To be united with Christ is not about some static identity that you and I now “have.” Being united to Christ touches you at the very level of your being so that your life is now being formed into the very life of Christ. Our union with Christ is not just about who we are but has everything to say about how we live—our ethics.

As Irenaeus put it, “Christ became what we are in order to make us what he is.” This is transformation.

In Acts 9 we have two very different characters. Saul—who is not living into the truth of his own identity in Christ, but “kicking against the goads,” or living against the grain of who he truly is as he is persecuting Christ in the church; and Ananias—a disciple of Jesus who is living into the truth of his identity, and is called into action to let the life of Jesus happen in him in his ministry to Saul.

These are two different ethics (ethos = way of life). Saul, preventing Christ “who is his life,” from being formed in him; and Ananias, whose “Yes, Lord” comes without reflection or delay.

In Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ethics there is a section entitled “Ethics as Formation.” Ethics for Bonhoeffer is not achieved by our efforts to imitate Christ and become like him, as if he is merely some historical and external model for us to emulate. The heart of Christian ethics for Bonhoeffer is having Christ take form in in us. Like a baby taking form in the womb. Real connection. Real union. Real participation in the same life.

According to Bonhoeffer, the way Christ takes form in us is through our taking responsibility for the world around us. Why? Because this is the very shape and form of Jesus’ life. Being-for-the-other and being-with-the-other. Jesus is radically for this world, he is for you and me, not against us. And in the incarnation we see that because he is radically for this world he is also with us. Emmanuel.

The whole content and quality of Jesus’ life is lived for others and with others. As Bonhoeffer puts it, “Jesus Christ is the man for others.”

It is this life that is to take shape and form in our lives. 

Here are some of the quotes from Ethics that we looked at:

“There is no part of the world–no matter how lost, no matter how godless–that has not been accepted by God in Jesus Christ and reconciled to God.”

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“[Jesus] does not say ‘I have the life’ but ‘I am the life.’ Consequently life can never again be separated from…the person of Jesus…St. Paul describes this state of affairs very accurately, though also very paradoxically, in the words ‘To me to live is Christ’ (Phil. 1.21) and ‘Christ who is our life’ (Col. 3.4). My life is outside myself…My life is a stranger: Jesus Christ. This is not intended figuratively, as conveying that my life would not be worth living without this other, or that Christ invests my life with a particular quality or a particular value while allowing it to retain its own independent existence, but my life itself is Jesus Christ. That is true of my life, and it is true of all created things. ‘In all things that were made–He was the life’ (John 1.4).”

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“Jesus Christ is our life, and so now, from the standpoint of Jesus Christ, we may say that our fellow-man is our life and that God is our life.”

It is in this mundane, boring, and everyday world that Christ wants to take shape in us. To be “in Christ” is not to be removed from the world, but to be pressed into this world in responsibility. Work/culture, family, politics—these are the relations that all of us are involved in whether we like it or not, and these are the places where Christ’s life of being-with and being-for must take form in us.

We are called to take responsibility for the world around us and share the place of our neighbors in their vulnerabilities, their sufferings, and their needs. These are the fields in which Christ must come alive in us.

This is the calling of ethics “in Christ.” Not to be conformed to some exterior standard or model laid down for us. But to make it so the presence and the peace of Jesus comes easily to those around us, just as Ananias did for Saul.

Lord, let it be so in us.

C.H. Mason, the pentecostal founder and first bishop of the Church of God in Christ, described his experience of union with Christ like this in 1907:

“As I arose from the altar and took my seat, I fixed my eyes on Jesus, and the Holy Ghost took charge of me. I surrendered perfectly to Him and consented to Him. Then I began singing a song in unknown tongues, and it was the sweetest thing to have Him sing that song through me. He had complete charge of me. I let Him have my mouth and everything. After that it seemed I was standing at the cross and heard Him as He groaned, the dying groans of Jesus, and I groaned. It was not my voice but the voice of my Beloved that I heard in me. When He got through with that, He started the singing again in unknown tongues. When the singing stopped I felt that complete death, it was my life going out, but it was a complete death to me. When He had finished this, I let Him hold my hands up, and they rested just as easily up as down. Then He turned on the joy of it. He began to lift me up. I was passive in His hands, I was not going to do a thing… He lifted me to my feet and then the light of heaven fell upon me and burst into me filling me. Then God took charge of my tongue and I went to preaching in tongues. I could not change my tongue. The glory of God filled the temple. The gestures of my hands and movements of my body were His. O it was marvelous and I thank God for giving it to me in His way. Such an indescribable peace and quietness went all through my flesh and into my very brain and has been there ever since.”

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