GOD IS THE GOD OF EVERYONE
Few phrases will have been cited as often as this one that the Gospel of John puts on Jesus’ lips. The authors see in it a summary of what’s essential in the faith, as it was being lived among many Christians at the beginning of the second century: «God so loved the world that he handed over his only Son».
God loves the whole world, not just those Christian communities to whom Jesus’ message has arrived. God loves the whole human race, not just the Church. God isn’t the property of Christians. God mustn’t be hoarded by any religion. God doesn’t fit in any cathedral, mosque or synagogue.
God lives in every human being, accompanying each person in their joys and misfortunes. God doesn’t leave anyone abandoned, since God has paths to encounter each one, without necessarily having to follow those paths that we mark out for God. Jesus saw God each morning «making the sun to shine on the good and the bad».
God doesn’t know how to, or care to, or be able to do anything else but to love, since in the most intimate part of God’s being is love. That’s why the Gospel says that God has sent the Son, not to «condemn the world» but so that «the world would be saved through him». God loves the body as much as the soul, and our sexuality as much as our intelligence. The only thing God desires is to see already, from now to forever, the whole humanity enjoying God’s creation.
This God suffers in the flesh of the hungry and humiliated of the earth; God is in the oppressed defending their dignity, and in those who struggle against oppression, encouraging their efforts. God is always in us to «seek and save» what we ruin and end up losing.
That’s the way God is. Our greatest error would be to forget it. Even more. To enclose ourselves in our prejudices, condemnations and religious mediocrity, impeding people from cultivating this primary and essential faith. What good are the discourses of the theologians, moralists, preachers and catechists, if they don’t awaken the praise of the Creator, if they don’t make friendship and love grow in the world, if they don’t make life more beautiful and luminous, remembering that the world is enclosed on all sides by God’s love?
José Antonio Pagola
Translator: Fr. Jay VonHandorf
