In this past Sunday’s Gospel, we hear God the Father proclaim, “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.” What the Father proclaims about the Son he also wants to proclaim about us. What is Jesus’ by nature is ours through grace.
Jesus Christ is fully God and fully human. He reveals to us the Father’s love and the communion shared between the three persons of the Trinity. In addition to revealing God to humanity, Jesus Christ reveals what it means to be fully human. He reveals that human person was created to be a partaker of the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4). The human person was created to become an “adopted son” by which one participates in God’s life.
This may seem very abstract and theoretical. In our everyday life, we often experience our human nature as fallen with its limitations, sins, and imperfections which divide us from God. We see imitating Christ as a distant goal that is unattainable.
The truth that scripture and tradition proclaims is that God invites us into his divine life in the midst of our sinful condition. Through Baptism, he initiates us and draws us into his divine life completely gratuitously. We don’t earn this great gift, but he gives it to us without any merit on our own. When we fall, God restores us through the sacrament of confession. In the Eucharist, he purifies us through the gift of his divine love and gives us the gift of salvation.
Note: God acts first.
God initiates. God says to each one of us, “You are my beloved.” He says this not because we have earned his love, but because his love is greater than our sin. In response, we are called to receive his love and let it transform us. Through the sacraments, we become more and more like Christ. Let us seek to deepen our response to so great a gift.