[AI translation] There is hardly a Scripture in Scripture that people who read the Bible don't know by heart as well as the one I just read. From a Roman prison, Paul, an aging warrior for Christ, writes this. He knows well the decision hanging over his head. His only hope and expectation is that he may not be ashamed, but that the glory of Christ may shine forth. For to him life is Christ, that is, the sum of all that is worth living for, Christ. And then death is gain, because it brings us to a fuller, more glorious Christ-likeness. Even if we knew this Word not from without but from within, we could tell it not from the head but from the heart, as our experienced testimony: For me, life is Christ and death is gain. The joy, the profit, the possibility, the blessing of the Easter message is expressed in it, concisely, decisively. In the Easter event, the richness and abundance of this Word is revealed to us. In the light of the Easter Resurrection, we see that the source, the content, the power and the purpose of true life are all contained in this one name: Christ! Let us see them one by one.1) So Christ is the source of life, so much so that He Himself declared it: I am life! We immediately feel that Christ is life in a different sense from what we are accustomed to call it. The life that we know here on earth as life, however vigorous, however vigorous, however joyful and beautiful, is something very short-lived, very fleeting, and in any case, a life that is going towards death and subject to the immutable law of death. In the case of man, perhaps 70 to 80 years; there are plants and animals for which a few hundred years may be enough, but all life on earth is only temporary life, life surrounded by death, and therefore very much a questionable life. Is it life at all? For at every moment it is completely helpless and defenceless in the face of death. The ultimate reality of this life is death! We cannot even think of waiting for a new spring shoot on a broken, rotten tree branch, because we know that it is impossible anyway. Death has already conquered it! Man can only prolong a dying life, but once death has come, we know very well that there is no flaming love, no medical science that can rekindle the flame of life that has gone out. Even the most fervently loving heart is forced to accept that once death has swallowed up life, it cannot be changed. Well: yet on Easter morning, such an impossible miracle happened: on a broken and withered branch of humanity, a new life sprang up, a new shoot grew; one of us, a brother, who had really died, rose from the dead; for once, on that Good Friday, there on Golgotha, death seized a life that was stronger even than itself, could not cope with it, was overcome by it. "Jesus, who was in the tomb, through you death has died, and life has risen!" This is the life that swallowed up death: this is the Christ!
He is life in a very different way from what we are used to calling life. A life that has already triumphed over all the perils, sin, temptation, death and damnation that constantly threaten our lives. It is a life which can be called life, exclusively and alone, precisely because it is not threatened by death at every moment, because it is above the law of passing away - which is eternal life itself.
When Paul says: Christ is life to me, he testifies that he has received something of this life. For him, "to live" now means not only to breathe, to move, to speak, to act, to exist, but also to live in Christ, to live from Christ, to draw life from him, as from a spring, always anew. From him he receives life, the life of Christ animates him, moves him, makes him act, speak, think.
The person of Christ is itself the source of eternal life, of life that absorbs death. By faith. It is by faith in him that we can draw from him. Don't wait until you understand the mystery of the resurrection, I don't understand it either, it doesn't fit in our heads. I know because He said that he who believes in Him has eternal life. To believe means to be immersed, to be plugged into the stream of Christ's life, to be connected to the fountain of Life, to draw from that fountain again and again! Christ. Life!
2) This is how Christ became the content of the Apostle Paul's life. Everything else was only a frame. The life he lived from his birth to his death, all the events that took place in the meantime, all that was just an opportunity for him to grasp and live the Life - all that was just a vessel filled with the precious content of Christ's life. Whatever the outward circumstances of his life may have been: if he had been taken prisoner, if he had been tortured, if he had been in the court of a prince, if he had been shipwrecked on a stormy sea, if he had spent his time in a quiet, peaceful circle of friends, the content of his life was always the same.
He did not become indifferent to it, because for him life was Christ and nothing could change that, just as it was essentially the same whether we drank the communion wine, which was the blood of Christ, from a silver cup or a wooden cup. And now that his life has been reduced to a prison cell, he is not despondent, he does not feel unhappy, he does not feel marginalised, because the content of his life is the same as it was when he was free to roam the world: Christ! It is in prison that he writes: "To me life is Christ". Christ is life for you to the extent that you make Christ's life real in your own life. You realize His love in the face of hatred, His forgiveness in the face of hurt, His patience and peace in a troubled and tense world, His mercy to the afflicted, His humble service to your fellow human beings.
