Saturday of the Sixth Week of Easter
“The Father himself loves you, because you have loved me and have come to believe that I came from God.” (v.27)
God loves us because we have accepted his Son, whom he sent into the world, the one sent to reveal God’s love for us.
Our acceptance is put in terms of belief – “have come to believe.” In another place in St. John’s letters, it is put as keeping Christ’s word, “obeying what he said.”
This faith is humanizing and divinizing. It is humanizing because it gets to the center of what a human being is about, trusting! Fr. De Caussade puts it quite simply: “All he wants from us is an honest, straight-forward, simple, submissive and loyal heart.” Another way to come at it is, ‘Do I really want God?’ This gives our human lives a center to live from, the prayer of the heart. We translate living into prayer and prayer can come down to something very simple: ‘O God, I really am grateful you made me and I want you!’
Our faith is divinizing because we gradually turn our lives over to God’s saving action, to receive what he wants to give us or withhold from us, in all life’s events. This is the ‘spiritual sacrifice’ by which we creatures worship God, putting our lives into right relationship to our Creator!
“The Father himself loves you, because you have loved me and have come to believe that I came from God.”
Reflection by Fr. Xavier Nacke, OSB
Posted in Article for Easter, Daily Reflections