Tuesday of the Second Week of Advent
God and the man in the Bible
What is your opinion? If a man has a hundred sheep and one of them goes astray, will he not leave the ninety-nine in the hills and go in search of the stray? And if he finds it, amen, I say to you, he rejoices more over it than over the ninety-nine that did not stray. In just the same way, it is not the will of your heavenly Father that one of these little ones be lost.Mt 18,12-14
Fear not to cry out and say to the cities of Judah: Here is your God! Here comes with power the Lord God, who rules by his strong arm; Here is his reward with him, his recompense before him. Like a shepherd he feeds his flock; in his arms he gathers the lambs, Carrying them in his bosom, and leading the ewes with care. Is 40,9-11
“Two things, always new and growing, fill the heart of admiration and reverence, as long as more often and for a longer time the mind pauses thereby: the starry sky over me and the moral law inside me“. This statement of the german philosopher Immanuel Kant is perhaps the most elevated level where the searching of the human thinking has been able to reach. To further see, the eyes of the faith are necessary. This is the only mean which allows to catch, in the human history, the heart of God in continuous searching of the man, as the shepherd in the parable of the lost sheep, which summarizes the sense of the entire history of the salvation. Since the times of the original sin God is looking for the man to bring him back in the “earthly paradise“, as the shepherd is looking for the lost sheep. More than four thousand years ago God called a man, Abraham, by whom the mankind started a new history, which became the one of his family and, by the elapsing of the centuries, the one of the nation of Israel, to which construction God called another man, Moses. Two thousand years after, when he thought that the times of the history were mature, God sent directly his Son, incarnated in the person of Jesus of Nazareth who, via the church, extended the salvation to all the nations. During the going of this history, God allowed to be understood more and more, up to when he has revealed completely in Jesus Christ. The perception of this continuous revelation is obtainable by thinking to the way of the evolution of the concept of God into the man, from the time of Abraham to the New Testament. By reading the Holy Scriptures it would seem that God evolved during the history of the salvation but, indeed, it is the knowledge of God by the man which increased. What in the history means to be the path of God is, really, the path of the man reflected in God, as in a mirror. The knowledge of God by the man reaches its summit in Jesus Christ, who revealed three truths which, being alone, we would never have perceived: God is Father, is love, is forgiveness. The reaching of the understanding of these truths means to have been rescued by God and to be brought back to the fold, as the good shepherd of the today parable returns to the fold the lost sheep.