A Prayer for—and Reflection upon—the Resurrected Life

 

Christ, our risen Lord, Your resurrection showed us what we will someday be and what we already are now through our Baptism into Your holy name. Give us courage to bear in our bodies Your resurrected life as we live out the fruit of Your victory over death through works of charity and mercy; for You live and reign with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. –Prayer of the Day (1065) for July 27 in The Treasury of Daily Prayer.

This prayer in the Treasury follows the New Testament reading from Acts 22.30-23.11 where St. Paul lives the resurrection life by confessing the Christ before an antagonist council. The Lord “rewarded” this by “imprisoning” Paul and sending him via guard to Rome, saying, “Take courage, for as you have testified to the facts about me in Jerusalem, so you must testify also in Rome.” (Acts 23.11, ESV)

The thing is, of course, is that Christians are simul justus et peccator—simultaneously saint and sinner (cf. Romans 7)—which means that though we pray to live the resurrected life and desire to do so, sin still enters in, often in ways that are oblivious to the Baptized. This brings me to a quotation from Martin Luther where he describes the sacraments:

Therefore we always teach that the Sacraments and all external things which God ordains and institutes should not be regarded according to the coarse, external mask, as we regard the shell of a nut, but as the Word of God is included therein.(Triglotta, “Large Catechism,” IV.19)

It’s not an apples-to-apples comparison, but even non-Christians might find this helpful in viewing their Christian neighbors. Be careful of judging a Christian by the “external mask,” for as sinner-saints we have, in a sense, two competing natures. The old sinful nature hates God and doesn’t want anything to do with the ways of God; the Christian nature wants to keep God’s name holy and do God’s will. Thus, we pray prayers like the one above, but sometimes—often—we fall into temptation. In Galatians St. Paul puts it this way:

For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do. (Galatians 5:17, ESV)

Nowhere in the Bible is the Christian’s daily internal battle better described than in St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans  (referred to above). Here Paul describes both the conflict and the proper focus of the Christian:

So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being [Christian nature], but I see in my members [“flesh,” the sinful nature] another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin. There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death." (Romans 7:21-8:2, ESV)

This is why following Christ is a life of “daily contrition and repentance.” (Luther, Small Catechism, Part IV). In fact, this daily struggle and the importance of maintaining the proper focus on the free Gospel of Christ, is the heart and soul of Christianity and the very beginning of “The Reformation,” for the first of Luther’s famous "95 Theses" says:

Our Lord and Master Jesus Christ, when He said Poenitentiam agite [Repent!], willed that the whole life of believers should be repentance.

Repentance involves sorrow over sin (contrition) and belief the Lord Jesus for the forgiveness of sins (faith). So it is that “the resurrected life” is lived not by faith in self-improvement (which would lead to despair as we see our failures) but by faith in the Son of God (Who always hopes, always perseveres (1 Cor 13)). Indeed, as Paul wrote in Galatians 2:

I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. (Galatians 2:20, ESV)

Amen.