God Showed His Love through His Son
No man has ever seen God or known him, but God
has revealed himself to us through faith, by which alone it is possible to see
him. God, the Lord and maker of all things, who created the world and set it in
order, not only loved man but was also patient with him. So he has always been,
and is, and will be: kind, good, free from anger, truthful; indeed, he and he
alone is good.
He devised a plan, a great and wonderful plan,
and shared it only with his Son. As long as he preserved this secrecy and kept
his own wise counsel he seemed to be neglecting us, to have no concern for us.
But when through his beloved Son he revealed and made public what he had
prepared from the very beginning, he gave us all at once gifts such as we could
never have dreamt of, even sight and knowledge of himself.
When God had made all his plans in consultation
with his Son, he waited until a later time, allowing us to follow our own whim,
to be swept along by unruly passions, to be led astray by pleasure and desire.
Not that he was pleased by our sins: he only tolerated them. Not that he
approved of that time of sin: he was planning this era of holiness. When we had
been shown to be undeserving of life, his goodness was to make us worthy of it.
When we had made it clear that we could not enter God’s kingdom by our own
power, we were to be enabled to do so by the power of God.
When our wickedness had reached its culmination,
it became clear that retribution was at hand in the shape of suffering and
death. The time came then for God to make known his kindness and power (how
immeasurable is God’s generosity and love!). He did not show hatred for us or
reject us or take vengeance; instead, he was patient with us, bore with us, and
in compassion took our sins upon himself; he gave his own Son as the price of
our redemption, the holy one to redeem the wicked, the sinless one to redeem
sinners, the just one to redeem the unjust, the incorruptible one to redeem the
corruptible, the immortal one to redeem mortals. For what else could have
covered our sins but his sinlessness? Where else could we, wicked and sinful as
we were, have found the means of holiness except in the Son of God alone?
How wonderful a transformation, how mysterious a
design, how inconceivable a blessing! The wickedness of the many is covered up
in the holy One, and the holiness of One sanctifies many sinners.
Source: The Liturgy of the Hours – Office of
Readings
From a letter
to Diognetus
Image taken from Wikimedia Commons
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