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Office Of Readings | Week 4, Tuesday, Ordinary Time | A Reading From The Treatise Of Saint Irenaeus Against The Heresies | The First Fruits Of Resurrection In Christ
‘In Christ are the first-fruits of the Resurrection.’
In this reading from Against the Heresies, Saint Irenaeus sets out a compact and carefully reasoned account of the Incarnation and its saving purpose. His focus is on the unity between Christ and humanity, and on the resurrection as the fulfilment of that unity.
Irenaeus begins with the central claim that the Word of God became truly human in order to unite humanity to himself. Salvation is described not merely as forgiveness but as participation. Humanity could not overcome corruption and death by its own power; it required union with one who was himself free from corruption. This union, Irenaeus argues, could only take place if the Son of God truly became what we are. By assuming mortal and corruptible human nature, Christ made it possible for that nature to be transformed by his own immortality.
This transformation is described in terms of adoption. Through union with Christ, human beings receive sonship, sharing in the relationship that belongs properly to the Son. The Incarnation is therefore not incidental but necessary: without Christ’s real human birth from Mary, this exchange between mortality and immortality could not occur.
Irenaeus then turns to the biblical sign of Emmanuel, ‘God with us’. What humanity could not have imagined, God freely gave. Christ descends in order to seek what was lost, using the image of the shepherd retrieving his own sheep. Humanity belongs to Christ because it is his creation, and salvation is presented as a recovery rather than a replacement. Christ’s ascent into heaven completes this work: he brings the restored human race before the Father and entrusts it to him.
The resurrection is the decisive moment in this process. Christ is described as the first-fruits of the resurrection of humanity. His rising is not an isolated event but the beginning of a larger reality. Using the image of the body, Irenaeus explains that the whole human race, as members united to Christ the head, will share in the same destiny. Diversity is not abolished: each member has its proper place, and the many rooms of the Father’s house correspond to the many members of the body.
The reading concludes with a reflection on God’s patience. Human weakness and disobedience were not outside God’s foresight. Rather, they became the setting in which divine strength and kindness were revealed. The victory achieved through the Word shows that God’s power works not by force but through restoration, leading humanity from weakness into life.
A Reading From The Treatise Of Saint Irenaeus Against The Heresies | The First Fruits Of Resurrection In Christ
The Word of God became man, the Son of God became the Son of Man, in order to unite man with himself and make him, by adoption, a son of God. Only by being united to one who is himself immune could we be preserved from corruption and death, and how else could this union have been achieved if he had not first become what we are? How else could what is corruptible and mortal in us have been swallowed up in his incorruptibility and immortality, to enable us to receive adoptive sonship? Therefore, the Son of God, our Lord, the Word of the Father, is also the son of man; he became the son of man by a human birth from Mary, a member of the human race.
The Lord himself has given us a sign here below and in the heights of heaven, a sign that man did not ask for because he never dreamt that such a thing would be possible. A virgin was with a child and she bore a son who is called Emmanuel, which means ‘God with us.’ He came down to the earth here below in search of the sheep that was lost, the sheep that was in fact his own creature, and then ascended into the heights of heaven to offer to the Father and entrust to his care the human race that he had found again. The Lord himself became the first-fruits of the resurrection of mankind, and when its time of punishment for disobedience is over the rest of the body, to which the whole human race belongs, will rise from the grave as the head has done. By God’s aid it will grow and be strengthened in all its joints and ligaments, each member having its own proper place in the body. There are many rooms in the Father’s house because the body has many members.
God bore with man patiently when he fell because he foresaw the victory that would be his through the Word. Weakness allowed strength its full play, and so revealed God’s kindness and great power.
Christian Prayer With Jesus Christ
God of life and mercy,
you sent your Word to become one of us
so that we might share in your life.
We thank you for the mystery of the Incarnation,
in which our mortal nature
was taken up and healed in Christ.
Strengthen our hope in the resurrection,
begun in him and promised to us.
Unite us more deeply to your Son,
that we may live as children by adoption
and grow into the fullness of life you desire for us.
Give us patience in weakness
and trust in your transforming power.
Through Jesus Christ,
the first-fruits of the resurrection,
who lives and reigns for ever.
