He was rich

Introduction

This paper aims to clarify the notion of Christ being rich. Yes, it is a scriptural fact - the Lord Jesus was rich. Saint Paul states that Christ was rich in the Second Letter to the Corinthians. His statement goes like this:

“You know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you might be enriched through that poverty” (2Cor 8: 9).

Christ’s riches are our starting point, our first fact. The end point of this text is not given. And it is not given because it will be reached insofar as you yourself will develop your personal insight into another fact: the rewarding possessions of the Lord Jesus are yours, or better: they are ours. This is our second fact. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states it thus:

“All Christ’s riches «are for every individual and are everybody’s property»” (CCC 519).

What Christ’s riches are not

The Lord Jesus Christ was rich, alright. But how so? How should we construe his wealth? After all, Jesus has always been depicted as rather poor, and he himself preached poverty to his companions:

“How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!” (Mk 10: 23b).

To better understand the nature of Christ’s riches, I propose we start from telling what they are not.  Christ taught us no tto store up treasures on earth (Mt 6, 19), and warned us:

“You cannot serve God and money” (Mt 6: 24).

Whatever riches Christ lost for our sake, it’s likely they had little to do with financial resources, luxury goods, and mundane power.

Valuables, buildings, money and – more generally – any profit-oriented goods are earthen riches. Christians are not meant to get rich by them. Jesus was, however, also God. Hmmm, let me put it better: He still is God. So, it might well be that his wealth was and is divine.

Yes, yes, my friend, you are right. You got it! Okay, okay, I'll quote you. I promise. Below are your exact words: 

Christ’s valuable possessions, the riches of a poor carpenter who preached not to seek the power of money, are spiritual.

Excellent, brother, I buy it! Christ's riches might be understood as treasures in heaven. In particular, they could be the very treasures we have been invited to store up for ourselves (Mt 6: 20). But again, what are these heavenly treasures?

Defining true riches

This section tries to answer the question on the nature of our treasure in heaven by considering what we know about God’s nature. The Scripture tells us that “God is love” (1Jn 4: 8b) and “dwells in unapproachable light” (1Tim 6: 16a). Christ’s riches, therefore, could well be God’s love and the luminous, eternal glory of his dwellings. All right! This is the working hypothesis of the present paper:

God’s love and glory are our true riches. After all, when Jesus claims: “I and the Father are one” (Jn 10: 30), isn’t he also teaching us that he is one and the same with God’s love and glory?

But Jesus goes even further than that. He not only claims to be one with the Father, he also states that he has given each one of us to be one with the Father as well! Yes, Sir, yes. We can be one with the Father through Christ. It is written, brother.  Jesus taught his companions that any human being may, through him, became one with the Father. You do not believe me, do you? Well, just listen to him:

“The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one. I in them and you in me, that they may be perfected into one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me” (Jn 17: 22-23).

Saint Paul clearly describes is first-person experience of such love and luminous, eternal glory when he states: “Let us boast in our hope of the glory of God. […] Hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our heart through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us” (Rm 5: 2b.5). Also, while writing to the Ephesians, he explicitly prays that they all have such a luminous experience too:

"That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints" (Eph 1: 17-18 and see 1Chr 29: 11-12).

Any human being has the opportunity and the right to know through faith what are the riches of God's glorious inheritance. To make better sense of this point, and offer you a visual understanding of it all, I’d like to conclude this section with an image. It depicts the splitting of God’s grace in what we have come to define as Christ’s riches – divine love and divine glory.

The image of Merciful Jesus depicts two differently coloured beams: one is blue and the other one is red.

The blue beam is composed of spiritual rays that could be linked to divine glory, while the red one comprises rays that might carry God’s love. The blue beam could be further associated with elements such as water and oil, whereas the red beam might be easily related to blood and wine.

Please, note how the two decoupled beams appear to stem out of a single source of light, right in the middle of Jesus’ bosom, signalling that love and glory are one in God. This primal, unified spiritual light beams white rays.

Being enriched through Christ

The Lord Jesus Christ came to Earth and emptied himself of his riches for us:

“He who was born of the Virgin Mary, the carpenter’s Son (as he was thought to be), the Son of the living God (as confessed by Peter), came to make us all a kingdom of priests” [1].

