When Jesus lived on earth, He lived in an ordinary man’s body, carrying in that body both life and death. His thirty-three years of life were lived that He might die and through death forever destroy the power of death. He doesn’t live here anymore. We do. We who believe are his Body, assigned to carry in our bodies the death He died. Paul said it (2 Cor 4:10 NEB). Insofar as we are willing to die, to ‘cross out the self,’ we carry the death Jesus died. But that isn’t all! We carry also the life Jesus lived–the life that brings life to all, that will never end, that mysteriously is at work in the world because we who love Him are in the world.
O Life Eternal, purify this vessel of my body, that it may purely bear the death and life of Jesus for the life of the world.