Amen
Glossary Of Christian Terms
Word of God | The Son of God, through whom all things were made
Incarnation | The Son of God becoming truly human
Adoptive sonship | Sharing in the relationship of the Son with the Father
Corruption | The tendency of human nature towards decay and death
Immortality | Life that is not subject to death
Emmanuel | A name meaning ‘God with us’
First-fruits | The first part of a harvest, guaranteeing what will follow
Resurrection | The rising of the body to new life
Head and body | An image for Christ and humanity united to him
Ascension | Christ’s return to the Father in glory
Human race | Humanity considered as one body
Patience of God | God’s forbearance and enduring mercy
Divine strength | God’s power at work in salvation
The Penitential Psalms offer a path to spiritual growth and redemption, and this is reflected in the redemption offered by Christ on the Cross. Through his death and resurrection, Christ offers the forgiveness of sins and the hope of eternal life to all who believe in him. The Penitential Psalms, through their focus on repentance and the mercy of God, can be seen as a powerful tool in the process of conversion and reparation that leads to redemption [ … ]
The Priestly Prayer of Jesus concludes the discourse of the Last Supper. Immediately afterwards, Jesus will be arrested, betrayed. Jesus prays to his Father in a very moving way. He offers to the Father the imminent sacrifice of himself, praying that his sacrifice may be acceptable to the Father, that his holy human nature may be glorified. Jesus’ prayer is spoken aloud, so that his disciples and we also may receive his last testament, as Jesus intercedes on our behalf with the Father [ … ]
‘Death,’ says His Grace, ‘throws it all apart. For we are not as we should be. Faith requires our adjustment to God’s truth. God’s triumph in a very real sense requires in us the loss of our everything. Which, as with Mary at the other end of Jesus’s life, is God’s truth.’ The Gospel reading is of John 11: 1-45, which is a long passage, and His Grace’s homiletic theme commences in textual wilderness. Our brokenness – in this place – a family home. Our faith, our doubt, our death… The irruption – death, doubt, fear – within our precious scenes and our most intimate places. Our domesticity. His Grace speaks from the chair, as is a bishop’s prerogative, and says: ‘So much is obscure in the Gospels. We’re always reaching through them. We’re never there. Really, we never are. Our knowledge, our understanding, of the Gospels is never complete, and with each reading comes a new revelation. There are always new riches there. Just as there are between all of us, between myself and you. The Gospels are living texts. This is a part of the conversation we have with our own Christianity. It is a part of who we are in our relationship with Jesus. We are in this sense always on the brink. ‘So yes, there is plenty that doesn’t seem to make sense. As one of the order of bishops, we would be lying if we said that weren’t the case. They are not easy texts to encounter, if by that word we may signify something more than a superficial glancing off against, but rather a profound search for the word of God. The Gospels are written by people who had their own ideas, and often didn’t know what had really happened. Luke is quite explicit on this point. His is an investigation, from the explicitly claimed point of view of an historian, rather than that of a first-hand witness, who attempts, so he says, to set out an orderly account, out of the chaos, the sheer muddle, that has been handed down to him. It is possible to imagine Luke researching and composing his account after many years, when there has arisen a desire to know what exactly happened, and this implies a certain call to faith and certain demands of historicity, to historical exactitude. So in these different ways, the people of the first years of Christian faith are in the dark. There is also a decisive need to define the life of Jesus. And people didn’t get Jesus. The whole meaning of Christianity is only now beginning to take root throughout the composition. So much needs to be evangelized. The light shines almost in tentative fashion like that first star, which drew the wise men from the east to our Lord’s cradle. ‘John’s is widely held to be a very late Gospel. There are others who say that John’s Gospel might have been the first to acquire its true shape, because it most fully expresses Jesus, as we know him to be, as members of the Catholic Church. We don’t really know when any of this is being written, but we get a feel in John of a Gospel refined over many years, through a community. So there’s a lot going on there that I’d like you to think about. ‘What I would like to suggest to you is that, while within the Gospels we are often confronted with clues, guesswork, stories that have been handed down through so many people, and so in this sense we might find ourselves to be in the wilderness, this is the very desolate space itself to which we must give ourselves in order to experience Christ’s full redemption in our lives. I suggest it is for God’s glory that we do so. ‘As we become aware of ourselves, in this seminary, we find ourselves in a very secure, comfortable setting, and there are signs of Easter everywhere. Within the very fabric of these buildings, our Lord is risen; our Lord lives. But now this is our Lenten journey, where death enters, where death breaks us. We are to ride into Jerusalem in triumph, and then we are to be utterly broken, all hope gone, our hope extinguished. And really, I suggest to you, it is only by inhabiting this thought, as if we don’t know Easter is there, that our new life can follow, just when we have given up all hope, when every promise that Jesus made to us seems to have been cancelled. ‘And here now we have the story of Lazarus. I should like to suggest to you that we have a very powerful call now. In our very comfortable space, our domesticity, with all this comfort, where so very little might seem to happen each day, so it might seem to you, there is a disturbance within all of this comfort, and that is a disturbance within ourselves, and that is our call to Jesus. I think it is correct to say that our most comfortable places break in the light of Jesus from the inside, in order that we may take the necessary steps to be with Jesus. ‘Faith is not comfortable. I think that we can all receive the message of the rolling away of the rock from the tomb of Lazarus to say something of vital importance to ourselves concerning our openness to God’s love. The rock we roll away can come in all sorts of guises, but we know when we are blocked, and I firmly believe if we are truthful then we know where those blocks might be. ‘Next Sunday, which will be Palm Sunday, we process as it were to Jerusalem, to begin our Holy Week. Now as I speak to you we are on the brink. Even now, I suggest it might be very good for all of us to lay aside what we think we know, to fall apart a little, and so […]
