Lectio
“Jesus did not come to change the mind of God about humanity. It didn’t need changing. God has organically, inherently loved what God created from the moment God created it. Jesus came to change the mind of humanity about God.”
— Richard Rohr, Teaching An Alternative Orthodoxy
Meditatio
For God so loved the world that He gave us Himself, in our own flesh — to walk, teach, break bread, pray, weep, suffer, forgive, die, and rise with us and as one of us — to show us what God is, which is to say what Love is and what Love can and will do for the beloved. God did this not to save us from God’s wrath, but to show us His mercy. He did this not to save us from Hell, but as an invitation into Heaven. He lived, died, and rose again not because of our sinfulness, but because of His grace, His love, and His desire to be with us — His beloved creation — since creation, in this very moment, and for all eternity. Because the God who is love would do anything — would empty Himself, take the form of a slave, humble Himself even to death — to draw us into relationship with Love itself, now and forever.
God created humankind out of love, for what else could we have been created out of since God, Himself, is Love. He made us in His own image and likeness, and, from the beginning, He called it good. He called us good. And from the beginning, God’s intention was to be with His creation. From the beginning, God desired to walk with us, to know us, and for us to walk with Him and to know Him. And from the beginning, He desired this relationship of perfect, divine intimacy with us in spite of our rebellion, in spite of our rejection, and in spite of our refusal to accept Him, even if that meant submitting to His own humiliation, crucifixion, and death to show us that this desire is unwavering and unconditional, and that, in love, death is not the end.
Christ is not merely a sin offering. Christ shows us what sin does to God and what God does for our sins — taking up our broken humanity into Himself, retracing our steps from the inside, so that what Adam unmade in us, Christ remakes. Through Christ, we are invited back into The Garden, into right relationship with God — the relationship of wholeness He always desired — before our ancestors brought death into the perfect life we shared with God. Through Christ, we may share with Him what He always intended for us: Himself, freely given and freely chosen. And just as God is, eternally, a relationship of love between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one in being, ever begotten and ever proceeding, we may share in that relationship with and within Him. Christ is not merely a sin offering. He is an invitation to transcend, in love and freedom, all that sin has done to us.
Christ is God refusing to let our wandering be the last word on who we are. He is God inviting us to be one with God like He, the Son, is one with the Father. He is God drawing us out of our self-centered finitude, into His love-centered eternality — embodying for us, through the Paschal Mystery, that the path of resurrection is the pouring out of oneself, obediential surrender, and even death for the sake of the other in love. And He is God showing us, through the blood pouring down His face, the stripes on His back, the wounds in His side, hands, and feet, what we do to God through sin — by trying to be God without God — and that we are forgiven no matter how many times we crucify God, for we know not what we do. We only need accept, by His grace, the fact of our salvation and embody Christ for the sake of others.
Oratio
A Love Like Yours
Oh, sweet Lord
to have a love like Yours
a perpetual yes
to the Father’s will
but it is not in me
without You
I’m a lost sheep
alone
amongst the wolves
in my mind
but through Your grace
I turn to You
and through Your yes
I say yes
to the will
of the One who sent You
Contemplatio
Can you let your wandering be met with mercy, rather than the last word on who you are?
Related Scripture
“The Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago. Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth. When there were no depths I was brought forth, when there were no springs abounding with water. Before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills, I was brought forth — when he had not yet made earth and fields, or the world’s first bits of soil. When he established the heavens, I was there, when he drew a circle on the face of the deep, when he made firm the skies above, when he established the fountains of the deep, when he assigned to the sea its limit, so that the waters might not transgress his command, when he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master worker; and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race.” — Proverbs 8:22-31 (NRSVCE)
For Further Reading
If you enjoyed this post, you may also like The Soul’s Sole Longing: On Surrender, Resistance, and Returning to Love, which traces the same Rahnerian insight that grace and freedom are both gifts of God, from the angle of a soul resisting that grace rather than the grace that precedes and grounds the Incarnation itself.
Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity.
Wrestling With God.
Returning To Love.
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