God does not
love us because we are lovely or loveable; His love exists not on account of
our character, but on account of His. Our highest experience is responsive not initiative.
And it is only because we are loved by Him that we are loveable.
Fulton Sheen Rejoice,
1984, 9
God loves
us; we can say this with the utmost confidence because of the life, death, and
resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is what we celebrate at Easter. We show our
love for God by keeping his word, by loving each other as he has loved us. We
are called to the same sacrificial, self-giving love which Our Lord shows us.
It’s a big ask. It should make us stop in our tracks and realise the enormity
of the task and our utter reliance upon God’s grace. We show this love by
keeping God’s word, by doing what Jesus tells us to do and not simply going
along with the ways of the world.
Our Lord promises his disciples that
the Father will send the Holy Spirit in Jesus’ name to teach us all things and
to bring to our remembrance all that he said to us. The Holy Spirit speaks
through the Church so that we can profess our faith in the co-eternal and
consubstantial Trinity. His gift to us is His peace – not as in the absence of
war or violence, but something deeper and more profound. The peace that Jesus promises
is that which characterises the life of the Godhead: a peace which passes all human
understanding.
We can have peace through our
relationship with the Trinity, the source of our peace, and joy, and love. Grounded
in this relationship we need not be afraid or troubled – we are free to live
lives which proclaim God’s love and victory so that the world may believe.
Through God loving us, we can truly love him and each other. We experience this
most clearly at the Eucharist when God feeds us with His Body and Blood, which
he as both priest and victim offers to God on the Altar of the Cross. That self
same sacrifice which heals the world through the pouring out of God’s love
feeds us here and now. We are fed so that we may be nourished and share in the
divine life. We receive the free gift of God’s grace so that it may perfect our
human nature, so that we may go where Our Lord is going and share in the joy,
and love, and peace of the Triune God.
We should rejoice in the coming of
the Spirit at Pentecost after Our Lord has ascended, as in this we see the
birth and spread of the Church – it’s why we are here, because people filled
with the love of God and His Holy Spirit have brought us into His loving embrace.
Loved by him, we are to share that love with others, so that the world may
believe and share in the source of all love, and peace, and joy. It’s not
somebody else’s responsibility but ours as the baptised people of God to follow
in the footsteps of the apostles and share what we have received so that we and
all the world may sing the praise of God the Father, God the Son, and God the
Holy Spirit, to whom be ascribed as is most right and just all might, majesty,
glory, dominion, and power, now and forever.
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