God So Loved the World

By Fr. Christopher Foeckler, MJ • Phoenix, AZ

As the Jubilee Year of Hope comes to a close, let’s focus on the main reason that “Hope doesn’t disappoint” so as to carry the fruit of the Jubilee with us beyond this year. This reason is also intimately connected with the Christmas Season and is all about a properly understood notion of God’s exceptional love for us. 

The main theme of the Jubilee is based on St. Paul’s letter to the Romans in which he explains how we have hope that does not disappoint (Rm 5:5-9) 

“…and hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. For Christ, while we were still helpless, yet died at the appointed time for the ungodly. Indeed, only with difficulty does one die for a just person, though perhaps for a good person one might even find courage to die. But God proves His love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us.” 

Hope doesn’t disappoint “because the love of God has been poured into our hearts”! This verse should help us understand many things about our relationship with the Lord, or better to say, about God’s relationship with us. 

The Lord Jesus told Nicodemus that the reason for the Son’s coming into the world is “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him might not perish but might have eternal life.” (Jn 3:16) This most popular verse of the New Testament captures the joyous spirit of Christmas as well as the first aspect of God’s special love for us, that God initiated the relationship with us – He loved us first! St. John writes this explicitly in his first letter, that “Love of God is not that we have loved God, but that He has loved us first”. (Cf. 1 Jn 4:10)

Not only did God love us first, but even more remarkably, as we saw above, St. Paul explains: “For Christ, while we were still helpless, yet died at the appointed time for the ungodly. Indeed, only with difficulty does one die for a just person, though perhaps for a good person one might even find courage to die. But God proves His love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us.” So God’s special love for us is a sacrificial love by which the Father sacrifices His Beloved Son for us sinners! This is amazing and repeated by St. Paul in several of his letters! (Cf. Rm 5:8; 8:32; Eph 1:7 & 2:4-5; 2 Cor 5:21; Col 1:13-14)

There is still one more aspect of God’s exceptional love for us, that it is for always and never stops, endures forever and never grows weary. Psalm 136 is very clear and insistent on this, citing 26 times at every instance of the history of Israel’s redemption from Egypt “because His love endures forever”! You can check out Psalm 118 as well for the same. Moreover, the Church offers a beautifully poetic antiphon every Monday night for Compline: “O Lord our God, unwearied is Your love
for us.”