In ancient traditions, we find many different ideas about God(s). In the Aristotelian tradition, we find a god who is compelled to create but isn’t especially interested in its creation. In the Enuma Elish, the gods create mankind as servants so they can be at leisure. In Greek myths, we see gods who are petty and jealous of men, often in competition with them and one another. So, perhaps the most surprising thing about the redemption is that in contradistinction to many of the ideas that human beings have given to supposedly divine beings, God loves us enough to even bother redeeming us. This is one of the most astounding claims of Christianity.
God’s creation of mankind out of love with nothing to gain from his work would be shocking enough. Yet, even when His creation turned against him through inordinate love of self, He did not abandon it to its own destruction. Rather, He emptied himself and stooped down like a father who seeks to comfort an injured child. Just like the child, we are in no position to restore our friendship with God. There is nothing in our power that is able to reconcile the relationship between God and man, but the love of God is such that he comes to save those who are at enmity with Him, rather like the admonition Jesus gave us to love our enemies.
God is quite different from how many people imagine Him. He is not a “cruel tyrant, or a permissive, non-demanding force of love” (352). He is a God who understands what we need and does not hesitate to offer it to us as a free and unmerited gift. Often times human beings abuse all the gifts that we are given. We use each other for our own purposes, destroy the material things that have been entrusted to our care, and often choose to be slaves to our passions instead of truly free. Yet, even though we often go astray God offers to give us what we need to be freed from the yoke of our sin, He journeyed with us as a man to restore what we had lost and what was not in our power to restore ourselves. Although His example pointed us toward the truths of his love, it was not a lesson he could not teach us by word alone, but this lesson relied upon His love in action in order to reveal the infinitude of the love that He has for us.
In our earthly experiences of love, we often struggle to give and receive the kind of selfless love that God has in store for us. God offers his infinite love to obtain the forgiveness of sins through his living and dying which enables us to unite ourselves to Christ’s death. The transcendent God of the universe loves each of us so much he suffers the ultimate death and humiliation to redeem us. It is difficult to imagine something more shocking than this.
Kereszty, Roch. Jesus Christ: Fundamentals of Christology. Saint Pauls/Alba House, 2002.
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