Christ didn’t keep the love of the Father for himself, nor did he lay hold of his glory. He didn’t seize the grace of God. But emptied himself of all his excellencies for our priesthood:

“Though Christ Jesus was in the form of God, he did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, having been made in human likeness” (Phil 2: 6-7).

Christ did that to free us. He didn’t take advantage of his divine nature, but died for us and “was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so [that] we too might walk in newness of life” (Rm 6: 4), that is to say, as royal priests, priests in a kingdom of priests.

He died to give us the right and opportunity to live this life as enriched human beings – “partakers of divine nature” (2Pt1: 4).

Yes, it is another fact of the Christian faith, our third fact, to be precise – the Lord came into the world to share his divine nature with us. Let’s consider that for a bit longer now.

Love and Glory – the Truth

Traditionally, we have been taught to just focus on one property of divine nature, that is, God’s love: the red beam. We have something sick in ourselves since birth, something that Jesus has taken away from us via love. Without downplaying the role of God’s love, this paper maintains it is important to also focus on glory, the blue beam, which is something we all have been given, as opposed to taken, by Jesus.

The gift of God in Christ Jesus is grace, and grace is composed of love and glory, not just love.

The red beam pictures God’s love. It represents the grace that prompts us to wash our robes, making “them white in the blood of the Lamb” (Rev 7: 14b). Conversely, the blue beam mirrors God’s glory, “the glory as of the Father’s only Son” (Jn 1: 14b). It depicts the grace through which we are “a new creation” (2Cor 5: 17a), a creature “born from above” (Jn 3: 3c).

God’s glory is the force that makes us “children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of a male, but of God” (Jn 1: 13).

The fact that the Lord came into the world to wash away our sins and the fact that Christ was born into flesh to make us offspring of God might well be one and the same fact. Yes, the same fact looked at from different angles – the blue and the red angle, so to speak.

Saint Paul himself claims that “in the Beloved we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace” (Eph 1: 7).

And the riches of Christ’s grace are, now we know it, not the love only, but the love and the glory. Not the blood only, but the blood and the water:

“There are three bearing testimony: the Spirit and the water and the blood, and these three are in one” (1Jn 5: 7-8).

The image of Divine Mercy depicts the unity of water and blood and the Spirt in the bosom of Jesus with white colour. We could think of the fact that love and glory are one in the bosom of God as the truth of God.

Enacting the gift of Baptism

Baptism is a sign of grace whereby we are washed from our sins (red beam) and born from above (blue beam). It endows us with Christ’s riches and makes us children of God:

“Baptism not only purifies from all sins, but also makes the neophyte a «new creature», an adopted son of God, who has become a «partaker of the divine nature», member of Christ and coheir with him, and a temple of the Holy Spirit” (CCC1265). The sacrament is sign that “the baptized have become «living stones» to be «built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood». By Baptism they share in the priesthood of Christ, in his prophetic and royal mission” (CCC 1268).

The power of the sacrament, however, is latent and silent, awaiting our free and conscious decision to engage in the battle of faith to enter God’s kingdom, becoming true not only to God, but to both ourselves and our neighbour.

What? What conscious decision?  - a disturbing thought flashes through my reader's mind - Aren't we simply supposed to listen?

Well, no, my firend. You need to listen and act.

An active decision to take part in the battle of faith and our personal struggle to deny ourselves, open up and be built into a holy priesthood are pivotal.

A thought experiment

Suppose you have tattooed your forearm because you need that mark on your skin to enter any supermarkets on Earth. Now also imagine that to enter the supermarket you need to fight for your place in line as there are plenty of people cheating. They simply jump the line and do whatever they want once inside. They even steal! Good. Further suppose that you were tattooed as a child by your parents. You personally do not care that much about going to the supermarket, as you go grocery shopping somewhere else, or because you went with your parents when you were a child and know there is nothing worth buying in there. Basically, you never had a chance to use your tattoo.  That’s what I meant when I said – You need to engage in the battle of faith to enact the power of Baptism. Try and see.

Ascending to heaven

Currently, Jesus is “seated at the right hand of God” (Col 3: 1d), “full of grace and truth” (Jn 1: 14). From the right hand of God, he “holds a permanent priesthood, wherefore he is able to thoroughly save those who approach God through him” (Heb 7: 24-25a).  

