I would make a bad homilist, for despite my best intentions I rarely think ahead to the texts and prayers of the upcoming weeks but mostly to those of yesterday—always a little behind in the spiritual life. So, I keep thinking about the post-communion prayer from the Twenty-Eighth Week of Ordinary Time: “We entreat . . . that, as you feed us with the nourishment which comes from the most holy Body and Blood of your Son, so you may make us sharers of his divine nature.”
We would do well to consider this idea about sharing God’s divine nature; it is a remarkable teaching, one core to the Christian claim. It’s so central that the Catechism of the Catholic Church begins with it, the first sentences proclaiming that God “created man to make him share in his own blessed life,” and for that reason sent his Son so that “through him” and “in the Holy Spirit” we might become “his adopted children and thus heirs of his blessed life.” We are invited to become heirs sharing in God’s own life, in God’s own nature.
We might be tempted to understand this only from the vantage point of the future, relating solely to what we hope will be our final destiny but with few implications for the moment. However, we are invited to ponder how God’s eternal life informs and shapes discipleship and our lives even now.
In a dense but excellent essay from the Fall 2024 issue of The New Ressourcement, John R. Betz notes that the divine life cannot be understood without the Trinity, nor the Trinity absent the dynamism of love. The Father eternally begets the Son, giving “the whole of his nature to the Son,” and with that “gift of love” eternally returned to the Father. This giving to the Son is a handing on—in Greek, paradosis—in English, derived from Latin, tradition. The primary, the logically first tradition, is the Father handing on or giving the divine nature to the Son: the begetting of the Son.
In becoming God’s own adopted children, we also receive something handed on to us—namely, as Betz describes, “the Father gives the whole of his nature to the Son and, through the Son, to us, in order that through the Son we might share in all that the Father has given to the Son and, in him, become participants of the divine nature.” Admittedly, that might seem very abstract, an arcane theological point, except it explains that humans conformed to the image of Jesus, those who received the life of Christ, are thereby able to “receive and return the gift of love that the Son has eternally received from and returned to the Father.” This is no small matter, and hardly irrelevant to the life of discipleship.
The life of God, shared with us, is a way of emptying, giving, and dying to self, if we are to be like Christ.
If we are able to give and receive as Christ does, what is being asked of us? According to Betz, the idea of the primary divine tradition means that all the secondary traditions of the Church, while true and necessary and cherished, have their meaning, origin, and criterion in the primary tradition, in the eternal giving of the divine nature from the Father to the Son. The tradition or traditions of the Church, however valuable they are, and they are certainly valuable, do not exist for their own sake, as if self-enclosed and fixed and captured for themselves, but, rather, as the way through which the Church, the Body of Christ, properly understands its “traditions as life-giving,” with the Church itself understood “as a massive rescue operation in need of constant mobilization.” The Church is not established by Christ so that it can simply exist, but to communicate and offer the vital life of God to everyone in desperate need of that life and the hope it provides.
From early in his pontificate, Pope Francis has pleaded with the Church to “save those outside the camp,” and for priests to “be shepherds with ‘the smell of the sheep.’” By now these are famous lines, and have been understood in various ways. Betz helpfully explains that the very point of “the Christian tradition” is to “communicate the primary tradition that flows from the Father to the Son to all who, upon hearing the gospel” are adopted into that life as God’s own children—which is how the Catechism begins.
The divine life always gives, and it also empties, in a way. When the Father gives the divine nature to the Son, the Father does not lose anything; he doesn’t give it away as one might give away an heirloom and thus no longer possess it. Rather, the Father gives what he continues to have and be, so that there is a full sharing; in the Nicene Creed we proclaim Father and Son as consubstantial, after all. At the same time, Scripture tells us that Christ, who remains fully God, “emptied himself . . . being made in the likeness of men” (Phil. 2:7 ESV). The life of God, shared with us, is a way of emptying, giving, and dying to self, if we are to be like Christ. As Betz puts it, “The Church must give up all conceitedness and self-centeredness, indeed it must be prepared to lose itself and die to itself if it is to find its destiny (Matt 10:39; 16:25). But this is to say nothing other than that it must follow the way of its Lord.”
The Trinity is not only hard to understand, and certainly so, but also difficult to desire. It asks quite a lot of us, even while giving everything to us. That is, the inner life of God is one of gift: The Father gives the divine nature to the Son, who gives love to the Father, with the mutual giving and return of these gifts as the spiration of the Holy Spirit. But it doesn’t stop there, for it is fitting for God to create the world, and to create humans in the image and likeness of God, and to offer us to share in that divine life through adoption. But that divine life, once received by us, if we are to actually share in that life as it is, is an invitation to give all the more, to give to others, whomever they are, in whatever state or condition they are, because, quite simply, that is just what the divine life is and does.
To receive the divine life is our joy and salvation, but it is also an invitation to spend ourselves in service for others, not to be self-centered or self-directed but to die to self. Accepting God’s invitation to share in his life asks us to share that life even now by offering ourselves for others, including those who have not yet accepted it. In the image of the parable, even if ninety-nine sheep are safely in the fold, the shepherd leaves to find that last, lost sheep. We, too, are asked to be shepherds, to seek the lost sheep, and to spend ourselves in so doing. Anything else, Betz tells us, is not “radical enough” and ignores that we are asked to “think all the way back to the divine beginning and all the way forward to the divine-human end.”
This is no more than the call to love our neighbor, but, as the Prologue to the Catechism states: “The whole concern of doctrine and its teaching must be directed to the love that never ends . . . all the works of perfect Christian virtue spring from love and have no other objective than to arrive at love.”
Pope Francis has asked us to follow the way of our Lord, to turn our concern and attention away from ourselves as individuals, and away from ourselves as the corporate body of the Church, toward the world, and in so doing to act as a field hospital—to offer that vital life of God, a vital life given to us, to all those who wait and watch for us to offer it to them.
That is Christian love. It is also the inner life of the Blessed Trinity.