What are you interested in me, my Jesus,
that at my door, covered with dew,
you spend the dark winter nights?
Oh, how hard my heart was,
for I did not open it to you! What a strange delusion,
if from my ingratitude the cold ice
dried up the sores of your pure feet!
How many times the angel said to me:
"Soul, lean out of the window now,
you will see with how much love to call”!
And how many, sovereign beauty,
"Tomorrow, we will open it” she would reply,
to answer the same thing tomorrow!
Lope de Vega
We always hear it said that faith is a gift from God, and in a way, it is, because as St. Paul says, it is the Holy Spirit who cries out within us, ‘Abba! Father!’ (Galatians 4:6); or as Jesus says in John 15:16, "You did not choose me, but I chose you...". However, if faith is fundamentally a gift from God, would not God be seen as unjust because He did not give this gift to those who call themselves atheists or agnostics?
God only loves those who love him, I like to repeat rhetorically in my sermons. Of course it is false, but it is only false in theory; in practice, it is as if it is true. What warms us is not the sun directly, but rather the feedback or response from the earth. In fact, the higher up and the further away from the earth we are, the colder we get (some of us may have seen on the information panels that the outside temperature of a plane at 10,000 meters is minus 50 degrees Celsius).
Salvation is free but it is not automatic; God feeds the birds of the air but He does not put the food in their nests; they have to look for it. What saves us is not so much faith as a gift of God, but faith as a choice and as a response to God's gift. God loves everyone equally; He loved Hitler and Francis of Assisi in the same way. The difference between them lies in their response to God's gift: negative in the former, positive in the latter.
Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me. Revelation 3:20
The door can only be opened from the inside, Jesus has no way of opening it from the outside. It is in accepting God's grace that we are saved, it is in rejecting God that we are condemned. Faith can be a gift from God, but it is also a human choice. In the face of our freedom, Almighty God is powerless because He created us to be free.
Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC
No comments:
Post a Comment