The Christ Withinby Lou Ann Karabel

I’m sure you have Bible passages you often turn to. Scripture that speaks to the deepest parts of your soul.

One of mine is Ephesians 3:14-19. I love these words in part for their beautiful reassurance of the extent of God’s love for us. But also because Paul assures us that Christ dwells in our hearts, that we who believe are filled with all the fullness of God.

For this reason I bow my knees before the Father,  from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name. I pray that, according to the riches of his glory, he may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through his Spirit,  and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth,  and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

On the surface, this sounds impossible. How can Christ live within this body? How can the fullness of God’s grace and love be contained within me? Within you?

For most of my life as a Christian, I interpreted this metaphorically. I thought it meant that, through the work of the Holy Spirit, followers of Jesus have within us some measure of God’s love and grace. And that, as we study, and pray, and practice spiritual disciplines, we gradually learn how to try to live as Jesus did.

But there is a different way to read this. In his letter to the Galatians, 2:20, Paul writes: “I am crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.” Paul doesn't say, “I behave like Christ,” or, “I model my life on Christ.” No, he says, “Christ lives in me.”

Paul is telling us that the Christian life is not about behaving like Jesus. It’s about allowing Christ to live in and through us, so that we should expect to experience Jesus—not only with us or alongside us—but within us, guiding our actions.

Still hard to wrap our minds around, I think. I don’t know about you, but an awful lot of the time, I sure don’t feel like Jesus. But as Paul says, this is a love that surpasses all knowledge.

A few years ago, when Harry and I were in Florence, Italy, we saw four sculptures by Michelangelo that help me to think about God’s Spirit that lives deep within us. You may be familiar with these deliberately unfinished sculptures, often referred to as Michelangelo’s Slaves. In each larger-than-life sculpture, a human figure looks as if it’s straining to break free of the marble that contains it. The image you see here is the sculpture named Atlas.

As with many others created by the artist, it is sculpted with such detail, we feel the immense power of Atlas’s struggle. His muscles and tendons and even his veins are enlarged, his body bent beneath the weight of the heavy marble in which he is encased.

Michelangelo believed that as a sculptor, his task was not to create, but to reveal the figures already contained in the marble. He would spend days simply looking at the rock, until he saw the figure within it. His task, he believed, was to chip away the excess, to reveal that inner form. 

I think God looks at us the way Michelangelo studied the marble, looking deeply within us, seeing who we are and who we can be, and then chipping away, bit by bit, whatever keeps us from what Paul calls the fullness of God.

In Luke 7:20-21, we read one of the many incidents when the Pharisees questioned Jesus to try and trap him into contradicting Jewish law. They asked when the kingdom of God was coming.

Jesus knows that the kingdom the Jews are expecting is one in which the throne of David is restored. But their idea of what is coming was very different from the kingdom about which Jesus taught.

He answers:

“God’s kingdom isn’t coming with signs that are easily noticed. ²¹ Nor will people say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ Don’t you see? God’s kingdom is already among you.” (sometimes translated “in your midst”).

Uncharacteristically, I find I prefer the King James Version: “The kingdom of God is within you.” It opens up—at least for me—a different way to think about the kingdom of God. It is not out there (or up there!), waiting to be revealed once we have created a perfect world. It is already here, within those who believe.

In other words, the kingdom is coming, but it’s also here now! One of the great mysteries of our faith. For when God is in control of our lives, that is the kingdom. When, as Paul says in Romans, “righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit” are made visible through you and me, that is God’s kingdom, here and now. That is Jesus living within us and through us, in the fullness of God.

The kingdom of God is within you, because the Christ lives within you. From the very moment that God took form in Creation, it has, as Paul writes in Romans, “been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.”

What is being birthed is a world in which truth is valued over lies. A world in which love conquers hate, and fear gives way to compassion. A world in which the fullness of God reigns above all else.

But that reign must first happen within our hearts.

May it be so for you, and for me.

Amen.