The psalmist believed that the dead inhabit the land of oblivion (88:13); they are in a state of spiritual amnesia. God no longer works wonders for the dead (88:11). They cannot remember God because their relationship with him has been severed. Sadness reigns in the world of the dead (Dt 34:8).  The joyless state of the dead derives from their inability to remember God. They do not share in the joy of Israel’s worship and praise of God (Ps 88:11; Is 38;18). The psalmist assumes that only where death reigns is there no praise of or joy in God; where there is life, there is praise and joy.
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Jesus could not work miracles for people without faith, because such persons are without the Holy Spirit which empowers people to “see” the Father in Jesus. People do not come to Christ unless the Father draws them through the gift of his Spirit of love for the Son he proclaims as his “beloved” at his baptism.

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How can God be closer to you than yourself?  The answer lies in appreciatingthe nature of what it means to be psychologically present to someone, including onself. An appreciation of personal identity and psychological presence can illumine the sense in which God is supremely present in our lives, indeed closer to us than we are. Our concern is the nature of this divine human proximity and what it is for someone to be indwelt by God. We assume the classic tenets about the God of Christianity who is the all- knowing, all-powerful, loving Creator of the cosmos. We also assume that persons have beliefs, emotions, desires, and sensations. They have a conscious and unconscious life. They act or are capable of acting in a world where they have a past and a future. Although these are not all necessary conditions for personhood, we assume that they are sufficient conditions for being a person. We now consider five respects in which persons may said not to be present to themselves.
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A theophany occurs at the baptism of Jesus by John. What is revealed in the audible and visible coincidence of the voice of God declaring the Father’s pleasure in his Son, the dove descending, and the incarnate Word is nothing less than the Trinity itself, in the fullness of its shared love, its imminent dynamism of distinction and unity. The constellation of figures in this tableau constitutes an icon, a crystallization of the mystery of faith in one perfect image. This is not a simple allegory, but a real showing of God, manifesting simultaneously the full drama of salvation and the full order of intradivine relations, revealing them to be not only compatible motions but identical. The descent into the waters, whereby Christ submits to a sanctification of which he is in no need, is an image both of the way of the Son into creation, his gracious descent into flesh, time, and space, ultimately into the darkness of death and hell, but also of the way the Son goes forth eternally from the Father and restoring all to him in “selfless” adoration. Christ’s emergence from the waters is at once his resurrection , his ascent and return of all creation to the Father as a pure offering, and also his eternal “response” to the Father as the Father’s everlasting Word. The descent of the dove is at once the blessing of the Spirit, sent by the Father upon the Son and imparted by the Son to his church as the teacher of all truth, who bears tidings of Christ, but also the Father’s eternal gift to the Son of the Spirit, who forever bears the joy of the Son to the Father. Read on »

The story of Jesus is what the eternal trinitarian life of God looks like when it is projected upon the screen of history, and this means not only on the screen of human history but of sinful human history. The obedience of Jesus to the Father, his obedience to his mission, is just what the eternal procession of the Son from the Father appears as in history. His obedience consists in nothing else but his being in history. Jesus did nothing but be the Son as man. His crucifixion was the dramatic manifestation of the sort of world we have made, the showing up of the world, the unmasking of what we traditionally call original sin. There is no need for theories about the Father putting his Son to death once we know that he was human in our world. Jesus died in obedience to his Father’s will simply in the sense that he was human in his obedience to his Father’s will. Read on »

Each of the four gospels proclaims in its particular way that the Holy Spirit of Love is the reciprocity of the Father and the Son in communion.

Mark - Gospel of the loving Father and of the beloved Son proclaims both

The Spirit of the Fathe’s love for the Son, and

The Spirit of the Son’s love for the Father.

Matthew – Gospel of the Son’s Body the Church proclaims both

The Spirit of the Father’s love for the Body of Christ and Temple of his

Spirit, and

The Spirit of the Body of Christ’s love for his Father. Read on »

In Christian speech a witness is not a reporter. Witnesses speak about what they know. The witnesses of Christ’s Resurrection not only told people what they had seen, but also spoke of what had happened to them because of what they had seen. They spoke about Christ in them, not only about the person they had known during his sojourn among them and who had appeared to them after his Resurrection. Read on »

When speaking of how God is known, Christian thinkers favored the metaphor of seeing, not hearing. Beauty is the corollary of seeing. In the Scriptures many of the key terms used of God’s self-disclosure, words such as glory, splendor, light, image, and face, have to do with the delight of the eye. When we speak of the pleasure the eye takes in what it sees the term that comes to mind is beauty. The psalmist wrote, “One thing have I asked of the Lord…that I will behold the beauty of the Lord” (Ps. 27:4). As early as the second century the apologist Athenagoras of Athens included the term beauty in a list of word depicting God. The God we set before you, he says, is “encompassed by light, beauty, spirit, and indescribably power.” In his commentary on the Song of Songs Origen wrote that the “soul is moved by heavenly love and longing when it beholds the beauty and comeliness of the Word of God.” God’s revelation can be seen from the perspective of its ineffable beauty as well as of its truth and goodness

Through the gift of the Triune God’s Son and Spirit we learn to think, love and rejoice as God. The Spirit of God is the cognitive and affective life of God that is the origin, ground and destiny of all creation.

The life story of Jesus expresses what God thinks, loves and enjoys. He has given us the gift of his Holy Spirit to remind us of what he thinks, loves and enjoys that we may participate in thought, love and joy of the Triune God. Read on »

There are three key moments of divine and human hospitality in  our salvation history The Abraham pattern of divine and human hospitality recurs through salvation history. From the time of the promise made to Abraham, to its fulfilment in Christ, and at the Last Judgment, the Host of the world is welcomed and shown hospitality in three key moments by persons unaware that they were hosting him. Abraham hosting his three visitors, the Samaritan woman hosting Jesus at the well, and the blessed of the Father hosting the hungry and thirsty Son of Man, had no idea whom they were hosting. 1. Abraham at the time of the promise (Genesis) 2. The Samaritan woman at the fulfillment of the promise in Christ (John 4) 3. The blessed of the Father at the end of time (Matthew 25) In these three moments of salvation history, Scripture tells us that we encounter the Other in our hospitality to others. We encounter the Host of the world in our hospitality to strangers. Hosting those whom the Host of the world is hosting, we encounter the Host himself, the Origin, Ground and Destiny of all humankind!  The hospitality operative in these three key events, like grace of God, is purely gratutious, devoid of any calculating thought of recompense or quid pro quo. Had the hopitable persons known the importance of their Guest, the sheer gratuity of their hospitality might be in question.