Yesterday's gospel reading on Lazarus is one of my favourites. One could spend a lifetime contemplating just two words in the passage - 'Jesus wept'.
this passage shows that the pain for the loss of a loved one is not a disbelief in eternal life but a human condition totally separate from sin. indeed many Calvinists say that if the grace of God were not irresistible then God would not be sovereign however the scriptures show Christ crying when predicting the destruction of Jerusalem that would perish as a punishment for rejecting its only and sufficient Savior.
Christ, fully man and fully God one person yet two natures - Jesus wept - A few snippets from my wee book to reflect on the incarnation of Christ - The life of faith - A wonderful exchange. The gift of the Rosary is that it is a powerful meditative prayer that helps us to come to know God and to love God. A marvellous exchange occurs, since we become like the one we adore and worship. Through prayer we commune with God and in exchange He returns to us a thousand-fold, for God can never be outdone in generosity. Whilst keeping our human nature through grace we already participate in His divine nature. Just as Christ, the second person of the Trinity, participates in our human nature, we participate in His divine nature ‘who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body’. What we become is solely dependent upon the one true God, for the divine life in which we partake is His. What a wonderful exchange that Christ became like us in His humanity in order that we might become like Him in His Glory, ‘and just as we have borne the image of the earthly man, so shall we bear the image of the heavenly man’ (1 Corinthians 15v49). How precious then is each human life, each soul that is called to be with God forever in the beatific vision. Christ humbled himself to take on human flesh and died for the human race, ‘therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father’. Through our humanity and through grace we are divinized and made ‘partakers of the divine nature’ (2 Peter 1v4). Christ is the Hope of Man because Christ the second person of the Blessed Trinity is now eternally grafted to humanity through His incarnation; ‘for man, this consummation will be the final realization of the unity of the human race, which God willed from creation and of which the pilgrim Church has been "in the nature of sacrament." Those who are united with Christ will form the community of the redeemed, ‘the holy city’ of God, ‘the Bride, the wife of the Lamb.’ She will not be wounded any longer by sin, stains, self-love, that destroy or wound the earthly community. The beatific vision, in which God opens himself in an inexhaustible way to the elect, will be the ever-flowing well-spring of happiness, peace and mutual communion (CCC 1045)
