Thursday, 3/19/12
In the Gospel St. John quoted Jesus as making this statement:
“The Father loves the Son and has given everything over to him.”
We see somewhat of the Father giving all over to the Son in two verses from the Epistles.
Paul’s Letter to the Colossians, 3:15, speaking of the Son, says, “He is the image of the invisible God.”
The Letter to the Hebrews, speaking of the Son, says he is, “The very imprint of the Father’s being.”
The Father-Son relationship is a mystery, but we can partially understand. The great scholar St.Thomas Aquinas used his mind and the Bible to explain something about the relationship between the Father and the Son.
Here is an oversimplification of the explanation we have from Aquinas. God, as an intelligent being always had a thought; and before anything was created his thought was a mental picture of himself. That picture was complete, and it was satisfying. It never left his mind. It became his “brainchild,” the Son.
In his First Letter St. John gave a simple definition of God. He wrote, “God is Love.” Not only does the Father love the Son, but the Son loves the Father.
Creation came about by God’s needing others with whom he could share his beauty and his love.
Everything in Nature is somehow a copy of what the Father sees in the Son. Now, if we ask what is the one element in nature that most directly comes from God. The answer is that it is the order in nature. We see that God-mimicking order in the unchangeable laws of science, in the harmonies of music, in the unchanging relationship between the molecules in our DNA.
In the Divine Comedy Beatrice explained that. She said, “All things possess among themselves and order, and this order is the form that makes the universe like God.”
When we love this world so much that we don’t want to leave it, we should realize that the beauty we cling to is a meager sampling of the beauty that inspired it.
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