THE KNOWLEDGE AND LOVE OF GOD


SATURDAY, TWENTY FIRST WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME

1 Thess 4:9-11; Ps 98:1,7-9; Mt 25:14-30

The Attainment of a Single Mind and Heart

By guiding us through the three stages of spiritual life, God unites the minds of the faithful in a single purpose. So, the prayer of the Church throughout the week, for God to bring us to love what he commands and to desire what he promises, is a plea for God to initiate His purification in us. God purifies us and makes us understand how miserable we are without him. He opens our minds to behold and understand his word, and our hearts to love what he promises us. By beholding and knowing Jesus Christ in faith, the love for what God commands fills our hearts. Our love for God is not prior to our comprehension of divine truth through faith in Jesus Christ. Thus, in the stage of illumination, God causes our minds, purified to an extent, to grasp the truth in Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is our New Law. So, to know him is to know the will of the Father. Hence, in the stage of illumination, he comes to us as the Truth. What God commands us is the truth about our existence, for there is no falsehood in God. The deeper we advance into the mysteries of Christ, the more we know the will of the Father for us. The more we know the eternal truth, the more our hearts are inflamed with the love of the heavenly life. We must walk in faith and with true knowledge of self before God. God builds us into a dwelling place when we are mindful of our nothingness and his powerful presence in us.

Since the Son of Man is the firstborn of all creation and the first man to be fully illuminated by the Eternal Word, our journey into the mysteries of Christ, or illumination, is not only into God, but also into knowledge of who we are. Hence, as the mind is illuminated more and more with divine light, we grow in knowledge of God and ourselves as made for God alone. Thus, the more we know God, the more we love God and ourselves and those around us. The parable of our Lord in the Gospel illustrates this for us. The parable of the talents is about us. God has blessed human nature with many gifts and potentials by creating us as rational beings. The more we understand our nature, the more of these potentials we unlock for our good and the gain of those around us. The ability to unlock our gifts depends on the knowledge we have of our nature, and the knowledge of human nature is available through God’s illumination, which is in Jesus Christ. Thus, the ignorance of the Son of Man is the ignorance of self and others. The three stewards who were gifted with various numbers of talents represent our different degrees of knowledge of God or Jesus Christ. Corresponding to these degrees of knowledge of the Son of Man are the potentials we are able to invest in serving God and neighbours. The last steward with a wrong or false opinion of the Master was unable to unlock his potential and could not invest. “Sir, I had heard you were a hard man, reaping where you have not sown and gathering where you have not scattered; so I was afraid, and I went off and hid your talent in the ground. Here it is; it was yours, you have it back.”

Saint Paul’s preaching of the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ to the Thessalonians brought light to them in their darkness, sin, and ignorance of God. The light of the Gospel helped them, and should also help us, to know ourselves in Jesus Christ and unlock our God-given potentials for the love and service of God and man. Saint Paul expressed joy in the fact that they were already investing their potential through the practice of their faith in the love and worship of God, demonstrated in their love for one another. “As for loving our brothers, there is no need for anyone to write to you about that, since you have learnt from God yourselves to love one another, and in fact this is what you are doing with all the brothers throughout the whole of Macedonia.” The three stages overlap; purification overlaps with illumination, which equally overlaps with union. The knowledge of self as nothing initiates a focus on Jesus Christ, who is all in all, and inflames our hearts to love God and desire what we are called to be in God. As the Master said to the faithful stewards: “Well done, good and faithful servant; you have shown you can be faithful in small things, I will trust you with greater; come and join in your master’s happiness.” Let us restart our spiritual journey through introspective examination of ourselves and humble confessions of our sins, blindness, and ignorance. It is God’s prerogative to bring us to union with himself if we humbly wait on him.

Let us pray: O God, who cause the minds of the faithful to unite in a single purpose, grant your people to love what you command and to desire what you promise, that, amid the uncertainties of this world, our hearts may be fixed on that place where true gladness is found. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever. 

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