By Orlando Hernandez
In the Gospel for Wednesday of the Fourth Week of Lent our Lord Jesus is arguing with non-believers about His mission to carry out His Father’s work. A key element of this mission is to give “life” to a dying world. He says:
“For just as the father raises the dead and gives life, so also the son gives life to whomever He wishes.”( Jn 5:21) And, “whoever hears My word and believes in the One who sent Me has eternal life and will not come to condemnation, but has passed from death to life. Amen, amen, I say to you, the hour is coming and is now here when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live. For just as the Father has life in Himself, so also He gives to the Son the possession of life in Himself.” (Jn 5: 24-26)
The Gospel of John is full of allusions to this life: “What came to be through Him was life, and this life was the light of the human race,: (Jn1:3b-4). Jesus brings “the fulness of life”, and “life to fullest”. The Greek word “zoe” is used in the scripture to refer to this kind of luminous life, as opposed to the verb “bios”, which refers to biological life.
But I would like to thank God for this “bios” that He has given us. When I was an elementary school teacher I would give the students a long unit on the process of life. We had studied about atoms, molecules, and types of energy so we could appreciate this wonder. I would compare biological life to a burning candle. Oxygen molecules would combine with the carbon and hydrogen atoms in the candle to create heat and light. If you put a jar over the candle, the fire would gradually go out. Life works in a similar way. The atoms in the food we eat are “burning” constantly by combining with the oxygen we breathe. If this process stops for just a few minutes life ends and death occurs. With a match, you can turn the candle back on, but the fragile, extensive, exquisite, chemical processes, the “fires” that had been burning in a living body, can never be restarted. Biological death is irreversible. In that sense, sooner or later, we are all doomed to die.
The students were fascinated that there were about 30,000,000,000,000,000 tiny little such “fires” keeping the body of a fifth-grader alive. They were each made up of thirty trillion tiny, microscopic cells, each one alive on its own. Together, these tiny motors work to carry out a human life! Our whole planet is covered by this kind of living activity—humans, animals, plants, microbes: the biosphere. It was a shame that, as a public school teacher, I could not tell the students that all this was lovingly created by God.
What is even more wonderful, is that, as human beings, we can live in an even greater, fuller, never-ending type of life: “zoe”. We have these specialized cells in our brains that enable us to know and recognize. God gave us this gift so that we might begin to recognize His light, power, existence, and love, and in turn experience “eternal life (zoe)”. In His “High-priestly Prayer” Jesus makes the simple statement: “This is eternal life, that they know (recognize) You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent.” (Jn 17: 3) This life-giving recognition goes beyond the abilities of our brain cells. Our intellects can lead us to the threshold of Eternity, but it is the Love of God in prayer that reaches out to us and gives us the faith to make our lives meaningful, to enable us somehow to live in God, eternally, to never die. In this last Sunday’s Epistle, St. Paul writes:
“God, who is rich in mercy, because of the great love He had for us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, brought us to life with Christ—by grace you have been saved—“ (Ep 2: 4-5)
This gift has been freely given by God and thinking about this grace makes me feel even more alive because of my faith. When I meditate on the wonder of my breathing, the feeling of being alive, self-awareness, consciousness, I imagine the Divine Life itself, lovingly caressing each molecule, each cellular structure, each energy reaction within every cell of my body and the joy I feel is so great, that it hurts. I remember the One who made it possible for me, my Lord Jesus on that Cross. He called me from there, enabled me to recognize Him, and saved me from an insipid , hopeless life. I pray for the world, that it may know him.
In his book Jesus of Nazareth- Part II, Holy Week Pope Benedict XVI writes:
“‘Eternal life’ is not—as the modern reader might immediately assume—life after death, in contrast to this present life, which is transient and not eternal. ‘Eternal life’ is life itself, real life, which can also be lived in the present age and is no longer challenged by physical death. This is the point: ‘to seize life’ here and now, real life that can no longer be destroyed by anything or anyone.
This meaning of ‘eternal life’ appears very clearly in the account of the raising of Lazarus: ‘ He who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and whoever lives and believes in me shall never die’ (Jn 11:25-26). ‘ Because I live, you will live also’, says Jesus to His disciples at the Last Supper (Jn 14:19), and He thereby reveals once again that a distinguishing feature of the disciple of Jesus is the fact that he ‘lives’ : beyond the mere fact of existing, he has found and embraced the real life that everyone is seeking. On the basis of such text, the early Christians called themselves simply ‘the living’ (hoi zontes). They had found what all are seeking—life itself, full and, hence, indestructible life.”
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