26. A Changed People

Our redemption is not just a fact of history that we happen to know about and the pagans do not. There is more to believing in redemption than just going about with a sigh of relief that the gates of heaven are open and that things will be different for us when we die. Redemption makes things different right now. Our Lord's death did not merely open up paradise or change the Father's attitude toward us. Christ died so that we might change interiorly, in the very core and reality of our being.

When people talk about getting in touch with themselves, or when they admit anxiety about their self-identity, they are speaking on a purely natural level. If we really got in touch with ourselves after baptism, we would realize what God has made of us and what he has called us to be. Why does God love us? It is because he sees in us the very life of his Son graced. That is what makes us most attractive to God. Christ died that we might be changed.

We celebrate what we are, what we have become by the grace of Christ, and who we have been called to be as living members on earth of his Mystical Body. First, we recognize who and what we are. Second, from this flows the conduct we usually associate with being good or holy. On Calvary, it was not just our sins which were washed, we died in Christ so that we might rise in him and live on an entirely new level of human existence. Because we are redeemed, we are now called and able to think as people have never thought before, to evaluate things in this world in a way that overturns all previous standards of judgment. Without that, it is crazy on a natural plain to do things like forgiving your enemies. We are called to rise above the worldly and this will sometimes entail pain. We and our ways are profoundly altered. It is made possible for us to act in ways that are far beyond what we usually understand as morality. If morality is only custom, then there would be nothing stopping us from creating new ones, justifying the evil we are doing. Does this make any sense? No. The thoughts and ways of God are beyond the thoughts and ways of men. "My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. As high as the heavens are above the earth, so high are my ways above your ways and my thoughts above your thoughts" (Isaiah 55:8-9). The Mass helps us to put on the mind of Christ.

All the distance between God and man has been overcome by the redemption that is ours through Jesus Christ. Because we have died with him, we have risen in him-- ready to lead a new life. And this life, which we call the life of grace, is to share in Christ's life. In other words, we are to partake of his thinking, choosing, appreciating, knowing, loving, suffering, and rejoicing here on earth, now and until he comes again. On that final day, we will share fully in his life and joy forever in heaven.

If Christians really expressed themselves, knowingly and consciously, through gestures of the Mass, then every Mass would be a profound act of total commitment to God to live in an entirely new way. Imagine what it would be, if every person at Mass deeply and consciously expressed the sincere offering of the whole self to God for transformation, with the bread and wine, into a perfectly responsive member of the Body of Christ. Conjecture what it would be if every such person brought this awareness and receptivity to their dying and rising with Christ in order to live a new kind of life (otherness), a life according to the attitudes (mind) and values (heart) of Christ himself. This is a tall order, and means "Going out on the limb." Yet Christ comes to assist us in making that commitment. That is the essence of redemption.