Okay, all right. Every individual owns Christ’s riches as their property and has the right to approach God through Christ to actually inherit them. But how is that going to happen exactly?

The second working hypothesis of this paper is that to inherit Christ’s riches you need to ascend to heaven.

There are at least two ways to ascend to heaven, depending on whether you open your doors to Christ in this life and are taken to heaven in prayer or you do that once you’re physically dead.

Leaving aside physical death, let’s concentrate on the first route to heaven – prayer.

First of all, even though we are not asked to physically die, well, to ascend to heaven, we are nonetheless asked to deny ourselves:

We must learn to “take up our cross” (Mt 16: 24) and “groan, longing to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling” (2Cor 5: 2).

Such longing develops through a personal understanding of the gift of God. The gift of God is – to repeat it – the grace our Baptism into Christ gives us.

Knowing God's gift involves undertaking a spiritual journey to develop first-person experience of the fact that the question: “Are you unaware that as many of us as have been baptized into Christ Jesus, have been baptized into his death?” (Rm 6: 3) refers to the red beam, while the satement: “As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourself with Christ” (Gal 3: 27) refers to the blue beam.

Approaching God through WI-FI

It is now about time we introduce another fact: free access to God. Yes, it is written. All Christians have been given the opportunity and right to “have access to God in boldness and confidence through faith in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Eph 3, 12). That is our fourth magnificent scriptural fact:

Baptism equips us with wireless fidelity in the name of Jesus, or better: faith in Christ Jesus is our free Wi-Fi.

If you pursue your opportunity and fight for your right, well, sooner or later, you will connect to heaven. You’ll be caught up into there, “whether in the body or out of the body, I don’t know” (2 Cor 12: 3). You just need to practice prayer and you’ll be able to experience an uplifting, spiralling movement by which the Father takes you to Jesus. Exactly. It is the Father who draws you to Jesus. Our Lord taught that himself:

"No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father” (Jn 6, 44).

Your connection is unlimted. You might connect and be transferred at mass, during eucharistic adoration, while meditating, relaxing or beholding the beauty of nature, and – in few, exceptionally outstanding cases – upon engaging in daily routines and ordinary actions. It just takes practice! When such connecting experience happens, you’ll be in heavenly communion and somehow know that you are among those of whom it has been written:

“You have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the Church of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant” (Heb 12: 22-24a).

As a matter of fact, you’ll be able to serve God in heaven, as royal priest, "in his temple day and night” (Rev 7: 15b), and speak and experience the truth of Saint Paul’s and Saint Peter’s words:

“The Father has delivered us from the authority of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins” (Col 1: 13-14).

“You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that you might proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvellous light” (1Pt 2: 9).

Conclusions

This paper has built upon two facts of Christianity, namely that Christ was rich and his riches are ours. It has then used two working hypotheses to elaborate on the topic of real wealth, linking it to Baptism. The first is that Christ riches are God's grace, which is composed of divine love and glory, while the second supposes that to access our divine possessions, to inherit God’s love and glory, we must try to ascend to heaven. While elaborating on that, another fact of the faith in Christ Jesus has come to the foreground: all the Baptized are so lucky as to have free access to God.

Faith in Christ can, in effect, be conveniently compared to free Wi-fi – a free spiritual Wi-Fi granting any baptized unlimited connection to the Kingdom in the name of the Lord.

NOTES

[1] Saint John Paul II,  Homily for the Inauguration of his Pontificate, 22 October 1978.

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REFERENCES

Benedict XVI (2012), St. Alphonsus Mary Liguori, General Audience, August 1, Piazza della Libertà, Castel Gandolfo available at https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/audiences/2012/documents/hf_ben-xvi_aud_20120801.html

CCC, Catechism of the Catholic Church, Pope John Paul II (1992, 1997) and Pope Francis (2018), available at https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/_INDEX.HTM

John Paul II (1978), Homily for the Inauguration of his Pontificate, 22 October, AAS 70 [1978], 945-947, available at https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/homilies/1978/documents/hf_jp-ii_hom_19781022_inizio-pontificato.html