Eph 3:2-12 / Lk 12:39-48
The real meaning of the term “infinite” rarely hits us, and most of us never fully appreciate what all the great theologians have told us, namely, that God is simply too big ever to be adequately understood or described. Indeed, Thomas Aquinas said that the best we can do is by way of negation, that is, describing what God is not.
Sometimes we forget all this and unconsciously attribute to God some very human qualities which don’t really fit. An example of this is our tendency to think of Jesus as God’s “Plan B,” which our frustrated heavenly Father had to conjure up after we all made such a wreck of His “Plan A.” This just isn’t so, as St. Paul notes in today’s epistle.
God knew from the beginning that we’d lose our way and get stuck in both individual and societal troubles of our own making. It was inevitable, given our incompleteness. And so from the beginning, God “in accord with His age-old purpose” intended to save us. In the fullness of time, He did so in and through the person of His Son Jesus Christ, who is the personification of the Father’s love.
Jesus came to show us how to be fully human and to give us the love-power to become fully human. Receive His gift thoroughly into your heart and your life, and know what it means to be born anew, just as Jesus told us we would.
