Rescue

Like foolish children, Adam and Eve ran away from their home with God in paradise and took us with them into godlessness. They abdicated paradise for godlessness. They opted out as Lucifer and the gaggle of angels that follow him opted out. When God gave them the gift of paradise, God wanted them to keep it. However, they fumbled the ball - they muffed it. 

Godlessness sucks. In godlessness, we are fish out of water. We were in trouble. We needed help.

So the Son of God dove into godlessness after us to rescue us.

He did not say "goodbye and good riddance" as the door between paradise and godlessness slammed shut behind us. 

He did not delegate the job of rescue to his subordinates. He did not send his flunkies. The Son of God did the job himself. Our welfare is so important to God that he came to rescue us himself. (Thanks be to God.)

None shall perish because our rescuer is the God who loves us. God does not fail. God does not come up short. God does not miss the mark. The only people not rescued are the fools who refuse to be rescued - those who tell God to bugger off.

God designed his rescue plan to reduce the likelihood of post delivery paradise opt out to near zero.

Our lifeguard stays on the dock and watches as we are drowning in the stormy sea of godlessness but only for a moment. The delay gives us a taste of the sourness of godlessness. He gives us the experience that Adam and Eve so desired. By letting us drown for a little bit in godlessness we learn for ourselves that godlessness sucks. The illusion conjured up by the serpent that sugarcoats the sourness of godlessness is shattered. 

The delay between the delivery of the gift of life and the delivery of the gift of paradise is the source of all the complaints about God's rescue plan. It is the cause of harsh criticism. Indeed, the delay is harsh medicine. However, the effectiveness of the medicine justifies its harshness in the eyes of God. When God gives us with the gift of paradise as he gave it to our parents, Adam and Eve, we, unlike them, shall not opt out. Oh! no. We shall keep it. The prodigal son is never going back to the pig sty and neither are we. By experiencing the pig sty for ourselves, we know better than to opt out.

Godlessness is autodidactic.  It itself is the sledgehammer of truth that shatters the illusion as the blow of a hammer shatters glass. When the illusion is shattered, rational people flee the sourness of godlessness. It is contrary to their self-interest to do otherwise. 

When the sourness of godlessness becomes unbearable, he rescues us. He pulls us out of this world and puts us into his world. As Our Lady said at Quito, we make that great leap from time to eternity.

Therefore, let us stop referring to our rescue from this world as death. Instead, say God rescued him or her from this world and, when the time is ripe, we, too , shall be rescued. In the interim, hope in our Savior and cling to the life preserver that he tossed to us - cling to love of him and our neighbor. Cling as Jesus clung while we wait for rescue.

The Relationship of Suffering to the Message

God had something to tell us. God had something to say. God had an important message for us. The message was so important that God personally involved themselves in 1) the message 2) its delivery and 3) the guarantee of its genuineness.

What is the message? 

The message is that God loves us dearly. 

How was the message delivered to us? The message was so important that God did not delegate its delivery to a subordinate. God did not put the message into the hands of a flunky. God delivered the message themselves. The most Holy Trinity sent the Son of God to deliver their message to us. He was the messenger and the message. Furthermore, He was the guarantor of its genuineness. 

He was their love note to us.

How did God guarantee the genuineness of the message?  

Suffering.

God allowed us to baptize the love note in the boiling cauldron of suffering.

God allowed us to impale the love note on the sharp hook of salvation while He was human, alive, tender, vulnerable and our guest upon the earth..

Like silver, God allowed us to test the love note in the furnace.

God allowed us to torture and kill the Son of God. 

If the love note were counterfeit, His love for us would have faded as we tortured Him and died when we killed Him. But it did not. His love for us survived.

The survival of His love for us is the guarantee that God gave us that the love note was genuine. The survival of His love for us despite the suffering and death we inflicted upon Him verified the veracity of the love note. Suffering authenticated it. Suffering proved that God's love for us is indestructible. 

Can you even imagine a better, more reliable guarantee? 

God wrote the guarantee of the genuineness of their message of love in the ink of suffering. Why? Because the guarantee was addressed to creatures who suffer. Creatures who suffer understand what it means to survive suffering.

On the canvas of Calvary in the pigments of pain and suffering, God painted a self portrait of the nature of God  Why? Before Calvary and since Calvary, many representation have been created of the nature of God. All of them without exception and regardless of their author are inferior to the self-portrait that God painted with their own hand at Calvary. All of them must yield to the self-portrait.

In the Ten Commandments, God admonished us not to make any representations of them. Why? God knew that any representations of them would be inferior to the representation God would give us at Calvary.

Suffering was not the message.

Suffering was not the messenger.Suffering did not deliver the message.

Suffering guaranteed the message.

Suffering is the seal that God placed on the message of love to guarantee that the message is genuine.

“The only universal language to survive the confounding of languages that took place at Babel was the language of suffering. All creatures who suffer understand it. It is our native tongue. God became a creature who suffers so He could communicate with us in our native tongue”