Reflection for the Octave of Easter

"Indeed, matter itself is remolded into a new type of reality. The man Jesus, complete with his body, now belongs totally to the sphere of the divine and eternal. From now on, as Tertullian once said, 'spirit and blood' have a place within God. Even if man by his nature is created for immortality, it is only now that the place exists in which his immortal soul can find its 'space', its 'bodiliness', in which immortality takes on its meaning as communion with God and with the whole of reconciled mankind. This is what is meant by those passages in Saint Paul's prison letters that speak of the cosmic body of Christ, indicating thereby that Christ's transformed body is also the place where men enter into communion with God and with one another and are thus able to live definitively in the fullness of indestructible life. Since we ourselves have no experience of such a renewed and transformed kind of life, it is not surprising that it oversteps the boundaries of what we are able to conceive."

--Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth--Part Two: From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection (Ignatius Press, 2011), p. 274