Thursday of the Twenty-Eighth Week in Ordinary Time, October 15th
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The Sum of All Things
Rarely do we have the opportunity to genuinely take the time to consider what the entire purpose of this life and this world actually is. Why do we bother waking up every day, working from morning to night, balancing relationships and other necessities of life? Do we do all of this in the hope that one day we will not need to do these things? Do we only survive so that we might fill our free time with leisure? And if life is only this, why even bother trying to maintain a life in those eras in history when leisure time was not possible? We were created for a reason, placed in this world and this time for a reason, and deep within our hearts, we are still oriented towards discovering that reason.
To first answer this question, we must first ask why God created the world in the first place. He created the world and its inhabitants for the same reason He created the heavens and those angelic beings who occupy the closest spaces to Him: His love was too perfect and too great to be contained within Himself. Love is by its nature creative and generative; and, although it may find its wholeness and completeness within the Trinity, God willed the creation of other beings so that His love could extend to them and that they could extend His love back to Him. Why does an artist create? For the sake of the art itself, emerging first within his heart and then becoming corporeal and real. We are God’s art and He is our Divine Artist. We did not need to be created. We did not need to be loved. Our mere existence is a gift, far preferable than non-existence, yet so wonderful for what its potential could be. Essentially, God created the world because of love. So if we are to return to the question of what the purpose of our own lives are and our own world is, we ought to have the exact same answer: love. However, our journey as creatures is far more complex than simply coming into existence and occupying a space while infinitely reciprocating the love of our Creator; we brought sin into this world, an action made through free will, which is yet another gift of love from God. Even in those mistakes we may have made that cause our journey in life to become more complicated than it ever had to be, God continues to shower us with gifts of exponentially greater love; because of our sin, He sent His only begotten Son to make His love for us even more intimately known according to our human needs. Because we dared to consider His love not enough for us, He gave all of it to us in the most perfect form through Jesus Christ.
Everything that makes life worth living, every bit of motivation that humans had since our creation to get up and live life on a daily basis, all of the things that we have subsequently created on our own with the gifts God instilled within us, all of it was leading us to the moment when we would come face-to-face with God Incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ. God created the world to give us His Son. God called Abraham so that one day we may know Jesus. God inspired David and Solomon to construct a Temple so that they might eventually come to know His presence in Jesus. God moved the heavens and the earth, the sun and stars, working within each individual human soul before and since so that all of us may come to know Jesus. The whole purpose of life itself is Jesus Christ, the Second Person who makes God physically, intimately, and infinitely knowable for a human being. As Paul tells the Ephesians, he alone is the sum of all things, the destination of all journeys, the reason behind every act of Divine Intervention. Despite all of our failings and all of our ingratitude, we now have the opportunity to arrive at and accept the gift of the purpose and meaning of life in the person of Jesus.
