BECAUSE HE LOVED US FIRST

GOD LOVES US

The word does not try to tell us what God is in himself, but what he is to us. It is not intended to manifest its nature, its being and its identity, but rather its behavior with us. It has, therefore, a meaning that we could call ‘functional’. By saying, then, that "God is Love" (1 Jn 4:16), he simply wants to affirm that God loves us. And that love is the only reason and the only reason for all his actions with respect to us. He creates us for love, he keeps us in being for love, he chooses us and calls us in Christ for love, and for love he predestines us, from all eternity, to be his children in his only Son, for a real mystical configuration and identification with the. Of course, in manifesting what God is to us, he also tells us, and at the same time, what God is in himself. His behavior with us reveals, in fact, his true identity.

The ultimate expression of the love that God is and the love that God has for us is called Jesus Christ. He is the supreme manifestation, the epiphany and the definitive demonstration that God is love and loves us. “This manifested the love that God has for us: that God sent his only Son into the world so that we may live through him. This is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent us his Son as a propitiation for our sins ”(1 Jn 4: 9-10). "God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son" (Jn 3:16). "The proof that God loves us is that Christ, while we were still sinners, died for us" (Rom 5, 8).

Jesus shows us God in his most genuine identity, in his deepest truth, in his full authenticity, which is mercy: diffusive goodness, love that is delivered, unwavering fidelity to himself and others. The great message of the word, that is, in the Good News, which finds its maximum realization and historical expression in Jesus Christ.

Now, we might ask ourselves: Why does God love us? And we will have to answer that the reason and the reason for his love for us are not in ourselves, but in him. God loves us because he is Love, and is very worthy of love to love. The love of God does not suppose, but creates in us goodness and beauty. His gaze makes us good and pleasant in his eyes, because he imprints on us the image of the Son of his pleasures. Therefore, truly knowing Christ and believing in him is truly knowing God and believing in his love. And to truly believe in God's love is to believe in Christ. "We, John confesses, have known the love God has for us and have believed in him" (1 Jn 4:16). All Christian spiritual life is reduced, ultimately, to truly believe that God loves us, gratefully acknowledging and accepting with trembling freedom that love.