Your life takes on new meaning, you try to look at another person with trust, patience, helpfulness, to speak to them, whether they are your children or your enemies, as if Jesus were looking and speaking from you. This earthly life can be loved for what more we can receive in it, but also for what we can give. Those who always expect something from life are soon disappointed because they often do not get it. But if I set myself to give rather than receive, my life will always be beautiful and meaningful. When one has lost much that one has received from life: comfort, prestige, wealth, perhaps even family, a familiar framework, is it not because God wants us to learn to give what we have forgotten? Christ! Wasn't Paul's question: what more can I expect from this world? In his case, there in prison, it would have been easy to answer: nothing good! But still: what more can I give to the world? Frames do not matter if the content remains the same: Christ! That is the true life, the life of meaning: to live the life of Christ, to give Jesus Christ to the world!
3) Yes: that would be the real, attractive Christian life. This is what every believer longs for. But who has the strength for it? Certainly not our own. But that is the great, joyful possibility of Easter, that it comes from the power of the crucified and risen Christ! The life of which He is the substance: the power, the engine, the motive force can only be His. One of the greatest failings of our faith in Christ is that it does not dare to reckon with the unheard-of vitality that Christ triumphant over death represents for us all.
Someone once said: There are three kinds of Christian people: the rowboat type, the sailboat type, and the powerboat type. "The rowboat type depends on his own human wisdom, trying to make progress by his own means, by his own efforts. It tries to be good, it tries again and again. He fights with clenched fists and gritted teeth. But because his own means are limited, his progress becomes limited. Victories are few and far between, defeats are plentiful. This type includes people who are dependent on circumstances and other people. If they have the wind, if people are constantly courting them and encouraging them, helping them, they will get ahead. If the push from behind stops, they stop. They are controlled by circumstances and their environment. These are the people who have the power within them, the power of that other life, and they go forward whether the winds are favourable or not. It is true that they move forward faster when the wind is favourable, but they keep moving forward whether the wind is blowing or not. They depend neither on themselves nor on circumstances, but on Christ. He is the driving force in their lives.
This is the secret of the Christian life. This is how Paul put it on another occasion. And so: "The life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God". The same divine vitality that broke death at Easter is able to lift me, you and our whole Church out of our helplessness, to renew us, to make us victorious over all fear, temptation, sin and death. It does not mean that we no longer have to fight, that everything is given to us, but that we receive strength from the spring that springs from the foot of the cross and flows from the open tomb. In faith, we take hold of Christ's victory and make it our own. We struggle in the power of his life. We seize the opportunity opened up by His victory over death. "I am the Life", says Jesus, and this life awaits those who will live, with Him and from Him. This is what it means to cry out to him in faith, and this life will be opened to you! If you are sad, if you are troubled, if you are reluctant to follow Christ, if you cannot cope with your sins: do not give up the fight, you do not have to lose, dare to believe in the life that has been given to you in the resurrection of Christ.
4) Paul believed in Him so much that even the thought of imminent death did not worry him. So much was life Christ to him that he saw death as a gain. The fear of death is the surest sign of how little we have to do with Christ. We cannot really believe it, we take as poor consolation what the Word of God always tells us as the supreme consolation, that dying is indeed gain. We are accustomed to see in dying the fullness of the danger of the end. We are always ashamed of the word we read in Corinthians, "If we hope in Christ only in this life, we are more miserable than all men." (1 Cor 15:19) So that's why we are so miserable, full of fear, trembling, worry, stumbling, defeatism, because we hope in Christ only in this life. Because our faith is materialistic, earthbound, clinging to worldly things, values, plans. We do not believe that Christ is life and that we have life in Christ, and that we only truly have life in its fullness, richness and immediacy when we die. So let us not only hope in Christ in this life, that He will, by His divine power, fulfil our earthly hopes and change our destiny for the better. For me, life is Christ, which also means that the end of my life on earth is Christ. And then, if it is True: it is also true that dying is gain!
On Easter morning, all over the world, the great Good News resounds again: Christ is Risen! Weary people, struggling with worries, troubles, sins, death, my brothers and sisters, let us go to Him! Let us find in Him the source, the content, the power and the end of a renewed life!
Let us pray together:
Jesus, help me in this,
Help me to live more holy,
And that I may not come to judgment,
Raise me up to new life.
The power of your soul
The fountain of new life;
So that I may be a living person:
By thy spirit live in me.
Canto 347, verse 5
Amen
Date: 18 April 1954 Easter
Lesson
Jn 20,1-9