4th Sunday of Advent 21.12.08 Sharing God’s nature
We are often told one way or another that we should behave well, that we should be good and do good.
Fine, but then we can feel discouraged by the difficulty of being good all the time, as it is an all-the-time proposition. The obligation to be good is always present. The commandments apply always and in every place.
So we can sink into a kind of resignation that we are never going to be good enough and settle for a mediocre rate of return on the spiritual life. This is clearly not what God intended for us.
What He intended is very different. When God took on human nature He joined divinity with humanity. He was bridging the gap between the two natures, not so much to lower Himself to our level as to raise us to His own.
He became human so we could become divine. We are not God; we are not gods; but we do share in the nature of God; we participate in His divine nature.
New age religion talks of the god within each of us and encourages us to reach our full potential. The trouble is that kind of ‘god’ is largely egotistical and could lead to monstrous self-absorption.
The ‘God’ within us is the Blessed Trinity. We claim He is within us but He is also in a lot of other places, so we do not think we have a monopoly on Him.
We are ‘godlike’ in so far as we maintain humility and due balance between all our rights and obligations.
False gods often have the faults of the human race attributed to them – such as jealousy, desire for revenge, lust.
The true God has no weakness or blemish. His most clearly defining characteristic is Love. With that go humility, generosity, ability to sacrifice Himself for the good of others.
If we are to be like Him, to share His nature, we must also show forth these qualities.
This gets back to the obligation to be good at all times and places, which we find so difficult. Is there a way forward?
Yes, the key is that when divinity was joined to humanity then it worked the other way as well and humanity was joined to divinity.
This means that we have received extra strength to fulfil the demands of the moral law. We are being told to be good, not as a kind of impossible task way beyond our strength, but as something we can take in our stride given that we can think and act like God Himself.
Did Jesus commit sins all day long? No, never, not even one sin. How did He do it? Because He was divine He did not feel inclined to sin. Sin was alien to Him and He rejected it totally.
The more we share in Jesus’ nature, the more fully He dwells in us, the less inclined we will be to sin, or the more inclined to do good at all times.
It is ‘second nature’ we could say. And to demonstrate how it works, we have the Blessed Virgin Mary. She was fully possessed of God from the moment of her conception and so always did good and was good.
She did not sin because she did not want to, and was immune to the devil’s normal methods.
She helps us as we prepare for Christmas to be more like she was. There is a way forward for us and we should take it.
It is itself a deception of the devil that we cannot keep God’s commandments. He wants to keep us at a very low level of expectation, so we do not aim high.
God, however, wants us to aim very high, not as something beyond us, but to realize that He has lifted us up, and we are capable of much more than we thought.
Still humble, we claim a share in divinity and we live accordingly.
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