Risen with Christ
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“ “If you then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ is, sitting at the right hand of God. Set your mind on things above, not on things on the earth. For you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is our life appears, then you also will appear with Him in glory” (Colossians 3:1–4). All that Christ has accomplished, He accomplished with us. It strikes me as important that, in the original Greek, the word we translate as “risen with” (συνηγέρθητε) is a single word. It describes something happening in us and with us. As such, it describes the nature of the Christian life.” (Father Stephen Freeman)
“Many Patristic writers were clear that ‘heaven’ is not simply going to be an endless continuation of our current life on earth. Rather, they believed that ‘heaven’ is a transfigured life, a new creation. What exactly it will be is not yet clear to us, though we get glimpses of it in the appearances of the Risen Lord at the end of each Gospel. The risen Christ is still Christ, and yet His disciples (including the women disciples) cannot recognize Him at first. He shows them He is real and not a ghost, and yet He is transfigured by the resurrection. We are to share in this transfigured life of the new creation when the resurrection of all occurs.” (Fr. Ted Bobosh)
“Because “Christ is Risen!,” we must not use the fact that we have bodies as an excuse to remain enslaved to corruption in any form. We fall into hatred, greed, sloth, gluttony, drunkenness, vanity, and other sins not because we are flesh and blood, but because we have not opened our personal wounds to the healing of Christ. In one way or another, we have all refused to enter fully into the joy of the resurrection.” (Fr. Philip LeMasters)
“To turn on an electric light, you must plug it in. Faith is the plug that connects us to the life of the Risen Christ. Trust in the Lord is the means of our union with Him and all that He is and wills to do through us. Accordingly, by the Spirit, the Lord has given this same faith of Peter to His Church. The Lord said that if believers had faith as tiny as a mustard seed, they could move mountains (Matthew 17:20) or throw mulberry trees into the sea (Luke 17:6). The point of the metaphors is not the stupendous feats but the divine power that faith engages for carrying out the will of God.” (Fr. Basil)
“ ‘Christ died for us’. What does Paul mean by this? Some commentators assume that Paul is thinking of Christ’s death as substitutionary: they assume, that is, that Christ dies in our place. This does not seem to be an appropriate description of his teaching, however, for Christ’s death does not mean that Christians do not face physical death….‘Christ died’, he wrote, ‘in order that we might live with Him.’ He sees Christians as sharing the life in Christ. This is the idea that we find him spelling out in Romans 6: ‘Christ died for us’ does not mean that we escape death, but that He dies as our representative — the representative of humanity – and those who in turn share his death (to sin) will also share His resurrection…In Christianity, Death does not have the final say about how humans are to be judged. Death is not the last word on human life for Christ has risen from the dead destroying death by His death. The power of sin and death has been overcome by the Risen Lord.” (Morna Hooker, Fr. Ted Bobosh)
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