Ten days after the Ascension, the Apostles were gathered together awaiting the Spirit Who would teach them and reveal to them all that Our Blessed Lord had taught them. During His public life, He told them that He would take on a new Body. It would not be physical like the one He took from Mary. That Body is now glorified at the right hand of the Father. Nor would it be a moral body like a social club which derives its unity from the will of men. Rather, it would be His new social Body that would be bound to Him by His Heavenly Spirit which He would send on leaving this earth. He spoke of His new Body sometimes as a Kingdom, though St. Paul would speak of it as a Body which the Gentiles could understand more readily. He told the Apostles the nature of this new Body. It would assume seven main features:
1. He told them that to be a member of His new Body men would have to be born into it. But it would not be through a human birth, for that made sons of Adam; to be a member of His new Body one would have to be reborn through the Spirit in the waters of baptism which would make adopted sons of God.
2. The unity between this new Body and Him would not be through singing hymns to Him, nor having social teas in His name, nor listening to broadcasts, but through sharing His life:
You have only to live on in Me,
And I will live on in you…
I am the Vine,
You are its branches.
JOHN 15:5
3. His new Body would be like all living things, small at first—even, as He said, “like a mustard seed” but it would grow from simplicity to complexity until the consummation of the world. As He put it:
First the blade, then the ear,
Then the perfect grain in the ear.
MARK 4:28
4. A house expands from the outside in, by the addition of brick to brick; human organizations grow by the addition of man to man, i.e., from the circumference to the center. His Body, He said, would be formed from the inside out, as a living embryo is formed in the human body. As He received life from the Father, the faithful would receive life from Him. As He put it:
That they too may be one in us,
As Thou, Father, art in Me,
And I in Thee.
JOHN 17:21
5. Our Lord said that He would have only one Body. It would be a spiritual monstrosity for Him to have many bodies or a dozen heads. To keep it one, it would have one shepherd, whom He appointed to feed His lambs and His sheep.
There will be one fold, and one shepherd.
JOHN 10:16
6. He said that His new Body would not manifest itself before men until the day of Pentecost when He would send His truth-giving Spirit.
He will not come to you unless I do go.
JOHN 16:7
Anything that would start, therefore, even twenty-four hours after Pentecost or twenty-four hours ago would be an organization; it might have the human spirit, but it would not have the Divine Spirit.
7. The most interesting observation He made about His Body was that it would be hated by the world, as He was. Anything worldly the world loves. But what is Divine, the world hates.
Because I have singled you out
From the midst of the world,
The world hates you.
JOHN 15:20
The nucleus of this new Mystical Body was His Apostles. They were to be the raw material into which He would send His Spirit to quicken them into His prolonged Self. They would represent Him when He was gone. The privilege of evangelizing the world was reserved to them. This new Body, of which they were the embryo, was to be His post-humous Self, and His prolonged Personality through the centuries.
Until Our Lord sent His Spirit on them fifty days after His Resurrection, the Apostles were like the elements in a chemical laboratory. Science knows up to 100 percent the chemicals which enter into the constitution of a human body; but it cannot make a human being because of its inability to provide the unifying principle, the soul. The Apostles could not give the Church Divine life any more than chemicals could make human life. They needed God’s invisible Divine Spirit to unify their visible human natures.
Accordingly, ten days after the Ascension, the glorified Savior in Heaven sent upon them His Spirit, not in the form of a book but as tongues of living fire. As cells in a body form a new human life when God breathes a soul into the embryo, so the Apostles appeared as the visible Body of Christ when the Holy Spirit came to make them one. This Mystical Body or the Church is called in tradition and Scripture the “whole Christ” or “the fullness of Christ.”
The new Body of Christ then appeared publicly before men. Just as the Son of God took upon Himself a human nature from the womb of Mary, overshadowed by the Holy Spirit, so on Pentecost He took a Mystical Body from the womb of humanity, overshadowed by the Holy Spirit. Just as He once taught, governed, and sanctified through His human nature, so now He would continue to teach, to govern, and to sanctify through other human natures united in His Body or Church.
Because this Body is not physical like a man, nor moral like a bridge club, but heavenly and spiritual because of the Spirit which made it one, it is called a Mystical Body. As a human body is made up of millions and millions of cells, and yet is one because vivified by one soul, presided over by one visible head, and governed by an invisible mind, so this Body of Christ, though made up of millions and millions of persons who are incorporated into Christ by baptism, is one because vivified by the Holy Spirit of God and presided over by one visible head and governed by one invisible Mind or Head Who is the Risen Christ.
The Mystical Body is Christ’s prolonged Self. St. Paul came to understand this truth. Perhaps no one has ever lived who hated Christ more than Saul. The early members of Christ’s Mystical Body prayed that God would send someone to refute Saul. God heard their prayer; He sent Paul to answer Saul. One day this persecutor, breathing hatred, set out for Damascus to seize the members of Christ’s Mystical Body there and bring them back to Jerusalem. The time was only a few years after the Ascension of Our Divine Savior, and Our Lord was now glorified in Heaven. Suddenly a great light shone about Saul, and he fell to the ground. Aroused by a Voice like a bursting sea he heard:
Saul, Saul, why dost thou persecute Me?
ACTS 9:4
Nothingness dared to ask the name of Omnipotence:
Who art Thou, Lord?
And the Voice answered:
I am Jesus Whom Saul persecutes.
ACTS 9:5
How could Saul be persecuting Our Lord Who was glorified in Heaven? Why should the Voice from Heaven say: “Saul, Saul, why dost thou persecute Me?”
