NOW YOU SEE HIM NOW YOU DON’T

No, it’s not a ‘hide and seek’ game, we used to play as children. It’s not even a flashback to Baroness Orczy, ‘The Scarlet Pimpernel’. This time Christ seems to be playing at it. But His message to the Apostles is very profound. He is becoming ‘visible’ in preparation for the time when they have to accept Him, when He becomes ‘invisible’.

He has returned, appeared, in a visible form to disappear again. Christ is helping the Apostles to accustom themselves to His visible form so that in time they will accept Him, accustom themselves to see Him with their eyes of Faith whilst visibly, not seeing Him. Then His presence will be more real, that’s what He wants the world to do.

We all recall His remark to Thomas: “Blessed are you, Thomas, for believing because you have seen, but more blessed are those who believe without seeing.” Blessed are we who recognize His invisible presence by Faith.

As Christ had prepared His friends for His Passion, Death and Resurrection, He is now preparing them for His going to the Father and for His new mode of presence. He did tell them that it was beneficial for them that He goes, or else the Advocate will not come. He told them that he was not going to leave them ‘orphans’ but He will come again. He made it quite clear that the Advocate, the Spirit is not going to replace Him, but to restore and renew His presence, His teachings, in the most intimate way.

The Apostles might have not understood, for the time being, such ‘Good News’, that is they, and we, are going to share in the life of the Blessed Trinity. The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit will abide in them, and in us, and the soul will possess the three-in-one within her. Their eyes will eventually open when they receive the Spirit, and are filled with wisdom and courage to (physically) leave their ‘old Jerusalem’ because they have in them the ‘new Jerusalem’. They carry the spirit of Christ throughout the whole world. “I am with you till the end of time.”

God, once used to abide in their Temple, which was destroyed in the year 70, but God is now abiding in His Word, which the Apostles are spreading throughout the four corners of the world. This is the dynamism of the Church, the visible dynamism shown by those who gave up their lives as martyrs. In them was the presence of Christ.

Death does not cut off the Christian from the world, death unites them with Christ.