God is very kind to us. How do we know this? Because He lets us cooperate in His saving work.
Noah, in days of old, was granted the privilege of building an Ark by which to save humanity from the flood.
Moses was privileged to give the law to the chosen people.
Judith was privileged to save Israel from an invader.
Esther was privileged to thwart a plot to wipe out the Jews.
Samuel was privileged to anoint David as King.
All these men and women were given privileges by God, to cooperate in salvation history and point towards Christ. Now that we are at Christ, the apex of history, we are given better (Colossians 2:17) privileges.
We have the privilege of spreading God's salvation to the ends of the Earth (Matthew 28:18-20).
We have the privilege of being persecuted and suffering (Luke 6:20-26); thereby “filling up what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ”(Colossians 1:24).
But most of all, we have the privilege of participating on the one event in all history that matters most, the sacrifice of Christ. Through the Mass, we have a chance to participate in (Paragraph 1348) that one saving work of God. We reach across time to make present (Paragraph 1366) the one sacrifice (Paragraph 1367) of Christ. God gives us the opportunity to be united (Paragraph 1368) with the greatest work of history, our own redemption.
Further Reading: God saves Israel from starvation not by having food grow, but by using His servant Jacob (Genesis 45).
“God is absolute moral goodness or holiness.”
If you are trying to be good person, and I imagine you are if you are a regular reader this blog, you need to know what you are striving to become. You rarely make progress towards a goal if you don't know what the goal is. What does your goal look like?
This dogma is a statement of what a Catholics goal looks like. We are striving to become like God, to mold ourselves to Him so that we too can “be perfect as [our] heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48). God is the target towards which we aim.
Now, often times I've struggled because I don't know what God looks like. His moral perfection is beyond me. He can justly judge and give vengeance, because He knows all, but I cannot. How do I determine what I should mold myself to, and what is beyond me?
Luckily for me, God has given me Himself as an example. By coming as a man, I can see what this man should do. I can learn what to be justly enraged by (John 2:13-17), what to be saddened by (John 11:35), and so forth. By coming Himself to show us how to live He was able to show us what absolute moral holiness looks like in terms of one of us. All the Law and the Prophets could only point to what moral goodness looks like, Jesus enacted it (Matthew 5:17).
How then should we act? We should act like Jesus and lay down our lives. This may not be modern martyrdom or a crucifixion, but it is a call to sacrifice your life in the service of others. There are two ways to lose your life (Matthew 16:24-25), in death and in giving of all your time.
Therefore if we don't pray unceasingly (1 Thessalonians 5:17), if we don't give up all we have to follow Jesus (Mark 10:21), then we are not yet fully configured to Christ, and we will still have room for moral improvement.
Further reading: Stand firm in trying to be like Christ, don't give up! (Sirach 2)
This dogma is a statement of what a Catholics goal looks like. We are striving to become like God, to mold ourselves to Him so that we too can “be perfect as [our] heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48). God is the target towards which we aim.
Now, often times I've struggled because I don't know what God looks like. His moral perfection is beyond me. He can justly judge and give vengeance, because He knows all, but I cannot. How do I determine what I should mold myself to, and what is beyond me?
Luckily for me, God has given me Himself as an example. By coming as a man, I can see what this man should do. I can learn what to be justly enraged by (John 2:13-17), what to be saddened by (John 11:35), and so forth. By coming Himself to show us how to live He was able to show us what absolute moral holiness looks like in terms of one of us. All the Law and the Prophets could only point to what moral goodness looks like, Jesus enacted it (Matthew 5:17).
How then should we act? We should act like Jesus and lay down our lives. This may not be modern martyrdom or a crucifixion, but it is a call to sacrifice your life in the service of others. There are two ways to lose your life (Matthew 16:24-25), in death and in giving of all your time.
Therefore if we don't pray unceasingly (1 Thessalonians 5:17), if we don't give up all we have to follow Jesus (Mark 10:21), then we are not yet fully configured to Christ, and we will still have room for moral improvement.
Further reading: Stand firm in trying to be like Christ, don't give up! (Sirach 2)
“God is absolute ontological goodness in Himself and in relation to others.”
This is the goodness of the Lord in relation to us, that He sets things right for us. We muddle and He un-muddles; we lose ourselves and He gathers us; we are wronged and He vindicates us. His goodness to us is that He repairs us.
Can there be a better focus of that goodness than Eucharist? During the Mass, the Priest says, “Blessed are you, Lord, God of all creation. Through your goodness we have this bread to offer, which earth has given and human hands have made. It will become for us the bread of life. ” He then follows that a very similar set of sentences about the wine.
In this we are reminded about the goodness of God for us, that He comes Himself to straiten out our crooked paths. He gives us the bread and wine, it is not the toil of our hands. He miraculously lets it become His very self (1 Corinthians 11:29) to meet not only our physical needs but also our spiritual. The fact that God decides to appear to us in the form of bread and wine means something. From Him we have our strength and mirth (cf. Psalm 104:15), both our body and soul is healed. God is good to us.
Oh, we might bewail our fate as Job or Habakkuk did, but in the end we, as they, recognize that if our breath is taken we return to clay (Psalm 146). We see that our source of life is God, because our plans, if not supported by Him, fail. We know that God is good to us, then, because He sustains us.
There is also one other part to this dogma, that God is good in Himself. As we know God's goodness to us in that He sustains us, we also know that God is good in Himself in that He doesn't need us. He made the world, He does not need some pittance that we might give back. Everything we offer to God is not for His sake, but for ours. This, then, is the root of why we try to love God as He loved us: love is not forced. If God needed us in some way, His love for us would be a forced love, and therfore no love at all! God alone can show us love, because God alone needs no one. His love is totally free.
Further Reading: Jesus multiplies the bread (thereby supplying the majority not through toil in a field) and describes it as His body (so much so that people left following Him for fear of cannibalism): thereby giving both physical sustenance as well as spiritual to the people (John 6).
Can there be a better focus of that goodness than Eucharist? During the Mass, the Priest says, “Blessed are you, Lord, God of all creation. Through your goodness we have this bread to offer, which earth has given and human hands have made. It will become for us the bread of life. ” He then follows that a very similar set of sentences about the wine.
In this we are reminded about the goodness of God for us, that He comes Himself to straiten out our crooked paths. He gives us the bread and wine, it is not the toil of our hands. He miraculously lets it become His very self (1 Corinthians 11:29) to meet not only our physical needs but also our spiritual. The fact that God decides to appear to us in the form of bread and wine means something. From Him we have our strength and mirth (cf. Psalm 104:15), both our body and soul is healed. God is good to us.
Oh, we might bewail our fate as Job or Habakkuk did, but in the end we, as they, recognize that if our breath is taken we return to clay (Psalm 146). We see that our source of life is God, because our plans, if not supported by Him, fail. We know that God is good to us, then, because He sustains us.
There is also one other part to this dogma, that God is good in Himself. As we know God's goodness to us in that He sustains us, we also know that God is good in Himself in that He doesn't need us. He made the world, He does not need some pittance that we might give back. Everything we offer to God is not for His sake, but for ours. This, then, is the root of why we try to love God as He loved us: love is not forced. If God needed us in some way, His love for us would be a forced love, and therfore no love at all! God alone can show us love, because God alone needs no one. His love is totally free.
Further Reading: Jesus multiplies the bread (thereby supplying the majority not through toil in a field) and describes it as His body (so much so that people left following Him for fear of cannibalism): thereby giving both physical sustenance as well as spiritual to the people (John 6).
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