Through the person was the person of God

Doctors of the Catholic Church 12/5

The below meditation by Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson (+ 1914), a convert to Catholicism, is best known for his novels about the faith. This is a dynamic, universal perspective, from all dimensions, and how the humanity of Jesus united to his divinity, reveals God’s infinite and tender concern for the human race forever. It is a dramatic viewpoint that will help us treasure and appreciate Jesus Christ made possible through the Church, and his Mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary. Benson shares with us a love story that reveals the Creator’s unlimited and beautiful love, mercy and profound pity for us who need redemption. It is given to us not only from the Blessed Trinity, Jesus Christ and Mary, but from all human beings who have received those gifts from God. God helps everyone to help us receive those same gifts through the rich mercy of God’s sanctifying power. God gives to every creature all the blessings that are possible when we pray, love, and do good.

Meditation of the Day

It is believed by Christians that this work, of redemption and revelation was accomplished through human nature assumed into union with the divine – that God did not, so to speak, act merely in virtue of his deity, but through humanity as well – that, first a nation, then a tribe, then a family, and then a person, were successively drawn from the world as a whole – Israel, Judah, the line of David, and finally, Mary – and then, by a unique substance was produced so perfect and so pure as to be worthy, in a sense, the entire summary of the Old Testament – that his substance was then assumed into union with God, and used for his divine purposes – by which he lived and suffered and died as man, was the instrument of both revelation and redemption; that by a human voice he spoke, that human hands were raised to bless, that a human heart loved and agonized, and that these human hands, heart, and voice – broken, pierced, and silenced as they were – were the heart, hands, and voice of Very God.

Consider that claim carefully. Through the person was the person of God, the nature by which he was accessible and energetic was the nature of man. It is by union with that humanity that Christians believe themselves redeemed. This in that last emphatic act of life of him humiliation he took bread, and cried, not here is my essential self, but “This is my Body which is given for you,” since that Body was the instrument of redemption. And, if the Christian claim is to be believed, this act was but a continuation (though in another sense) of that first act known as the Incarnation.

He who leaned over the bread at that “last sad supper with his own” had, in another but similar manner, leaned upon Mary herself with similar words upon his lips.