- Human mind can’t grasp God. The ocean doesn’t fit into a thimble. Yet, we are image and likeness – God’s own Word. If we read closely our humanity, we can discover the features of God. Most eloquent and expressive image of God in our humanity is marriage, crown of creation. Marriage as God intended it is not always our experience, but is something we all yearn for.
- Man and woman give and receive one another in freedom and in love, giving rise to a bond which unites in mutual fidelity until death. The Father and Son give and receive one another eternally in freedom and love, giving rise to the Bond who is the eternal Spirit. In death, the human marriage bond isn’t so much broken as transferred into God. Marriage is for the sanctification of the couple, their immersion in God.
- Bond of marriage can give rise to a child. Image and likeness of parents, embodies their love. Trinity gives rise to a child, the human race, in image and likeness of God, intended to embody Their love. God sees us as many but also as one, just like Himself.
- A married couple provides in love for a child the best and most they can give, with all manner of gifts and helps. God provides in love for humanity the immense wealth of the earth and even of the cosmos. It is for all humanity of all generations, not the private possession of a few for exploitation. God, like marriage, doesn’t intend that the child will love all these gifts to the point of denying love to them. On the contrary.
- Like the prodigal son in the parable, if a child’s heart strays to love property rather than the parents who provided it, the child leaves home, turns its back on love of its parents. Selfishness turns gift into possession, love into resentment and rejection, home into prison; it mistakes abandonment of home for freedom; it exploits parental love for personal gain; it mistakes self-indulgence for self-mastery. It ends in misery (pigsty). This is what humanity did through the mysterious reality of original sin. God’s child, and image and likeness, became God’s enemy and marred God’s likeness in itself.
- BUT “The Lord, the Lord, is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and rich in mercy and compassion.” As many a father or mother would do to win back a lost child, God came after us, in person, at immense personal cost in suffering. As a father might discover that a son has ended up on the street as the result of his irresponsibility and will go and take him by the hand and bring him home, so Christ enters the pigsty where the prodigal son, the human race, lies humiliated and starving for love, salvation, life and peace.
- And as a father and mother will celebrate the return of a lost son or daughter, so God does with us. He restores to us our inheritance, only this time we realise that our inheritance is not the things given to us, but the One who gives them. God Himself is our portion and cup! Even more, as Moses asked of God, He takes us to Himself as His inheritance! He wants to include us in the Holy Spirit, the bond of love and life between the Father and the Son, making us sharers in eternal life and, yes, in the Divinity itself.
- It’s therefore an immense tragedy and real folly when anyone, especially anyone baptised, deliberately turns away from God, or is indifferent or apathetic towards Him, so as to prefer some self-invented, personal meaning to life which must inevitably deceive and collapse. Only the true, living God who has revealed Himself to be the Blessed Trinity can fulfil the longings of the heart for definitive peace and happiness. Let us praise God unashamedly and unabashedly for being God, for wanting to give birth to humanity in creation and in redemption. God is our destiny, not the pigsty!
Glory be to the Father ….