Jesus Is (Luke 20)

If you want to know Jesus, you need to know that He Is.

Read chapter 20 of the gospel according to Saint Luke here.

What is the nature of God? Do we have eternal souls? Will our bodies rise from the dead? The Jews of Jesus' time wrestled with these questions. God had revealed Himself partially to them through Moses and the Prophets. Jesus reveals God fully. And often the way He revealed the Father was by explaining the meaning of the Old Testament.

The Jewish religious leaders of Jesus' time were divided into two camps: the Pharisees and the Sadducees. One of the main points of contention between them was belief in the resurrection of the body, which the Pharisees affirmed and the Sadducees denied. When the Sadducees questioned Jesus about the resurrection, He pointed back to the story in Exodus about Moses and the burning bush:

“But,” said Moses to God, “if I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what do I tell them?” God replied to Moses: I am who I am. Then he added: This is what you will tell the Israelites: I AM has sent me to you.
God spoke further to Moses: This is what you will say to the Israelites: The Lord, the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.
This is my name forever;
this is my title for all generations. (Exodus 3:13-15)

God's name - I AM - reveals a great deal about His nature. Saint Thomas Aquinas drew many of his insights about God from His name. Saint Thomas realized that God is not merely a supreme being, which implies that He is like other beings, but superior. He is not merely eternal, which implies that He exists in and could possibly be bounded by time. Saint Thomas defined God as "Being-Itself." Saint Thomas realized that God creates and transcends time and space, yet because He transcends time and space He can be immanent with everything He creates. "Through Him and with Him and in Him" all created things have their being.

As Being-Itself, God has no need of anything, so God's act of creation can only be an act of pure love. Nor should we understand creation merely as something that happened long ago and is done. God is creating every day and sustaining His creation every day. Every breath we take is a gift from an infinitely loving God.

And all of this applies to Jesus, the Son of God. Saint John, in the majestic prologue to his gospel, describes Jesus as the Word of God, one with the Father and creating all things with the Father:

In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God.
He was in the beginning with God.
All things came to be through him,
and without him nothing came to be.
What came to be through him was life,
and this life was the light of the human race;
the light shines in the darkness,
and the darkness has not overcome it. (John 1:1-4)

God who created us out of pure love calls us to share in the everlasting love that exists between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. We begin to share in this love (in fits and starts, but led by the guiding hand of Jesus) here on earth, so that we can dwell within the divine communion of love forever in Heaven. Here on earth we cannot understand fully what Heaven is like. The mystics who have an experience of Heaven struggle to put the experience in words; human language cannot express the joy and peace they felt. Jesus gives us a tantalizing clue about Heaven in Luke 20, when He tells us that "those who attain to the coming age... can no longer die, for they are like angels; and they are the children of God because they are the ones who will rise."

The Sadducees erred by thinking of Heaven (and God, by way of extension) in human terms. People today, believers and non-believers alike, frequently err by thinking about God in human terms. To give one example, how often have you heard someone say, "I don't think God is concerned about that." As if God were a busy CEO or politician who can't be bothered with our petty concerns. The love of God is infinite! The mercy of Jesus is endless. He is interested in and attending to the very smallest details of our lives. A sparrow doesn't fall to the ground without His knowing, and He has numbered all of the hairs on our heads. God is your loving Father. Jesus is your almighty Savior. The Holy Spirit is your consoler and advocate. Don't let anyone tell you God is less than that.

And you are God's beloved child. Don't let anyone tell you that you are less than that.

"They [the souls in Heaven] are equal to the angels, and the children of God, because made new by the glory of the resurrection, with no fear of death, with no spot of corruption, with no quality of an early condition, they rejoice in the perpetual beholding of God's presence." -Saint Bede the Venerable

Pray the Divine Mercy Chaplet every day for the salvation of souls.