Response
In some ways, this column of our series on the basic Gospel message is the most challenging. Once we have seen, heard, and understood all that God has done for us, we might be at a loss as to what to do next. The Psalmist King David says beautifully, “What return can I make to the Lord for all his goodness to me?” (Ps. 116:12) He created us out of sheer love and not from any compulsion or necessity, and when we had fallen in sin, God did not abandon us to our fate. Instead, he redeemed us in a most wonderful way through the Death and Resurrection of his Son Jesus. We truly can say with the Exultet, the beautiful proclamation of the Easter Vigil: “O happy fault [Adam’s sin], which gained so great, so glorious a Redeemer!”
How can we ever repay God for his goodness to us? In a very important way, we never can. Our relationship with God is not one of equals. He needs nothing from us, and our prayers and works, joys and sufferings do not balance the scales. As one preface from the Mass states, “For, although you have no need of our praise, yet our thanksgiving is itself your gift, since our praises add nothing to your greatness, but profit us for salvation” (Common Preface IV). Yet to embrace this perspective solely would cause us either to despair or to grow complacent. For if nothing we do can ever repay God, then either 1) we’re doomed to always feel guilty and inadequate (despair) or 2) we stop caring because we’re good enough (complacency).
Instead, God’s greatness and his goodness to us should cause humility to grow within us. Humility is not thinking less of yourself (degradation and belittlement), but thinking of yourself less (appropriate detachment). Humility recognizes that God is the Creator and we are the creature. He is the center of the universe; we are not. He is deserving of praise, glory, adoration, and thanksgiving for having created us and still more wondrously redeemed us. Humility is the necessary foundation for the spiritual life, for every other virtue (good habit) builds upon it like the walls of a house. Our response to God’s goodness humbly recognizes both our limitations and our very real ability to please God by cooperating with his grace. As St. John Paul II marvelously proclaims, “We are not the sum of our weaknesses and failures; we are the sum of the Father's love for us and our real capacity to become the image of his Son.”
In the coming installments, we will learn how to respond to God’s invitation to life by focusing first on the minimum commitments necessary to being in communion with God and then work our way up the various ways to grow in that communion. For as we learned through the Eucharist series, Jesus Christ made his Church a reality of communion that welcomes and challenges all to greater holiness. Learning how to be good sons and daughters of Holy Mother Church is precisely how God wants us to start repaying him for all his goodness to us.