If you remember the simple sketch depicting the Catholic Christian’s faith journey (January Liturgy Corner), it began at the person’s baptism.  For many, if not most of us, our baptism was a sacrament we received many years ago.  We tend to think of it as having removed original sin.  OK.  That’s a start, but it is only part of the picture.  When we were baptized, we, as St. Paul says in his letter to the Romans, died with Christ and rose with him to live a newness of life. (Romans 6).  Our immersion in the waters of life (baptism) knit us to Christ, becoming a member of his body.

   Pope Pius XII’s letter Mystici Corporis reminded us that the body of Christ is both head (Jesus Christ) and members (baptized, the church).  It would be a mistake to hear this just as a beautiful pious thought and nothing more.  St. Teresa of Avila is attributed as expressing this bond with Christ and each other this way:

Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours.
Yours are the eyes with which he looks with
Compassion on this world.
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,
Yours are the eyes, you are his body.

   The church teaches that it is the body of Christ who gathers for Eucharist.  How would you or I be changed if we paused to look around at the people gathered in church for Mass and reminded ourselves, “This is the body of Christ!”?

   Again, in the words of St. Paul, we recognize that our baptism has ushered in newness-- “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come." (2 Corinthians).  Maybe we don’t always feel like a new creation, but we are and have been given a new identity with the gifts to live out this identity and mission

   Theologians described the newness of the reign of God announced and inaugurated by Jesus as “the already, but not yet.”  God’s reign or kingdom has come (in the world and in ourselves), but its fulfillment, its completion is not yet here.  We just need to look at ourselves or the world around us and we have proof positive that God’s hopes for his beloved creation are frequently frustrated and/or opposed.  But this is not the final word.  Jesus Christ has conquered sin and death.