God in Himself and God in Us

For the past three Sundays the readings at Mass have told us how the father and the son began Christ’s church by sending the Holy Spirit upon Jesus’ apostles and disciples.  That was Pentecost Sunday.  
Next, Jesus taught his apostles the true nature of God as three persons in one nature on Trinity Sunday.  Finally, we reflected on how Jesus and the father with whom he is one live in us by sharing their Spirit of love with us and by nourishing and strengthening us with the body and blood of the risen Christ shed for us on the cross.
A lot of theological ink has been spilt in many books and in the first four ecumenical councils of our church, defining exactly what we believe concerning these mysteries of our faith.  They are mysteries because we are only human creatures and God is divine, eternal and infinite.  We can understand what is revealed to us in Scripture but we can never grasp adequately the God we cannot see, as Jesus told the apostle Philip.  What we understand about God we see in Christ and learn from his life and teaching.  As long as we live here on earth God will always be a mystery.  
However, a mystery is a truth that we do understand, but not fully.  We pray in the Mass that our deceased loved ones may see the “face” of God.  That will bring them a deeper understanding but they will remain creatures and God will remain eternal and infinite.  So there is still much we have to die for.
We live in a modern world that desires to know all the facts with total clarity.  But if the facts don’t give us the result we want, then we look for “alternative facts.”  This modern behavior makes it difficult to pass on the faith given to us by 2,000 years of faith-filled ancestors.  Bombarded by so many facts that turn out to be only opinions voiced by people on social media, we find it hard to put our faith in anything.
I think it is time to go back to the Bible. So does a man in Rome named Pope Francis, and he is joined by other believable writers in our church who think likewise.  In his Pentecost Sunday homily Pope Francis spoke about the comfort and solace that we should receive from the Holy Spirit of God uniting us in our common faith.  Too often, however, we split ourselves into “conservatives and progressives, traditionalists and innovators, right and left.”  Adhering to ideologies, we forget the Holy Spirit who impels us to harmony even in diversity.  

I think it is time to go back to the Bible. So does a man in Rome named Pope Francis, and he is joined by other believable writers in our church who think likewise. 

“Let us look to the whole,” Pope Francis said. “The enemy wants diversity to become opposition, and so he makes them (different views) become ideologies.  Say no to ideologies, yes to the whole.”  The apostles had “contrary political ideas, different visions of the world,” but when they received the Spirit they “learned to give primacy not to their human viewpoints but to the ‘whole’ that is God’s plan.”  And that same Spirit calls us to “put God before yourself.”  
Commentating on another set of Scriptures we read in Mass for the feast of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary on May 31, Bishop Robert Barron contrasted  Mary’s world view with that of many in our secular culture today.  Having submitted her life to God’s plan for our world or “theo-drama,” Mary found her mission and hastened to help her cousin St. Elizabeth, already in her sixth month of pregnancy with St. John the Baptist.  The contrast Bishop Barron sees is we “are dominated today by the ego-drama” that is pervasive in our culture.  “Freedom of choice reigns supreme:  I become the person that I choose to be,” he said. In contrast, like Mary and St. Elizabeth we should be searching for our role in God’s plan with the help and guidance of God’s Spirit of love.
We completed these great feasts of the Easter Season by going back to where they began — at the Last Supper with Jesus’ institution of the Eucharist.  On June 6 we celebrated the feast of the Body and Blood of Christ or “Corpus Christi.”  Scott Hahn, the most famous convert to Catholicism in our time, wrote a fine Bible reflection on this the Corpus Christi readings. 
 He pointed out that in the Old Testament reading from Exodus Moses sprinkled the Jewish people with the blood of the covenant to make them understand that God wanted them to be “his family, his blood relations.”  Jesus took this covenant symbol and made it become truly his body and blood in the Mass.  In receiving Communion we become one with Christ and one with one another renewing “this new and greater covenant made by Christ with all humankind. What Jesus does today (in this feast) is establish his church as the new Israel and his Eucharist as the new worship of the living God,” Hahn said.  What we do in memory of Christ at each Mass is to renew our covenant with him.  As Hahn writes, “God does not want dead works or animal sacrifices.  He wants our own flesh and blood, our own lives, consecrated to him, offered as a living sacrifice.”  
Sobered by the necessary sacrifices we have made during this time of pandemic, and strengthened by the reception of God’s Spirit and the body and blood of Christ, we go forward in peace and thanksgiving as we begin what we do hope will be a more “Ordinary Time” of our church year.          Father Carville is a retired priest in the Diocese of Baton Rouge and writes on current topics for The Catholic Commentator. He can be reached at [email protected].