The Love of God (11th Sunday in Ordinary Time)

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In this Sunday’s epistle reading, St. Paul teaches that God saves us as an act of pure love. He doesn’t wait for us to love Him, because apart from His love, we would never move towards Him in the first place, as our flesh is hostile towards God (Romans 8:5-8). Rather, it is His love that compels us to come to Him. As St. John teaches: “In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. … We love because he first loved us.” (1 John 4:9-10, 19)

Furthermore, he teaches that salvation is a free gift. We did nothing to deserve it. In fact, because of our sins, we deserve the very opposite: eternal death (Romans 6:23). But in Christ, we are delivered from that fate. This free, unmerited gift is what we mean by “grace.” As Paul says elsewhere: “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.” (Ephesians 2:8-9)

Finally, all this only makes sense in light of Jesus’ divinity, since His death can only be a sign of God’s love if Jesus is God. As N.T. Wright astutely observes:

What Paul says here makes no sense unless Jesus, in his life and death, was the very incarnation … of the living, loving God. After all, it doesn’t make sense if I say to you, ‘I see you’re in a real mess! Now, I love you so much that I’m going to … to send someone else to help you out of it.’ If the death of the Messiah demonstrates how much God loves us, that can only be because the Messiah is the fully human being (how much more human can you get than being crucified?) in whom the living God is fully present.¹

Let us rejoice, then, in the incarnate God’s supreme act of self-sacrifice to bring us to salvation.

J. Luis Dizon

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