Resurrection of Christ | Three Days in Limbo with Saints

LISTEN Volume III Book II Chapter XXVI - THE RESURRECTION OF CHRIST OUR SAVIOR AND HIS APPARITION TO HIS MOST BLESSED MOTHER IN COMPANY WITH THE HOLY FATHERS OF LIMBO

In the sepulcher were many angels as its guard, venerating the Sacred Body united to the Divinity. Some of them, obeying the command of their Queen and Mistress, had gathered the relics of the sacred blood shed by Her divine Son, the particles of flesh scattered about, the hair torn from His divine face and head, and all else that belonged to the perfection and integrity of His most Sacred Humanity. 

On these the Mother of prudence lavished Her solicitous care. The angels took charge of these relics, each one filled with joy at being privileged to hold the particles, which he was able to secure. Before any change was made, the Body of the Redeemer was shown to the holy Fathers, in the same wounded, lacerated and disfigured state in which it was left by the cruelty of the Jews. Beholding Him thus disfigured in death, the Patriarchs and Prophets and other saints adored Him and again confessed Him as the incarnate Word, who had truly taken upon Himself our infirmities and sorrows (Is. 53, 4) and paid abundantly our debts, satisfying in His innocence and guiltlessness for what we ourselves owed to the justice of the eternal Father. 

There did our first parents Adam and Eve see the havoc wrought by their disobedience, the priceless remedy it necessitated, the immense goodness and mercy of the Redeemer. As they felt the effects of His copious Redemption in the glory of their souls, they praised anew the Omnipotent and Saint of saints, who had with such marvelous wisdom wrought such a salvation. 

756. Then, in the presence of all those saints, through the ministry of those angels, were united to the sacred body all the relics, which they had gathered, restoring it to its natural perfection and integrity. In the same moment the most holy soul reunited with the Body, giving it immortal life and glory. Instead of the windingsheets and the ointments, in which it had been buried, it was clothed with the four gifts of glory, namely: with clearness, impassibility, agility and subtility (John 19, 40). These gifts overflowed from the immense glory of the soul of Christ into the Sacred Body. 

Although these gifts were due to it as a natural inheritance and participation from the instant of its conception, because from that very moment His soul was glorified and His whole humanity was united to the Divinity; yet they had been suspended in their effects upon the purest body, in order to permit it to remain passible and capable of meriting for us our own glory. In the Resurrection these gifts were justly called into activity in the proper degree corresponding to the glory of His soul and to His union with the Divinity. 

As the glory of the most holy soul of Christ our Savior is in comprehensible and ineffable to man, it is also impossible entirely to describe in our words or by our examples the glorious gifts of His deified body; for in comparison to its purity, crystal would be obscure. The light inherent and shining forth from His body so far exceeds that of the others, as the day does the night, or as many suns the light of one star; and all the beauty of creatures, if it were joined, would appear ugliness in comparison with His, nothing else being comparable to it in all creation. 

757. The excellence of these gifts in the Resurrection were far beyond the glory of His Transfiguration or that manifested on other occasions of the kind mentioned in this history. For on these occasions He received it transitorily and for special purposes, while now He received it in plenitude and forever. Through impassibility His body became invincible to all created power, since no power can ever move or change Him. By subtility the gross and earthly matter was so purified, that it could now penetrate other matter like a pure spirit. Accordingly He penetrated through the rocks of the sepulcher without removing or displacing them, just as He had issued forth from the womb of His most blessed Mother. Agility so freed Him from the weight and slowness of matter, that it exceeded the agility of the immaterial angels, while He Himself could move about more quickly than they, as shown in His apparitions to the Apostles and on other occasions. The sacred wounds, which had disfigured His body, now shone forth from His hands and feet and side so refulgent and brilliant, that they added a most entrancing beauty and charm.

In all this glory and heavenly adornment the Savior now arose from the grave; and in the presence of the saints and Patriarchs He promised universal resurrection in their own flesh and body to all men, and that they moreover, as an effect of His own Resurrection, should be similarly glorified. As an earnest and as a pledge of the universal resurrection, the Lord commanded the souls of many saints there present to reunite with their bodies and rise up to immortal life.