Cor Sanctum

Chapter taken from: The Spirituality of the Pro Sanctity Movement by Servant of God Bishop Giaquinta.  Reprinted with permission.

GOD IS LOVE AND FATHER

HE LOVES US INFINITELY

AND DESIRES THE TOTALITY

OF OUR LOVE

I believe in You, Father, God of love,

Whose love for us is infinite

And Who asks of us in turn,

A response of total love.

God is love.   The expression found in the first Letter of John (Jn. 14:6) is one of the most impenetrable mysteries of our faith.  When we speak of God we can speak of Him only by analogy.  The only way we can formulate an idea of Him among ourselves is by using human concepts.

It is through experience that we learn the meaning of love.  Love, in fact, is ingrained in the human nature and each person is an entity in relationship to others.

The human person is born with the ability to relate, with a social nature, such is the nature of every human being.  Every relationship man or woman establishes, is a relationship of love.  As matter of fact, every human person is born from an act of love and lives in a love relationship with the one who gave life.

As we have just stated, we learn the meaning of love by experience, even though here we are speaking basically of a sensitive, susceptable, sensual or passionate type of love.

Keeping in mind the infinite distance between God and Man, we wonder in what way our concept of love can be applied to God and we ask what John’s expression might mean when he says: “God is love”.

This is the mystery!

The mystery is made clear by Christ Himself.  John can state “God is love” because he personally had  the experience of that love.  He is the one whom Jesus loved; the one who was allowed to count the beats of the divine heart as he laid his head on the heart of the Master (Jn. 14:22).

When Christ says to the Apostles: “I have called you friends” (Jn 15:14), He expresses His affection, His friendship at the psychological level.  Therefore, we cannot deny the love that is in Christ Jesus who is God.  This leads us to another mystery.  That is, how can we explain the unity of Christ’s person in two natures?

This is the deepest of all mysteries.  It is a mystery that we must keep in mind when we speak of the relationship between Christ/man to God and God to Christ/man.  We must explore this reality, even though the terms used to describe  the mystery escape our human intelligence.

Through the hypostatic mystery (union of the human and divine natures in one person), what we see in Christ we apply to God and what we see in God we apply to Christ.  Therefore, when we see Christ’s love, we can say that God loves and that if Christ is love, then God is love .  And we know that Christ is love, because He personally has shown us His love with His own life.

This realization helps us to formulate two definitions of God, which might seem to contradict each other, but in reality they meet.

1. “I am who am” (Ex. 3:14): He is the power, the omnipotent, the infinite, the holy, the one infinitely distant from Man; distant from  the one who is not.
2. “God is love” (Jn. 4:8): He loves Man and is close to him.

How can we make sense out of these two apparently opposed definitions: “I am who am” and “God is love”?  That is, how can we relate the distant God of the Old Testament with the God of love of the New Testament?

The solution is found in Christ (Lk 5:6): Christ’s love is a love in quest, a love that suffers and does not turn from the repulsive.  And so is the God of the Old Testament; He is the God in search of Man.

These two definitions can be reconciled through an understanding of God’s mercy.

God’s justice is not revengeful, as it might seem from certain passages of the Old Testament (i.e. Is. 31:5).  In the general picture of things, the justice of God becomes ” a love in quest”, a merciful love desiring to enter the history of humanity.

Already in the Prophets, especially Jeremiah, and very often in the Psalms, we find the concept of a God who loves.  This theme emerges later in its fullness in the New Testament.

According to the protestant biblical scholar Jeremias, every time Jesus addressed the Father, He called Him Abba.

We find this occasionally in the Gospel.  Abba is a familiar and intimate title used by a child towards his or her father; something like: Daddy or Papa.  In the Old Testament, this title would never have been used by an Israelite when addressing God.  God was usually called Father but never Abba.  Christ is the only one who could turn to God and call Him with such an affectionate title.  And we , too, in the manner of Christ, filled with His grace and transformed in Him, can turn to the Father and say, Abba.

Of all we have said, we find traces in the Letter of Paul to the Romans (Rom. 8:15) and to the Galatians (Gal. 4:6), in which Paul explains how the Holy Spirit cries out in us to the Father, Abba.

God, therefore, is our Father, and how true it is that when Christ taught His own to pray he said to pray like this: “Our Father…”.  This gives us the certainty that we do have a Father.

From the philosophical point of view, it must be said that when the Infinite Being acts it can only act in an infinite way.  This is a fundamental principle: the measure of the act of the Infinite is infinite.

And so God, the Infinite, loves us and His love for us cannot be anything but infinite.

This affirmation a priori   is a result of a logical thinking, which doesn’t necessarily have to be applied to God, to the infinitely distant, the totally Other.  However, this philosophical principle finds credibility in creation through the following statement, creation is a free act of God, but even more so through redemption, for “God so loved the world (to such a degree) that He gave (sacrificed) His only Son” (Jn. 3:16).

Here we should pause not so much to analyze or even meditate, but to contemplate and wonder at such reality.  If we could only understand the abyss existing between our nothingness and the greatness of God’s Son, we would find it absurd that God, the Infinite, could prefer us, poor  finite creatures, to His Son, the Infinite One.  Yet, this is the common meaning of the passage: “God so loved the world that He gave His only Son”.  We must conclude that God loves us infinitely.

St. John also says: “See what love  the Father has bestowed on us in letting us be called children of God!  Yet that is what we are” (1 Jn 3:1).

It takes a special logic to comprehend how the Father chose to sacrifice His Son in order to gather into one all His dispersed children (jn 11:52).  Undoubtedly, there is an essential difference between the only Son, the Eternal Word of God, and ourselves His adopted children.

These are unfathomable mysteries, above our human comprehension which can only be accepted as revealed truths.    

Abba, Father