Christ: Alpha and Omega ✠ Brushed #Aluminum #MetallicIcon #AluminumPrint

Paul instructs us that God made our existence take its origin in Christ Jesus as our Alpha; that God created all things in and through the First Born, the Incarnate Christ; through that same Christ who is now fully in charge of this universe; who, when He will finalize His work of submitting the cosmos to Himself, will deliver it back to God: "When everything is subjected to him, then the Son himself will [also] be subjected to the One who subjected everything to him, so that God may be all in all" (1 Cor 14:28).

By means of His beatific vision and His infused knowledge Christ was perfectly aware that this universe had always been His own, that He is now its steward and has always been so; He could interface His beatific vision and infused knowledge with His experiential human awareness. The music of eternity now flowed to the beat of rhythmic time; His direct view of God was background to events experienced by His senses as He marched over the hills of Galilee.

At last on earth itself, Christ now embraced with His free will the events in which God had already engaged Him before time began. He did this in the light of the beatific vision which ever bathed His created mind, a vision in which all creation was displayed; He could call to the console of His experiential awareness His infused knowledge of the cosmos, and focus strands of this light on this or that event to enhance cerebral awareness. He experienced daily events with human perceptions, whose meaning He evaluated in the brighter lights of vision and infused knowledge.

The teachings of Thomas about Christ's knowledge fit smoothly into the insight of Paul who wrote to Timothy that Christ "saved us and called us to a holy life ... according to his own design and the grace bestowed on us in Christ Jesus before time began" (2 Tim 1:9). A closer look at the passage allows us to see a line of progression from the design initiated by God, to the elaboration of that design performed in Christ Jesus. "...secundum propositum suum, et gratiam, quae data est nobis in Christo Iesu ante tempora saecularia." The Propositum (in Greek "prothesin") is attributed to God, and the gratia (Greek "charin") is described as mediated to us in Christ Jesus. God proposes, but works out the proposal in the context of the consenting Christ. The manifestation in time, of events prefabricated in eternity, aroused wonder in Paul:

Praised be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has bestowed on us in Christ every spiritual blessing in the heavens! God chose us in him before the world began, to be holy and blameless in his sight, to be full of love...

God has given us the wisdom to understand fully the mystery, the plan he was pleased to decree in Christ, to be carried out in the fullness of time: namely to bring all things in the heavens and on earth into one under Christ's headship (Eph 1: 3-4;9-10).

The creation decision, then, is of God, and its actualization is done with the by-standing cooperation of the God-man. God, then, decided upon our individual creation not in the context of a mindless universe, but "in Christ Jesus before time began." Christ is the Alpha as well as the Omega of creation. Nothing happened in this universe except through Christ's engagement.

This passage of Paul is not a misprint of Sacred Scripture, but is a key to a more profound understanding of Christ Jesus as Pantokrator, the One to whom we owe not only our salvation, but our lives. Paul wrote to the Ephesians in the same euphoric outpouring: "For we are his handiwork, created in Christ Jesus for the good works that God has prepared in advance, that we should live in them" (Eph 2:10). The Christ Jesus in whom we were created is assuredly here the Incarnate Christ, the God-man. It is the same Christ who was born in Bethlehem, who died on the cross. Somehow God fashioned us within the framework of Christ, of His knowledge and free choice. We are creatures who have been planned beforehand in Christ, a plan which was made even before Christ was born at Bethlehem.

Paul dwells on this mystery in the Letter to the Colossians: "For in him [in the God-man] were created all things in heaven and on earth, the visible and the invisible" (Col 1:16). That Paul here refers to the God-man may not be entirely clear, yet in the context that seems to follow. A few lines on down Paul describes the very same subject functioning as the "Head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead" (Col 1:18).

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