However fervent or fitful, our Lenten journey is moving toward its culmination. Of the many symbolic riches of the Paschal Triduum perhaps none resonates so affectively as the raising high of the Paschal Candle in the darkened church. And the minister intones the ineffable saving mystery: “Light of Christ!” While the jubilant assembly responds in grateful wonder: “Thanks be to God!”
Less dramatic, though equally significant, are the words pronounced just prior to the proclamation. As the celebrant lights the Paschal Candle, he prays: “May the light of Christ, rising in glory, dispel the darkness of our hearts and minds.”
Christ’s light reveals not only our vocation to glory, but, inseparably, our dire need for salvation. So, St. Paul exhorts the Colossians to give thanks to the Father “who has delivered us from the dominion of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of our sins.” (Colossians 1:13-14) Only through Christ do we pass over from the domain of darkness into the promise of transfiguring light.
Hence, in the patristic tradition, baptism was also referred to as “phōtismos” since it signified the new Christian’s enlightenment by Christ. Thus, it is fitting that, on this Sunday of the second scrutinies of the catechumens, themes of light and sight permeate the readings. Paul, in his letter to the Ephesians, joyfully exclaims: “You were once darkness, but now you are light [phōs] in the Lord,” thereby disclosing their new identity in Christ. But this is immediately followed by the imperative that governs this section of the letter: therefore, “walk [peripateite] as children of the light!” (Ephesians 5:8) In effect Paul exhorts the Ephesians: Be all that you are called to be! Fulfill your destiny in Christ.
In the seven verses of today’s second reading the word “light” appears five times. It becomes manifest in lives of “goodness, righteousness, and justice.” And it displays stark contrast not only to the “darkness” [skotos] of believers’ former lives, but also to the darkness of the surrounding culture.
The Letter to the Ephesians is noteworthy in its emphasis on the ongoing growth of the Christian community, the building up of the Body of Christ. “Speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ.” (Ephesians 4:15) Baptismal renunciation and conversion are both the conclusion of a process of enlightenment and the beginning of an ever-renewed growth in the Lord. Saint Gregory of Nyssa famously characterized the Christian life as an ongoing dialectic of endings and new beginnings, every end [telos] giving rise to a new beginning [arche].
Hence the crucial importance of ongoing discernment – “discerning [dokimazontes] what is pleasing to the Lord.” (5:10) The believer must carefully examine his or her own behavior, learning to put on the mind of Christ, not yielding to the spurious enticements of those who are “darkened in their understanding and distant from the life of God.” (4:18)
In many ways, then, the final chapters of Ephesians are an extended commentary upon what Paul had admonished the Romans. “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, discerning [dokimazein] what is the will of God, the good and well-pleasing and perfect.” (Romans 12:2) Such discernment fosters an ever-greater realization of Christians’ new life in Christ and what it entails in the everyday.
Not only the newly baptized, but those who have lived the Christian life for some time, are called to realize ever more fully the glorious vocation that Paul celebrates in the great benediction with which his Letter begins. “God has called us in Christ before the foundation of the world that we might be holy and without blemish in his sight.” (Ephesians1:4)
Sons and daughters of light, Christians stand forth as a “contrast society,” that will often require of them a countercultural commitment. Not only in first-century Rome and Ephesus, but in twenty-first century Washington and New York, they may well need to “expose the fruitless works of darkness, the things done in secret, shameful even to mention.” (5:11-12)
Doing so in a manner not strident, but challenging, not random, but resolute requires spiritual maturity. Karl Barth famously called Christians to meditate with the Bible in one hand and the daily newspaper in the other. Today’s liturgy may well concretize that further. Reflect with Ephesians in one hand and the Epstein files in the other!
There were many who bridled at Saint John Paul II’s diagnosis of our contemporary “culture of death.” They considered it exaggerated, not sufficiently dialogical. But how else characterize the deadly confluence of greed, power, and sexuality exposed in the sordid Epstein documents? They depict Dante’s three beasts on steroids. They offer immersion not in a baptismal bath of enlightenment and regeneration, but in a demonic hot tub of darkness and death.
Those being initiated at the Easter Vigil will be called to renunciations that are neither faceless nor pro forma. The darkness they renounce is palpable; the Christic light they embrace ever more luminous. Two “synodalities” will be set before them: the way of death and darkness and the way of light and life. And holy Mother Church will implore them: choose life!
Of late, the vogue term in ecclesiastical exhortations is to be “missionary disciples.” All to the good – provided we gain an accurate discernment of the darkness in which so many dwell and of the cruciform cost such discipleship demands.
So before establishing a new commission or issuing yet another study document, we might simply have recourse to the end of today’s reading from Ephesians. Paul reminds believers of the hymn they have sung together: “Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will give you light.”
A no frills and rousing anthem to accompany missionary disciples on their journey. Singing it, suffering it, the early Christians patiently transformed a culture.
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