Our Lady Saint MaryBarry, J. G. H. (Joseph Gayle Hurd)
Religion
Our Lady Saint Mary
Barry, J. G. H. (Joseph Gayle Hurd)
Mary, Blessed Virgin, Saint -- Meditations
We need to grasp this living and present character of our Lord's work if
we will understand the meaning of His mediation. There is a gulf between
the divine, the purely spiritual, and the human, which needs some bridge
to enable the human to cross it. That bridge was thrown across in the
incarnation when God and man became united in the Person of the second
Person of the ever blessed Trinity. When God the Son became incarnate,
God and man were forever united and the door of heaven was about to
swing open. Henceforth from the demonstrated triumph of our Lord in the
Ascension the Kingdom of Heaven is open to all believers, and there is
an ever-ready way of approach to God the Blessed Trinity by the
Incarnate Person of the Son Who is the One Mediator between God and man.
Whoever approaches God, whoever would reach to the Divine, must approach
by that path, the path of Jesus Who is the Way, the Truth and the Life.
He is the Way to God: and that Way is one that we follow by
participation in His nature, by being taken up into Him. We do not reach
God by thinking about our Lord, or by believing about our Lord: thinking
and believing are the preliminaries of action. There are wonderful
riches in the King's Treasury, but you do not get them because you think
of them or because you believe that they are there. You get them when
you go after them. And you get the ends of the Christian Religion not
because you believe them to exist, but because you go after them in the
way in which Christ directed. Inasmuch as He is the Way to the Father,
we reach the Father by being made one with the Son, by being made a
member of Him, by being taken into Him in the life of union. "No man
cometh unto the Father but by me," He says. And the process of coming is
by believing all that He said and acting upon His Word to the uttermost.
Those who by partaking of the Sacraments are in Christ have passed by
His mediation to the knowledge of the Father.
For a road can be travelled in either direction. Christ is the road by
which we come to the Father, to participation in the life of the Blessed
Trinity; but also we can think of Him as the road by which the Father
comes to us. We can think of ourselves as drawing near to God in His
Beloved Son: I love to think the other way of the road, of God drawing
near to me, of God pouring of His riches into human life and elevating
that life to His very Self. I like to think of the Christian life as a
life to which God continually communicates Himself, till we are filled
"with all the fulness of God." Can we imagine any more wonderful
expression of the life of holiness to which we are called than that? We
"grow up into Him in all things." That is the true account of the
Christian life, not some thin and dull routine of moral duty, but the
spiritual adventure of the road that travels out into the infinite
pursuit of spiritual accomplishment till it is lost in the very heart
of God.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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