From the beginning of time, humankind has had trouble capturing an image of our ineffable God. In the Book of Exodus, when Moses goes back up Mount Sinai, taking along the two new stone tablets on which the Lord will again write his commandments, God proclaims his name and then offers three important insights into his own identity: he is the LORD, a merciful and gracious God, slow to anger and rich in kindness and fidelity. Having stood with the Lord, Moses can invite him to come along with them on their journey through the desert and receive them as his own. In this scene, we do not get a complete picture of God in God’s fullness, but we do get a sense of what it means to experience the presence of God in a grace-filled moment of theophany on the mountain.
In John’s Gospel, Jesus tries to help the Pharisee Nicodemus to understand that God sent Jesus, the image of the intangible God, for the salvation of all, because God loves all: God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might have eternal life. Jesus, God’s Son, incarnate, is God’s gift, freely given – he is the very grace of God, an embodied invitation to Nicodemus to be born again. It is an invitation Paul will extend to the recalcitrant Corinthian community: Mend your ways, encourage one another, agree with one another, live in peace. The Corinthians do not yet know union because they can’t get beyond their own worldly divisions. Paul’s wish for them is essentially Trinitarian: The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with all of you. Such a multi-dimensional experience of the Lord’s presence would indeed allow them to rejoice!
The three Persons of the Trinity – Father, Son and Holy Spirit – are bound in love to one another, indeed, so perfectly in love that they are one. We may not be able to get our minds around this concept very easily, but if we are one in Jesus, we are one in God and one in the Spirit and they are one in us. Yet this relationship is not static; there is a dynamism to the Trinity that invites us to grow in knowledge of the Lord who has given us life, welcoming the transformation such knowledge entails, that we might have an ever better experience of how God is active in our lives, everywhere, always, involved in everything. Then we too can rejoice and pray, as in the canticle of the Book of Daniel, Glory and praise to our God who is exalted above all forever!
This post is based on Fr. Pat’s Scripture Class.
Image source: www.wordclouds.com
No comments:
Post a Comment