[Grid::Blog::Gospel] Lovable, rejoicing God

"God is the one loveable who is always rejoicing world without end in infinite happiness." (Gregory, Bishop of Nyssa, died 395)
I find this idea of God very helpful and a distillation of biblical revelation of God. God has no need of the world, or of us, to make him happy or to fulfill some need. God has created us out of sheer grace and benevolence. God has created us to share in infinite happiness; to share in God's own always-rejoicing life.

A bit of a different picture from God as dour and killjoyish which seems to be all too common. God is the foundation of all that we perceive to be real life, joy, truth, goodness and beauty.There's an original blessing at the back of it all. God's first action towards wo/man, according to Genesis 1:28, was to bless and to give a share in the divine creativity and sustaining of the world. Our very being is rooted in God's blessing. Irenaeus of Lyons wrote that "The glory of God is a human being who is fully alive".

Unhappily we know that we do not live out of a sense of this blessing and neither do we live out of God's infinite happiness; we do not have that participation in God's own eternal & rejoicing life. Our being cries out to know deeply the life and the joy of God yet we find ourselves unfulfilled. And, in our unfulfilment, we look to created things to satisfy us. And so we try to feed our hunger and slake our thirst by fastening ourselves to things and people. We look for a sense of fulfilment or a sense of human-ness or a sense of self-worth in pleasure, doing good or relationships. So we find ourselves looking to sex, chemicals, food, self-denial, charity work, romance, power, family and so on to help us gain a feeling of aliveness or simply to keep despair at bay.

Not that those things are bad: -in themselves thay are good. They reflect the God-ness /goodness of the creator. In the Genesis story God says all that is made is 'good'. One of the reasons we find a degree of satisfaction [and even transcendence] in them is that they have God's goodness at the back of them. The part of us that is supposed to respond to God is, for a time, satisfied with things that have something of God about them.
Back to the future.... What needs to happen is that we human beings need to get into a positive relationship with God. We need to be able to sense God in all that is good. We need to know where to go so that what eludes our grasp can be placed into our hands.

Jesus Christ offers to do this for us. In a sense, his offer is to place into our hands what eludes us; right relationship to God, God's love, joy, peace, fulfilment, and a rediscovery of our true humanity. In his life and teaching he offers us a route to learning how to live in the goodness that He brings to us. In his death he takes on and defeats the forces that seek to deprive us of God's goodness (whether forces outside us or within us). In his rising from the grave he releases the power of God into the world so that we may overcome the negative forces and in his teaching he shows us how to live in that power.

The relationship that Jesus has with God is shared with us. He knows & addresses God as Father, and so may we. He lives in right relationship to God and shares that relationship with us. He commands the power of Good and shares it with us so we may learn to do what he did. He has eternal life and 'holds the keys of death' and shares that with us.
So how can we make sure that we receive into our being all that Christ has to share with us? Clearly if Christ has eternal life, forgiveness, relationship with God, love, joy, peace .... then the question is how we can make sure that we are able to make those things part of our life and experience.

Jesus said: "For my Father's will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life ...." When we believe in Christ we become sharers in eternal life. In modern times in the west "believe" has become a pale shadow of what it means in this passage. Often western people use it like it means 'has the opinion that he existed... or that he is God's Son'. But opinion is only part of it. Believe means to trust Christ enough to begin to be in a relationship with him which goes to the heart of who you really are and may call into question who you think you are and where you're going with your life. When that happens Christ will, by his Spirit, become a real presence at the centre of your life. Christ will be at the wellspring of your being and from him will flow the blessings that God wants you to share from God's very own being and goodness.

Baptism is the sign of this connecting with Christ Spirit to spirit, heart to heart being to being. It conveys to us God's promise and represents our own response of trust and commitment

See also Rationale.