Poured out into our Hearts

We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of Life who proceeds from the Father and the Son.  Last week, we celebrated Pentecost when Father sent the Spirit to the world through the Son.  These saving actions reveal to us the inner life of the Trinity.  What happens in time reveals to us what has been happening for all eternity.

The Father stands at the origin of the Trinity.  Just as the Son comes from the Father in Heaven to us on Earth, the Son proceeds eternally from the Father.  The Son is fully God.  In the Gospel today we heard it said, “Everything that the Father has is mine.”  In generating His Son, the Father has given everything of Himself so that the Son is the very image of the Father, the refulgence of His glory (Heb 1:3).  He is a Father that holds nothing from His children, but gives them the very best.  This is why He sent His Son into the world, so that those who believe in Him might also receive power to become children of God (John 1:12).
The second reading discusses this at length,  “We have been justified by faith.”  To be justified means to become a child of God.  It means to be an imitator of Abraham who believed in God and so was justified.  The child of God has faith and so knows the Father.  It is Jesus Christ, the image of the Father, who shows us who the Father is.  The Father is a God who pours out His own love into our hearts.  That is to say He gives us His own virtuous love.  To be like Christ, to be a child of God, means to love God with the same love that the Father has loved us.  We are transformed by God’s love for us.  We have victory over sin and death because the Father so loved the world that He sent his only begotten Son.

This divine love of God “has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”  The Holy Spirit teaches us how to love by guiding us to all truth.  All Truth is God Himself who is the pattern of the whole world.  Everything is True in as much as it corresponds to God’s Wisdom.  God established the heavens. He marked out the vault over the face of the deep. He made firm the skies above, and fixed fast the foundations of the earth.  He gives the whole world its being and its purpose in order to give His own glory and Truth to the world.  God grounds the truth of the world.  The Holy Spirit takes the fullness of Divine Truth which was given to the Son by the Father and declares it to us.  What at one time was known only to the Son of God, has been revealed to the whole world.  When we know this truth about who God is and about what God has done for us, how can we respond in any way but love?  How could we respond to God’s offer in any way but joy?

From all this we see that the whole Trinity has taken an intimate active role in our salvation.  The Father sends the Son and the Spirit.  He is the eternal origin of all that they are.  The Son reveals the Truth about God to us and the Spirit leads us into the Truth so that our human love might be transformed into a divine love.