June 10, 2018 – Fraternized

“The gift is made to us because Christ is ‘heavenly’ and has thus become for us a second Adam, the principle of a total renewal. This renewal will be completed by the resurrection, causing us to bear the image of Christ as we have borne that of Adam. Thus what is corruptible in us will be ‘clothed’ with incorruptibility, what is mortal in us with immortality.

This image of clothing, applied to the resurrection, is a favorite one with St. Paul; we find it again the Second Epistle to the Corinthians:

So long as we are in this tent [the transitory tent, skene, of our present body] we groan, weighed down as we are, because we desire, not to be naked, but rather to be reclothed [literally: clothed from above] so that what is mortal may be absorbed by life.

The verses that precede, using the imagery of the First Epistle, explain that it is ‘from heaven’ that we await this ‘clothing’, so that we shall not be found naked.

In this last explanation, we find an allusion to the account of Genesis: Adam becoming conscious of his nakedness after he had sinned. After the resurrection, man will no longer be in this state in which his sin has placed him, reduced to animality: the mortal in him will be as it were absorbed in life, because what is earthly will be absorbed in what is heavenly. And this will be brought about because the humanity that we have received from Adam will be as it were ‘clothed from above’ with the new, ‘spiritual’, ‘heavenly’, humanity which is that of the risen Christ.

Nor should we imagine that this was only an object of hope for St Paul. He uses this image of ‘clothing’ again, in connection with us and Christ, not to describe a future but rather a past reality extended into the present, a present which already contains the future in embryo. For, in the Epistle to the Romans, the first passage concerning Adam and Christ, which we have already studied, leads directly to a development about baptism centered in this statement:

All you who were baptized in Christ were baptized in his death; we were, indeed, buried by baptism with him in death, in order that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we also might walk in newness of life.

And a parallel passage of the Epistle to the Galatians gives this still more precise formula: ‘All you who have been baptized in Christ, have been clothed with Christ.’

It follows that, when Christ’s death extends its effects in us by baptism, it is already preparing the same effect of resurrection in us that it had in him. We may go so far as to say that, in a sense, we are already risen with Christ, inasmuch as baptism has united us to Christ dead and risen again. This is what the Epistle to the Ephesians says explicitly: ‘God has raised us up together and caused us together to sit in the heavenly places (sunekathisen) in Christ Jesus.’“