2nd of Easter
March 2008
Last weekend I said that religion was a simple matter. It is about:
- Finding out and realising what God has done for me.
- Trying to understand why God has done it.
- Saying thank you in the way most pleasing to God.
Last week I mentioned some of the obvious things that God has done for me.
Today I try and understand why God has done this.
There is of course the fact that God, the Supreme Being, must be totally Good. Therefore God created me and gave me everything I have just because He is totally Good.
For me a better answer comes from the revelation brought to us by Jesus of Nazareth; that God is a Trinity of Persons.
This means that God does not exist in lonely isolation. God is a community; a community of three persons. God is a family.
When you first met your future husband or wife you did not immediately say ‘lets open a joint bank account’ or ‘lets put down a mortgage on a house,’ or ‘lets move into the one apartment.’ No. After the first meeting there was the second meeting and then the third meeting etc. etc. The interest of the first meeting developed, after a number of meetings and conversations, into respect for each other and into a growing love. As this respect and love grew you began automatically to share with each other: your interests, your past, your hopes for the future. Your growing love for each other compelled you to share until eventually you shared a mortgage, a house, and even a bank account. The climax of this sharing, brought about by mutual love, is the total sharing which produces a child - another person who shares everything its parents have and are.
This image of the unity and love in the good human family is the nearest you are likely to get, in this life, to the unity and love of the Holy Trinity Family.
As St. John tells us ‘God is love.’
This love between the Father, the Son and the Holy Trinity is so complete that it compels them to share totally among themselves. Hence the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are equal in all things because they have shared everything with each other. Though each is God, their total sharing produces just One God.
This is God’s nature. This is what God is like.
Even in the human family love demands or compels us to share. This sharing produces children who share completely what the parents have.
This is only a pale image of the Holy Trinity Family but the results are the same.
The love between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit compels them to share, firstly among themselves but also with other things. So this total love that exists within the Holy Trinity Family compels God to create other things so that He can share his existence and his being with them and, in the case of human beings, share His very Nature and His Kingdom.
So God created me because by his very nature he has no choice but to share everything He has. Just as a truly generous person delights in sharing possessions with others, just as a truly forgiving person delights in forgiving, so too God delights in sharing himself with his creatures.
So that is one reason why God created. That is one reason why God created me.