.

The Risen Christ inaugurates an entirely new mode of existence, where life is always and forever, and death is no more. He is the first in history to be Transfigured, the supreme exception to cosmic evolution. Christ is totally free, unconditioned, sovereign, undetermined, infinite, absolute. And the apostle Thomas, who is by no means a visionary, but who has a cool head and weighs his words carefully, Thomas uses two words which in themselves alone are the most radical affirmation in the entire Gospel, words which say most and are the most profound. He cries out: "My Lord, and my God."

In Jesus, heaven meets earth. So there are no longer two worlds in opposition, but two worlds, one embraced by the other. Or, to put it more exactly: there is only one world but two modes of life, ours and God's. We are in this world, in history, in time and in space, organically conditioned; but Christ is no longer immersed in history, subject to the laws of the universe; rather the universe is included in Him. He is no longer of this world: He has "conquered" the world and the world has been gathered up into Him.

All this we believe without having seen it. We believe in this victory even though we have no proof. Even Thomas didn't see Jesus in all His glory. No one could have beheld the Risen One in His divine splendour. He never appeared in history except in a manner compatible with history's evolution. For a global and total vision of the Risen Christ, as the Spirit's power transfigured Him at the moment of resurrection, would be the Parousia, that is to say the end of the world. Such a manifestation would at the same time, presuppose a definitive transformation of this world, by direct contact with the Transfigurator. This is why the Spirit enables us to touch the event by faith, in other words, in a manner that respects our condition for seeking the truth and of being free. Thus it is under the veil of bread and wine in the Eucharist that our communication with that world through the Risen Christ is effected. When the ground wheat and the pressed grape become at the altar Table His Body and His Blood, Christ is neither the bread nor the wine, but each is to be found in Him, converted, transfinalised, transmuted into His new life. A fraction of the universe is seized, assimilated, incorporated by the Spirit of the Risen Lord.

So there is only one world: this unfinished world and its principle of a new creation. Not two juxtaposed worlds, but this world and its anticipated future. Christ is already present at the heart of the world, secretly hidden in the folds of history, until His transfigured newness deploys itself for all to see. Then will appear the entire Body of the glorified Christ, not another world, a different beyond, but this unique world that we know, enthroned finally in the courts of ages that will never end, in a life where no one dies, where nothingness is absent from the horizon of existence, where energy is undiminished, and eyes know no tears, voices are gentle and hearts know no sin. "God will be all in all."