Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

Scripture contains an overabundance of sweet consolations, amazing depths of warmth and wonder. Few, though, can compare to the sweetness of the words we read today in our Office Gospel today: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”

What an ocean of deep, dear and delightsome consolation! What an expression of the riches of God’s love for us and for the world! That for no other reason than for the sake of love, for the sovereign purposes of love’s outworking of love’s own bliss, God would enter into the world, the Creator becoming a part of creation, the eternal submitting itself to time, the immortal invisible taking on a mortal palpable body, the infinite discovering its transcendent fullness expressed within the confines of a full, finite, particular human life…all in order to share with us the inexpressible depths of the divine life, to show us that God delights in us and wants us to dwell in that delight, to find our home in the endless ecstasy of God’s own life, to save us from sin and death by an incomparable self-givingness of love.

I think there are some hidden depths to this clear articulation of the Good News that can be plumbed a little further by putting John 3:16-17 alongside Matthew 6:21: “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” Inexplicably and utterly mysteriously, we find ourselves God’s treasure! Because God sent the very Heart of God, the Word by which God speaks and understands Godself and all creation, the pattern of all things visible and invisible—God sent God’s own Heart to be with us and dwell with us. God loved us, cherished us, desired us so deeply that God was willing to give up the throne and starry crown of heaven for a cross and a knot of thorns, was willing to risk entrusting the divine fullness to us, was willing to be emptied so we could be full, not for any reward, not for any hope of gain nor on account of any thought that this divine gift could ever be reciprocated, but all for the sake of love.

Which, I think, may lead us to wonder, and appropriately so during this season of Lent: for what would we be willing to do the same? What do we love so much that we give ourselves completely to it? Is it our job, our family, our passions, our addictions, our pleasures, our disappointments, our accomplishments, our darknesses? There are multitudes of goods and ills to which we may give ourselves…and how is it we’re so willing to give ourselves up to and for them, but the Greatest Good of all, the one that endlessly gives itself to us, is often the one Good to which we hesitate to abandon ourselves? I imagine it's to do with a sense of the scarcity of our love…if we give it all to God, we won’t have any to give to others—so we live divided lives because we have divided loves. But the reality is: God is not in competition with any of the various goods of this world. In fact, the world is God’s treasure, the source and font of all the worlds varied goods, and God loves the world so much that God gives Godself to it without reservation and without end. And were we to manage to give ourselves completely to God in love, were we to so love God that we give God all of who we are, fully and without reservation, we would discover that Gods love for us and for the world has become ours, that the world has been restored to us in the fullness of a right relationship, in the holiness and completeness of a love crucified and resurrected.

Beloved, I hope that it can be said of us that we love God so much that we have given ourselves completely to God not for the sake of gain, but for the sake of love...that in losing ourselves to the love of God, we have found ourselves in the love of God as beloved by God, discovering ourselves able to love all that God has made and all in which God delights with an infinite love that is God’s very own!

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+