Our life is hidden with Christ in God

“Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.”

I love these words from St Paul’s epistle to the Colossians – ‘your life is hidden with Christ in God’. They are words which remind us that through our baptism, Christ lives in us and we live in Christ. This idea of participating in Christ has a long and rich history in the Christian tradition. It was a constant theme of the writing and thinking of St John Henry Newman, and of course it was announced last week that Newman is to become one of the doctors of the Universal Church. This is significant for us here at St Mary’s because it means that the sermons Newman preached here, his Parochial Sermons and his University Sermons, his writings on justification, his Tracts for the Times, all these things are recognised as expressing the faith of the Universal Church. Newman may have become a Roman Catholic, but his Anglican inheritance of faith is here acknowledged and affirmed.

We participate in the life of Christ, and that means that the character of our lives is drawn into the likeness of Christ. That is our true vocation. And if you want to know what the shape of your life should look like, if you want to flourish as a human being, then look to Jesus Christ for the pattern of your calling.

Of course, the tragedy is that so often when we want to flourish as human beings, we imagine that we can seek some sort of security elsewhere. And this is where the gospel reading comes in - the rich man, piling up his wealth in barns. 

Jesus warns his hearers about the dangers of greed and placing one’s security (literally one’s life) in an abundance of possessions: ‘Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.’

And Jesus then tells a parable to illustrate the point. A rich man pulls down his barns and builds larger ones – stores all his grain and possessions. And then Luke records that he says, ‘And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’

‘I will say to my soul’ is an intriguing phrase – because Luke is using this rhetorical device to express the man’s own internal self-reflection. ‘I will say to my soul’. It provokes a question about the way in which we cultivate the soul, about the way in which we think about ourselves, about our identity, about who we are and about the difference we make in the world.

The ancients were very interested in these sorts of questions. Ancient writers and philosophers developed all sorts of spiritual exercises, or practices of the self, to describe the whole enterprise of cultivating the soul. In the Christian tradition, we look to Christ as the pattern of our calling. And that is why there is so much reflection on the imitation of Christ, as the starting point for thinking about the pattern of our lives: ‘Our life is hidden with Christ in God’. 

And the gospel is clear that amassing material possessions is not a healthy way of cultivating the soul. Commenting on this passage, St Ambrose of Milan talks about the dangers of people amassing wealth and not knowing how to use it. He reminds his listeners that you cannot take it with you. ‘Virtue alone’, he says, ‘is the companion of the dead, mercy alone follows us, which gains for those who have died an everlasting habitation.’ And the true measure of our generosity is not what we have given, but how little we have left when we have given it away.