A LOVE ROOTED IN FORGIVENESS

FEAST OF SAINT MARY MAGDALEN

2 Cor 5:14-17; Ps 63:2-6,8-9; Jn 20:1-2,11-18

Love Nurtured by Forgiveness

God is infinitely just and infinitely loving. In our human thinking and understanding, it would appear strange that justice, mercy, and love come together in God’s dealings with us. As mentioned, God creatively works out our salvation in such a way that his infinite justice, mercy, love, and other divine perfections are not shortchanged in any way. This becomes clearer when we recall that God’s judgment and punishment are never geared toward our perdition or destruction, but rather toward our reconciliation with Him. It is not the will of God that we or any of his creatures perish, but that we come to share in his life and communion. Thus, God exercises his divine justice vis-à-vis his other perfections in such a way as to maximise the possibility of our repentance and return to his everlasting communion. So, the first goal of the divine justice is to reveal to us the evil of our sins and our nothingness before His divine Majesty. The way God attempted this in the Old Testament was through terrifying external manifestations, which sometimes claimed many lives and properties. These rarely achieve the desired goal of repentance. But the way was proper and adequate for the old dispensation, which is characterised by externality of religion.

God, our Creator and Redeemer, who understands that we are moved more by love than by terror and sheer power, decreed a new age or dispensation of the spirit. The new age of the spirit is characterised by spiritual religion, whereby God, who is the Father of spirits, will speak to every spirit of man directly and lovingly. In the new speech of God to man, the monstrous nature of sin is laid bare, and God’s love for us is also made manifest to all. This is what God achieved in sending His Only Begotten Son in human nature for our salvation. In the life, death, and resurrection of the Son of Man, God reveals to us how sinful our disobedience to his word is, our blindness to the love of God revealed everywhere in the universe, and our nothingness before God our Creator. The creativity in the revelation of God’s judgment, justice, mercy, and love is most visible in the life, death, and resurrection of the Son of God for our redemption. Putting love first, God enables us to see the sinfulness of our sins, the rigour of divine justice, his infinite mercy and compassion towards us, his wayward children. These form the melting point of our rocky hearts, bringing us to repentance and reconciliation with God, as He desired from the beginning. Saint Paul captures this when he says: “The love of Christ overwhelms us when we reflect that if one man has died for all, then all men should be dead; and the reason he died for all was so that living men should live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them.”

God created us, and he knows that we are pure desire at our core. Hence, he planned to draw us back from our lost states with chains of love back to himself. God is essentially love, as Saint John informs us in his first letter 4:8. That we are made for God implies that we are made for love. As sinners conceived and nurtured in sin, the experience of forgiveness touches our core and changes us from deep within. Mary Magdalene’s encounter with the Lord offers a good illustration of this. Possessed of seven demons due to her sinful lifestyle, she encountered the Lord, who freed her from their stranglehold by forgiving her sins. Subsequently, she entrusted herself to the Lord in total love and commitment. Her role in the resurrection narrative demonstrates this fact. “Meanwhile Mary stayed outside near the tomb, weeping. Then, still weeping, she stooped to look inside, and saw two angels in white sitting where the body of Jesus had been, one at the head, the other at the feet. They said, ‘Woman, why are you weeping?’ ‘They have taken my Lord away’ she replied, ‘and I don’t know where they have put him.’” She was unrelenting in her desire to see the Lord, dead or alive. Our Lord rewarded her persistent and loving desire by showing himself to her before any other. “Jesus said, ‘Mary!’ She knew him then and said to him in Hebrew, ‘Rabbuni!’—which means Master.” God intends to renew each of us in our original desire, which is love for God. May the prayers of Saint Mary Magdalene assist us in loving God tenderly.

Let us pray: O God, whose Only Begotten Son entrusted Mary Magdalene before all others with announcing the great joy of the Resurrection, grant, we pray, that through her intercession and example we may proclaim the living Christ and come to see him reigning in your glory. Who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever.