And one more thing is revealed to us in the Gospel, another good, incomprehensibly good, incomprehensibly great news: that God loved us so much that He became one of us in order to bear together with us the entire human created fate and all the terrible consequences of human sin, which occurred through falling away from Him, our Creator. This is the God Whom we can not only love, not only tremble before Him, but the God Whom we can revere and, in human terms, "respect," because He took upon Himself all responsibility for His primary act of creation of man and for the terrible, truly terrible, but also wondrous gift of freedom.

     Without freedom, love would be impossible, because love is the perfection of freedom, without love we would be only objects, but we would not be able to respond to God's love with the love that we can give Him or that we can withhold.

     How wondrous it is to think that such is God; that He takes everything upon Himself, that came from His decision to create us, that He takes upon Himself all the consequences of our sin and conquers everything in Himself, and gives us the freedom to become children of God, to partake of His Divine nature, to become His children. As Irenaeus of Lyons says, "In the Only-begotten Son of God, by the power of the Holy Spirit, to become the only-begotten son of the Heavenly Father."

      This is what the gospel is, this is what is new, never heard, never dreamed of, and which is not a worldview, not a dream, but a wondrous, salvific, transforming reality. When we read the Gospel, let us remember the words of Christ the Savior: "I make all things new," and indeed, the whole world has become new, because there is nothing created that cannot recognize itself in Him as transfigured and deified. Amen.

November 18, 1990

About the Gospel

      In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

     To many, the Gospel is almost blasphemously presented as a book of God's terrible judgment, of the Lord's demands; but how far this image is from the living feeling that the Gospel evokes in those who read it for the first time!