9781644135945

The Light of the World
“We . . . are baptized in His death.” To be united with Christ in baptism means to die in Christ,
to be crucified and buried with Christ. Dying to Christ means imitating His life of poverty and
accepting His crosses and mortifications. If we want to live the new life in Him and with Him
and His Church, we must die daily, hourly. God, the one true God, must be always before the
eyes of the baptized, as the only goal of his striving and longing. After the Son of God became
man by embracing human nature, His human will had to be in perfect conformity with His
divine will. Such a perfect harmony of His wills could be achieved only through a continuous
and unreserved devotion of His human will and desires to the will of the Father, which He
accomplished through continual mortification and His voluntary acceptance of a bitter and
ignominious death on the cross. Through His acts of mortification and self-denial, through
His death on the cross, He perfected the union of the human nature with the divine nature.
The way of Christ, the head, must also be the way of His members, the baptized. Having
been united with Him in baptism, grafted onto Him, as it were, we must perfect this fundamental
union through moral actions. The way leading to this union requires that we overcome
our ego, mortify and deny ourselves after the example of Christ, our head, so that we become
one with the life and death of Christ. “If thou wilt be perfect, go sell what thou hast, and give
to the poor, and thou shalt Have treasure in heaven; and come follow Me” (Mt 19:21). “Every
one of you that doth not renounce all that he possesseth cannot be My disciple” (Lk 14:33).
Mortification and self-denial are the fundamental principles in our life with Christ. Without
them no truly Christian life is possible. “We . . . are baptized in His death.”
“We are debtors, not to the flesh to live according to the flesh. For if you live according to
the flesh, you shall die; but if by the Spirit you mortify the deeds of the flesh, you shall live”
(Rom 8:12 f.). To be united with Christ means, fundamentally, to fight against the concupiscence
of the lower man. We are assured that our body, by our baptism, is the temple of the
Holy Ghost (1 Cor 6:19), that through the life of God within us, through sanctifying grace,
it is sanctified by our union with Christ, that it is called, to be “made like to the body of His
glory” (Phil 3:21). Concupiscence, however, is still alive within it, and sin desires to reign in
the mortal body (Rom 6:12). Because we live in the flesh, concupiscence seeks to “work in our
members, to bring forth fruit unto death” (Rom 7:5): “Another law [works] in my members,
fighting against the law of my mind” (Rom 7:23). It urges us to follow the flesh: “fornication,
uncleanliness, immodesty, luxury” (Gal 5:19). The life in Christ, therefore, which has been
established in us through baptism, demands necessarily that concupiscence be mortified. “They
that are Christ’s have crucified their flesh with the vices and concupiscences” (Gal 5:24). No
weed dies of itself, least of all the weeds of the soul. Neither does virtue and the perfect life of
Christ within us grow by itself. We must work continuously, pulling out the weeds, digging the
ground of our soul with a sharp spade. This necessitates the mortification of the lusts of the flesh
and a tempering of the demands of our senses, our mind, our inclinations, and our passions. It
requires a continual battle against the defects of our nature and character. “If any man will come
after Me, let him deny himself ” (Mt 16:24). That is the fundamental law of living with Christ.
“All we who are baptized in Christ Jesus are baptized in His death.” It is an unalterable law of
Christian life that there is no salvation except in carrying the cross of Christ and in following
the Crucified. We Christians today can be justly reproached for being too calmly optimistic and
for looking too much to our own comfort. Men reproach us for living a Christian life which has
478