God shows his love for us by sending his Son as our Savior. He also shows his love for us in giving us his Son as the model for creation.

Sunday, 5/13/12

Our readings today dwell on God’s love for us. They give special attention to God’s expressing his love by giving us his only Son as our Savior, but I will  speak instead of the love he shows in giving us his Son in creation.

I know that sounds like gobbledygook, but it is really a thought that can comfort you. St. Thomas Aquinas arrived at that comforting notion by pondering on some lines of Scripture.

Aquinas began with St. John’s concise definition of God where St. John said, “God is love.” Keep that in mind.

Next, Aquinas turned to St. John’s description of the relationship of the Father to the Son. There, St. John wrote, “The Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

To solve that riddle of how the Word could be with God while he was God, Aquinas got help first from Colossians where Paul wrote that the Son “is the image of the invisible God.” As well, he got help from Hebrews where it says that in relation to the Father the Son is “the very imprint of his being.”

Aquinas concluded that those passages were asking us to see the Son as the mirror image of the Father. In fact, he concluded that the Scriptures were telling us that God has always had an unwavering mental picture of himself, and that picture, that idea, is the one whom Scripture calls the Word. 

Earlier on I quoted St. John as saying “God is love,” and I said, “Keep that in mind.” Now, God’s complete identity with loving not only explains his relationship with the Son, it also supplies God’s motive for creating. It is the nature of love that it must be sharing, giving.

Finding his mental image utterly beautiful, the love which is his very nature propels God to share his beauty with creatures.

Dante, in the third part of “The Divine Comedy” tells us that the divine element in creation can best be seen in the order by which creation is organized. Dante wrote, “This order is the form that makes the universe like God.”

The order by which the colors in the spectrum mathematically merge into one another, the order that creates harmony in music, the order by which your mother and your father’s genes merged to create you: all this is God at work.

On an evening when the sky and the nature surrounding you are breathtaking you must realize that this is a limited sampling of the beauty that awaits you in God.