LOOK FOR THE THINGS IN HEAVEN

EASTER SUNDAY/2024

Reflection from Friar Nicholas Okeke

Theme: Look for the Things in Heaven

The resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ marks the eternal Day of our salvation. It is our day of rest in God. As the sacred author writes in the book of Genesis, “Thus heaven and earth were completed with all their array. On the seventh day God had completed the work he had been doing. He rested on the seventh day after the work he had been doing. God blessed the seventh day and made it holy.” In the same manner, God has blessed this day and made it holy for us. Therefore, this is a holy day of God, for it is the day in which God rested after he had finished the work of redemption of man. When the Son of Man finished his redemptive work on the cross of Calvary, he cried: ‘It is finished.’ God’s creation of man was finished, for the human nature the Eternal Word assumed has been made like God. Thus, relatively, God rested when he finished the creation of man in his image and in his likeness. The Son of Man is now made in the likeness of God. 

It is also the first day in which the spiritual light was made or has shone upon us. For the resurrection Jesus Christ is a divine illumination on the work of salvation God accomplished through the human nature he assumed. Thus, the resurrection of Jesus Christ is the rest of God in a relative sense, and the rest of man through the human nature of the Word in a proper and absolute sense. Jesus Christ who slept in death on the cross of Calvary is not specifically the same Jesus Christ who rose from the dead. The former has habitual natural consciousness which occasionally rises to divine or spiritual consciousness of the Word. But the latter has habitual spiritual or divine consciousness which encompasses the natural one. The Risen Christ is a new being in the sense of being the seed of a new heaven and earth, the foundation of the New Jerusalem where God and man live and rest together.

The second reading taken from St. Paul’s Letter to the Colossians instructs us on how to enter into this City of peace and rest—the New Jerusalem—into which the holy souls who came out of their tombs at the death of Jesus Christ entered. “Since you have been brought back to true life with Christ, you must look for the things that are in heaven, where Christ is, sitting at God’s right hand.” Paul is saying that Christ resurrection brought us and those just souls who were physically dead to true or spiritual life in God. The physically dead entered into this life at the resurrection of Jesus Christ as written in the Gospel of Matthew. Our own death was not physical, but symbolized in the ritual of baptism, when we were immersed in the water and brought up again. Theirs was actualized in their bodily death, while ours was symbolized in the baptismal ritual which is usually celebrated immediately after Christ resurrection. The death of Jesus Christ redeemed us and them from sin and everlasting death.

The heaven St. Paul refers to, is the New Jerusalem founded on the Lamb’s resurrection. It is a new City of God and man dwelling in communion. What is required to have access to the City of God is faith in the word of God. Hence, to look for the things in heaven is to live a life of faith in the word of God, to believe in the Risen Lord and have communion with him, while hoping for the spiritual blessings to be revealed. This new Jerusalem, which we now share with the Risen Lord and the just souls who have been perfected, exists in an eschatological form in the Catholic Church. The exercise of faith makes it present among us. The Eucharist we celebrate is the Sacrament of this communion and foretaste of the coming banquet; it is not specifically the same as the Last Supper, but something richer and deeper because it is the communion actualized; and it is slightly a different Jesus Christ who offers the communion sacrifice, and different people who partake of it. Cf. Lk 22:16, Mt 26:29

St. Peter attest to the new communion in the kingdom of God in the first reading from the Acts of apostles. “Now we are those witnesses—we have eaten and drunk with him after his resurrection from the dead—and he has ordered us to proclaim this to his people and to tell them that God has appointed him to judge everyone, alive or dead.” What they ate and drank before the crucifixion and were afraid, they ate and drank now and are emboldened to proclaim without fear of death. The Jesus Christ they ate and drank with before the passion was vulnerable, but the Risen Lord is no vulnerable, only in us who are his physical members. The Risen Lord is mystically one with God and with every who has faith in the resurrection and lives out the communion each day. This communion of faith with the Risen Lord is salvation.

Let us pray: Grant us, Lord, the grace to believe in the death and resurrection of your only Begotten Son, so that we may enter the communion of life and light in the New Jerusalem you have established for us at his resurrection.