If someone stepped on the foot, would not the head complain because it is part of the body? Our Lord was now saying that in striking His Body, Paul was striking Him. When the Body of Christ was persecuted, it was Christ the Invisible Head Who arose to speak and to protest. The Mystical Body of Christ, therefore, no more stands between Christ and an individual than His physical Body stood between Magdalen and His forgiveness, or His hand stood between the little children and His blessing. It was through His human Body that He came to men in His individual life; it is through His Mystical Body or His Church that He comes to men in His mystical corporate life.
Christ is living now! He is teaching now, governing now, sanctifying now—as He did in Judea and Galilee. His Mystical Body or the Church existed throughout the Roman Empire before a single one of the Gospels had been written. It was the New Testament that came out of the Church, not the Church which came out of the New Testament. This Body had the four distinctive marks of life; it had unity, because vivified by one Soul, one Spirit, the gift of Pentecost. As unity in doctrine and authority is the centripetal force which keeps the life of the Church one, catholicity is the centrifugal force which enables her to expand and absorb redeemed humanity without distinction of race or color. The third note of the Church is holiness, which means that it endures on condition that it keep itself healthy, pure, and free from the disease of heresy and schism. This holiness is not in each member but rather in the whole Church. And because the Holy Spirit is the soul of the Church, it can be the Divine instrument for the sanctification of souls. The sunlight is not polluted because its rays pass through a dirty window; neither do the sacraments lose their power to sanctify because the human instruments of those sacraments may be stained. Finally, there is the work of apostolicity. In biology, Omne vivum ex vivo or “All life comes from life.” So too the Mystical Body of Christ is apostolic, because historically it took its roots in Christ and not from a man separated by centuries from Him. That is why the infant Church met to choose a successor of Judas who had to be a witness of the Resurrection and a companion of the Apostles.
All through the time when the Lord Jesus
Came and went among us, from the time
When John used to baptize to the day when
He, Jesus, was taken from us.
One of these ought to be added to our number
As a witness of His Resurrection.
ACTS 1:21–21
Thus the Christ Who “emptied” Himself in the Incarnation now had His “fullness” on Pentecost. The kenosis or humiliation is one facet of His Being; the pleroma or His continued life in His Bride, Spouse, Mystical Body or Church is the other. As the emptying of the light and heat of the sun cries out for the filling of the earth with its radiant energy, so the downward course of His love finds its completion in what St. Paul calls His “fullness”—the Church.
Many think they would have believed in Him if they had lived in His day. But actually there would have been no great advantage. Those who do not see Him as Divine living in His Mystical Body today would not have seen Him as Divine living in His physical Body. If there are scandals in some cells of His Mystical Body, there were scandals too in His physical Body; both put forward a human appearance which in moments of weakness or Crucifixion require moral strength to see Divinity. In the Galilean days, it required faith supported by motives of credibility to believe in the Kingdom He came to establish or His Mystical Body through which He would sanctify men through His Spirit, after His Crucifixion. In these days, it requires faith supported by the same motives of credibility to believe in the Head, or the Invisible Christ, governing, teaching, and sanctifying through His visible head and His Body the Church. In each case a “lifting-up” was required. To redeem men, Our Lord told Nicodemus that He had to be “lifted up” on the Cross; to sanctify men in the Spirit, He had to be “lifted up” to heaven in the Ascension.
Christ, therefore, still walks the earth, now in His Mystical Body, whereas then in His physical Body. The Gospel was the prehistory of the Church, as the Church is the posthistory of the Gospel. He still is denied inns, as He was in Bethlehem; new Herods with Soviet and Chinese names persecute Him with the sword; other Satans appear to tempt Him to short cuts of popularity away from the Cross and mortification; Palm Sundays of great triumph come to Him, but they are preludes to Good Fridays; new charges (and often from religious people, as of old) are hurled against Him—that He is an enemy of Caesar, is unpatriotic, and would pervert a nation; on the outside He is stoned, on the inside attacked by false brethren; not even Judases who were called to be Apostles are wanting to betray Him and deliver Him over to the enemy; some of His disciples who gloried in His name walk with Him no more, because—like their predecessors—they find His teaching, particularly on the Bread of Life, to be “hard.”
But since there is never a death without a Resurrection, His Mystical Body will in the course of history have a thousand deaths and a thousand Resurrections. The bells will always be tolling for His execution, but the execution will be everlastingly postponed. Some final day, in His Mystical Body there will come a universal persecution, when He will go to His death as He did before, “suffering under Pontius Pilate,” suffering under the omnipotent power of the State. But in the end, all that was foretold of Abraham and Jerusalem will come to pass in its spiritual perfection, when He will be glorified in His Mystical Body as He was glorified in His physical Body. As John the Apostle described it:
Come with me, he said, and I will show thee
That bride, whose bridegroom is the Lamb.
And he carried me of in a trance to a great mountain,
High up, and there showed me the holy city Jerusalem,
As it came down, sent by God, from heaven,
Clothed in God’s glory.
The light that shone over it was bright
As any precious stone,
As the jasper when it is most like crystal;
And a great wall was raised high all round it,
With twelve gates, and twelve angels at the gates,
And the names of the twelve tribes
Of Israel carved on the lintels;
Three gates on the east, three on the north,
Three on the south, three on the west….
I saw no temple in it;
Its temple is the Lord God Almighty,
Its temple is the Lamb.
Nor had the city any need of sun or moon to shine in it;
The glory of God shone there,
And the Lamb gave it light.
The nations will live and move in its radiance;
The kings of the earth will bring it their tribute
Of praise and honor.
All day the gates will never be shut
(there will be no night there).
As the nations flock into it with their honor and their praise…
Be it so, then; come, Lord Jesus.
May the grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ
Be with you all. Amen.
APOCALYPSE 21:9–14, 22–26; 22:20–21
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