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As thinking Christians, we all need to pause and prayerfully consider the implications of this small but powerful verse. We must reflect upon the philosophical and existential ramifications of what Christ has accomplished and how all of this plays out in our daily lives as Christians living in the 21st century. For starters, we can say, along with Paul, that it is within the body of the Cosmic Christ that we “live and move and have our being.”
During the time that Christ walked the earth, his original band of disciples enjoyed intimate closeness with the Master. During the 40 days following the Resurrection, that level of intimacy continued. There has been much debate within the church over the nature of Christ’s body following the Resurrection, but the real issue here is the fact that the disciples were able to have continuing closeness with Jesus. Now, in our time, we also can partake of that divine intimacy due to the action taken by Jesus as described in Ephesians 4:10. Christ, through interpenetrating all aspects of creation, has made himself accessible in a way that even the early disciples were not privy to. The fact is, if our spiritual eyes are open, we can see Christ everywhere.
If scripture is indeed “God-breathed” and is to be believed, then the intimacy we now have with Christ far exceeds anything those who lived before his Ascension could have ever imagined. Even more, this closeness with Christ is as close as our own heartbeat. Christ infused the entire universe with his being, turning all reality into a type of spiritual hologram. The Master penetrated everything, including you and me. When I first really grasped this reality, I mean really took hold of it (or perhaps it took hold of me) – it was like someone slapping me in the face and screaming, “Wake up.” I can safely say my life, although still far from perfect, has never been the same. In her remarkable book, The Wisdom Jesus, Cynthia Bourgeault shares the following poem, penned by the 11th century Greek Orthodox spiritual master Simeon the New Theologian:
We awaken in Christ’s body
as Christ awakens our bodies,
and my poor hand is Christ. He enters
my foot and is infinitely me.
I move my hand, and wonderfully
my hand becomes Christ, becomes all of Him
(for God is indivisibly
whole, seamless in his Godhood).
I move my foot, and at once
He appears in a flash of lightning.
Do my words seem blasphemous? – Then
open your heart to Him.
And let yourself receive the one
who is opening to you so deeply.
For if we genuinely love Him,
We wake up inside Christ’s body
Where all our body, all over,
every most hidden part of it,
is realized in joy as Him.
And he makes us utterly real.
And everything that is hurt, everything
that seemed to us dark, harsh, shameful,
maimed, ugly, irreparably
damaged, is in him transformed
and recognized as whole, lovely,
radiant in his light.
We awaken as the Beloved
in every last part of our body.
I encourage you to spend quality time alone with these words from Simeon the New Theologian. Ask the Holy Spirit to open your spiritual eyes and grant you the same manner of vision as the poet exhibits – the kind of vision that will allow your spiritual heart to open like a flower before the sun and grant you full understanding of what holy scripture means when it says we are “in Christ.” Personally, I think our human understanding , no matter how advanced, has only scratched the surface of the true meaning of this simple phrase – in Christ. Taken in context with Ephesians 4:10, the ramifications are mind-boggling.
What we can say with certainty is the theme discussed above – that of deep intimacy with Christ in the new, vivified cosmic hologram. Through his final act of self-emptying love (Greek kenosis), Christ has filled the entire universe with his character, his being, and his selfless love. We also have been filled with that same character, that same being, that same love. Just as we live in Christ, Christ lives in us. Again, our comprehension of these mysteries is minimal but fortunately, we don’t have to understand it all to reap its benefits. Through faith we partake of this divine hologram, or as Peter tells us, the divine nature.
Our intimacy with Christ remains as deep and as profound as always. Cynthia Bourgeault explains:
.....our whole universe is profoundly permeated with the presence of Christ. He surrounds, fills, holds together from top to bottom this human sphere in which we dwell. The entire cosmos has become his body, so to speak, and the blood flowing through it is his love…..mystical visionaries have tended to claim that this “pan-cosmic” saturation of his being into the deepest marrow of this created world was the cosmic cornerstone turned in his passage through death. Without in any way denying or overriding the conditions of this earth plane, he has interpenetrated them fully, infused them with his own interior spaciousness, and invited us all into the invisible but profoundly coherent energetic field so that we may live as one body – the “Mystical Body of Christ,” as it’s known in Christian tradition – manifesting the Kingdom of Heaven here and now. Jesus in his ascended state is not farther removed from human beings but more intimately connected with them. He is the integral ground, the ambient wholeness within which our contingent human lives are always rooted and from which we are always receiving the help we need to keep moving ahead on the difficult walk we have to walk here. When the eye of our own heart is open and aligned with this field of perception, we recognize whom we’re walking with.
…..to be continued
(c) L.D. Turner 2010/All Rights Reserved
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