Jul 11 Thu - God took the initiative

Jul 11 Thu
God took the initiative.
The Blessed Trinity is the mystery of God himself.
God the Father begets God the Son, and gives him everything He is; God the Father is totally “being for.”
God the Son is totally “being from” the Father.
God the Holy Spirit is essentially the mutual love between the Father and the Son.
God the Father wanted to share his divine life and happiness with men; for this purpose, God the Son became man. During his whole earthly life, Jesus worked to establish a permanent relationship -a covenant- between God and mankind, translating into human terms -as if he were reproducing in a mirror- the Son’s filial relationship with the Father in the Holy Spirit.
In Jesus, we become sons of God through the Holy Spirit; and brothers and sisters among ourselves, in Jesus, through the Holy Spirit.
For these reasons, God took the initiative and created his Church, the family of men enriched with -really sharing in- the love, goodness and beauty of the Blessed Trinity.
The passion, death and resurrection of our Lord constitute what we call the Paschal Mystery, the climax of Jesus’ earthly life. In and through this Paschal Mystery, life in the Holy Spirit is made communicable to us; this Mystery is our entry point into the life of the Trinity as it was established in the covenant.
The fruit of the Paschal Mystery is Pentecost, the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. He lives in us to join us together in the Church and to unite us to God. The Paschal Mystery is perpetuated in time and space in and through the life, doctrine and worship of the Church.
The Church communicates to us life in the Spirit.
The Church proclaims the Word of God as handed down by the Apostles, making the Paschal Mystery present as “saving word.”
The Church makes the Paschal Mystery present as “saving action” through the sacraments but more especially through the Eucharist which makes present the Paschal Mystery in the sacrament.
During the Last Super, our Lord anticipated the bloody sacrifice he would accomplish the following day, on the cross, once and for all for the world’s redemption.
A sacrifice is the highest form of adoration. It should have two elements:
- The offering (oblation) of a victim to God in acknowledgment of God’s supreme dominion as the Beginning and End of our entire lives.
- The victim or gift should be destroyed (immolation), or at least partially removed from human use, as an act of submission to the divine majesty. A sacrifice is not only an oblation. While an oblation only offers something to God (as in the case of alms for the cult), a sacrifice also immolates, or somehow destroys, what is offered.