By Father Scott Archer
“I
leave the world and I go to the Father” (John 16:28).
As
a man, in His human nature, Jesus told His disciples that He was going to the
Father. As God, He was and always had been, with the Father and the Holy
Spirit; one God with Three Divine Persons. He spoke here in His human nature
because in His human nature He suffered, died, rose from the dead, and ascended
into heaven.
This
is a part of the mystery of the Incarnation, by which Christ united humanity to
God. However, through the sacraments, mankind receives the divine life of God
in their souls; that is, sanctifying grace. The Catechism of the Council of
Trent states, “He vouchsafed to become man in order that we men might be born
again as children of God.” It was necessary for Him to ascend to the Father
that we may receive the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. We are born again
through the Sacrament of Baptism, and this grace is increased in us through the
other sacraments, or restored, if lost through mortal sin, by the Sacrament of Penance.
Through grace, Christ lives in us and gives us the strength to carry out any
task in our lives, no matter the sacrifice that is demanded. Saint Elizabeth of
the Trinity wrote, “We must be mindful of how God is
in us in the most intimate way and go about everything with him. Then life is
never banal. Even in ordinary tasks, because you do not live for these things,
you will go beyond them.” However, this is especially true in the extraordinary
things God asks of us because we can do all things out of love for Him and with
His grace.
To borrow an example from literature, in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings Frodo, a hobbit, a
race of small creatures related to men, set out to destroy a magic ring before
it was found by the evil Sauron, the Lord of the Rings. The world would say a
hobbit would likely be unsuccessful in such an undertaking; however, love and
humility were his strengths. Tolkien wrote, “Frodo had done what he could and
spent himself completely (as an instrument of Providence) and had produced a
situation in which the object of his quest could be achieved. His humility… and
his sufferings were justly rewarded by the highest honour…Frodo undertook his
quest out of love – to save the world he knew from disaster at his own expense,
if he could; and also in complete humility, acknowledging that he was wholly
inadequate to the task.”
Frodo succeeded beyond expectation because of what he was humbly willing
to undergo to save the world he loved with the help of grace as an instrument
of Divine Providence. Tolkien wrote, “The
Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work…The
religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism.” It does not
matter if we think we are up to the task of carrying out the will of God. We
can accomplish anything Christ, by Whose Incarnation humanity was united with
God, asks us to do. We, like Frodo, may not seem up to the task; however, as
Saint Paul writes, “But the foolish things of the world hath God chosen, that
he may confound the wise: and the weak things of the world hath God chosen,
that he may confound the strong” (1 Corinthians 1:27).
Christ told his disciples that He must leave them so He could send
the Holy Spirit upon them. With the Holy Spirit, the paraclete, they could
accomplish the mission He would entrust to them, a mission for which they
seemed unqualified in a worldly sense. They needed the grace of God, as do we,
in order to endure the sacrifices and privations necessary to spread the Catholic
faith to all the world.
