Meditation: IN CHRIST by John de Gruchy

IN CHRIST

II Corinthians 5:16-20

Acts 19:1-9

If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation.

One of the books I read as a student which has left a life-long impression on me was entitled A Man in Christ.  The book, by a Scottish scholar James Stewart, is about St. Paul, hence "man" in the title!  I took the book off my library shelf again this week and was struck by how much I had underlined, sentence after sentence, passage after passage.  It  is a study of Paul's  understanding of the Christian life and faith based on his conversion to Christ which began so dramatically on the road to Damascus, an experience that turned his life around. The whole of Paul's understanding of what it means to be a Christian was premised on what happened to him that day.  It was the hinge factor which changed the way in which he understood himself, as well as God and the world.  He became a new creation, he saw things in a completely new way, he had a new direction and purpose in life.  "If anyone is in Christ," he would later write, "there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new."

Even though some non-human animals may have something similar, it is generally thought that what distinguishes us human beings from the rest is our self-consciousness .  That is, our ability to reflect on our experience, whether of suffering or love, of fear or of hope, of one another or of God, in order to understand what it all means for us and our lives.   Self-consciousness is the ability to know ourselves, to know what is going on inside, in the deep recesses of our being.  Sometimes when we do so we throw up our hands in dismay and acknowledge that our lives are in a mess, they are falling apart, or as Paul himself put it, "the good we want to do we don't, and the evil we don't want to do, we simply go ahead and do" despite our good intentions.  We may even feel like that this morning.  That is why some people today go as regularly to a clinical psychologist or counsellor as they do to the dentist or doctor.  They need help to put their lives together. The truth is, at some time or other we may all need such help to find an integrating a centre to our lives that will hold everything together and provide stability as well as direction in our lives.

This process began for St. Paul on the Damascus Road.  His old self-disintegrated, and out of the broken pieces a new person began to emerge like clay on a potter's wheel.  To begin with he did not fully understand what was happening to him, even though it was clear that something dramatic had taken hold of his life.  But in due course and with the help of others he began to understand that the Christ he had formerly rejected with a passion had become the centre of his existence.  As a result the direction of his life changed and everything had a new focus.  And as he grew into his new life in Christ over the months and years that followed, so his perceptions changed and his understanding deepened.  He  found the words to express what had happened to him and what could happen to others as well: grace, forgiveness, joy, peace, and a deep desire to share the good news.  In addition, he no longer saw anyone from his old human point of view and within the confines of a narrow ethnic legalism.  In Christ, he declared, there is neither Jew nor Gentile, slave or free person, man or woman, for all of them are equally part of the Christian community. 

In one of his prison letters Dietrich Bonhoeffer refers to Christ as the "cantus firmus" of his life.  The term was originally a musical one that referred to the melody line in the work of composers like J.S. Bach.  But it equally refers to all types of music that have a similar structure.  If you watch a jazz band play you will know that there is a controlling melody played by all the instruments together.  But then, one by one, the trumpeter, or drummer, or saxophonist will take centre stage and improvise while the rest of the band keep on playing the melody.  The melody provides the "cantus firmus," it holds it all together, but it also allows each instrument to do their thing -- in musical terminology that is called  "polyphony," the many voices that make the music come alive.  But these many voices are able to do this only because there is a strong core, a centre, a "cantus firmus."  Christ, says Bonhoeffer, is that centre, the "cantus firmus" which enabled him to experience the "polyphony of life," life in all its variety and different parts, but without fragmenting.  With Christ the centre, Bonhoeffer is saying,  things no longer fall apart, there is in fact a new creation which is driven a love for others and a passion for justice.

Some refer to this experience of Christ as the awakening of a "Christ consciousness."  I think that is a very rich and meaningful description as long as it does not become some kind of vague spirituality that has lost its connection with Jesus himself.  For the Christ of faith who becomes the centre of our lives, the Christ who stopped Paul on the Damascus Road and whom he would later describe in Cosmic terms, is the sam Jesus whose story is told in the gospels but in a different dimension.  Whereas before his resurrection and the outpouring of his Spirit, Jesus  was confined to a particular time and space, to the paths of Galilee and the Streets of Jerusalem, now people were encountered by him on the road to Emmaus and Damascus.  Through the Spirit Jesus the Christ had gone viral.  But the Spirit remains the Spirit of Jesus.  So when St. Paul tells the church in Philippi that they should "have the mind of Christ," he immediately reminds them of Jesus, the one who, though he had every right to claim divine status, became the humble servant who gave his life for the world.  Christian formation in Christ is all about the transformation of our minds into the "mind of Christ." That is "Christ consciousness."

Volmoed exists, as our motto has it, to make broken people whole.  And that includes all of us.  The fact of the matter is that all of us continually need to regain our centre in Christ, all of us need to be renewed and become whole, all of us need nurturing in the mind of Christ -- it is an ongoing process, it is the journey into the mystery we call God.  So when we come here on a Thursday to celebrate this Eucharist together, with Christ at the centre, we are centring our lives again in him.  As we listen to the gospel story, eat bread and drink wine together, so Christ enters our lives afresh to shape the way we live in the world.  If any of us begins to live in Christ, we become part of the new creation that God is grinding into being.

John de Gruchy

Volmoed  12 November 2015

©  John W. de Gruchy

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