LIBERTY UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF DIVINITY
Assignment Title: JESUS CHRIST THE FULFILMENT OF THE FATHER'S PLAN OF LOVE
Course: CHMN 699 - Internship
Student: Kristine Sage
Date: January 29, 2022
Professor: Dr. Joel Breidenbaugh
JESUS CHRIST THE FULFILMENT OF THE FATHER'S PLAN OF LOVE
a. In Jesus Christ the decisive event of the history of God with mankind is fulfilled
28. The benevolence and mercy that inspire God's actions and provide the key for understanding
them become so very much closer to man that they take on the traits of the man Jesus, the Word made
flesh. In the Gospel of Saint Luke, Jesus describes his messianic ministry with the words of Isaiah which
recall the prophetic significance of the jubilee: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has
anointed me to preach the good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the
acceptable year of the Lord” (Lk 4:18-19; cf. Is 61:1-2). Jesus therefore places himself on the frontline of
fulfilment, not only because he fulfils what was promised and what was awaited by Israel, but also in the
deeper sense that in him the decisive event of the history of God with mankind is fulfilled. He proclaims:
“He who has seen me has seen the Father” (Jn 14:9). Jesus, in other words, is the tangible and definitive
manifestation of how God acts towards men and women.
29. The love that inspires Jesus' ministry among men is the love that he has experienced in his
intimate union with the Father. The New Testament allows us to enter deeply into the experience, that
Jesus himself lives and communicates, the love of God his Father — “Abba” — and, therefore, it permits
us to enter into the very heart of divine life. Jesus announces the liberating mercy of God to those whom
he meets on his way, beginning with the poor, the marginalized, the sinners. He invites all to follow him
because he is the first to obey God's plan of love, and he does so in a most singular way, as God's envoy
in the world.
Jesus' self-awareness of being the Son is an expression of this primordial experience. The Son has
been given everything, and freely so, by the Father: “All that the Father has is mine” (Jn 16:15). His in
turn is the mission of making all men sharers in this gift and in this filial relationship: “No longer do I call
you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for
all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you” (Jn 15:15).
For Jesus, recognizing the Father's love means modelling his actions on God's gratuitousness and
mercy; it is these that generate new life. It means becoming — by his very existence — the example and
pattern of this for his disciples. Jesus' followers are called to live like him and, after his Passover of death
and resurrection, to live also in him and by him, thanks to the superabundant gift of the Holy Spirit, the
Consoler, who internalizes Christ's own style of life in human hearts.
b. The revelation of Trinitarian love
30. With the unceasing amazement of those who have experienced the inexpressible love of God (cf.
Rom 8:26), the New Testament grasps, in the light of the full revelation of Trinitarian love offered by the
Passover of Jesus Christ, the ultimate meaning of the Incarnation of the Son and his mission among men
and women. Saint Paul writes: “If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not spare his own Son but
gave him up for us all, will he not also give us all things with him?” (Rom 8:31-32). Similar language is
used also by Saint John: “In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to
be the expiation for our sins” (1 Jn 4:10).
31. The Face of God, progressively revealed in the history of salvation, shines in its fullness in the
Face of Jesus Christ crucified and risen from the dead. God is Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; truly
distinct and truly one, because God is an infinite communion of love. God's gratuitous love for humanity
is revealed, before anything else, as love springing from the Father, from whom everything draws its
source; as the free communication that the Son makes of this love, giving himself anew to the Father
and giving himself to mankind; as the ever new fruitfulness of divine love that the Holy Spirit pours forth
into the hearts of men (cf. Rom 5:5).
By his words and deeds, and fully and definitively by his death and resurrection[30], Jesus reveals to
humanity that God is Father and that we are all called by grace to become his children in the Spirit (cf.
Rom 8:15; Gal 4:6), and therefore brothers and sisters among ourselves. It is for this reason that the
Church firmly believes that “the key, the centre and the purpose of the whole of man's history is to be
found in her Lord and Master”[31].
32. Meditating on the gratuitousness and superabundance of the Father's divine gift of the Son,
which Jesus taught and bore witness to by giving his life for us, the Apostle John grasps its profound
meaning and its most logical consequence. “Beloved, if God so loves us, we also ought to love one
another. No man has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in
us” (1 Jn 4:11-12). The reciprocity of love is required by the commandment that Jesus describes as
“new” and as “his”: “that you love one another; even as I have loved you, that you also love one
another” (Jn 13:34). The commandment of mutual love shows how to live in Christ the Trinitarian life
within the Church, the Body of Christ, and how to transform history until it reaches its fulfilment in the
heavenly Jerusalem.
33. The commandment of mutual love, which represents the law of life for God's people[32], must
inspire, purify and elevate all human relationships in society and in politics. “To be human means to be
called to interpersonal communion”[33], because the image and the likeness of the Trinitarian God are
the basis of the whole of “human ‘ethos', which reaches its apex in the commandment of love”[34]. The
modern cultural, social, economic and political phenomenon of interdependence, which intensifies and
makes particularly evident the bonds that unite the human family, accentuates once more, in the light of
Revelation, “a new model of the unity of the human race, which must ultimately inspire our solidarity.
This supreme model of unity, which is a reflection of the intimate life of God, one God in three Persons,
is what we Christians mean by the word 'communion'”[35].
III. THE HUMAN PERSON IN GOD'S PLAN OF LOVE
a. Trinitarian love, the origin and goal of the human person
34. The revelation in Christ of the mystery of God as Trinitarian love is at the same time the
revelation of the vocation of the human person to love. This revelation sheds light on every aspect of the
personal dignity and freedom of men and women, and on the depths of their social nature. “Being a
person in the image and likeness of God ... involves existing in a relationship, in relation to the other
‘I'”[36], because God himself, one and triune, is the communion of the Father, of the Son and of the
Holy Spirit.
In the communion of love that is God, and in which the Three Divine Persons mutually love one
another and are the One God, the human person is called to discover the origin and goal of his existence
and of history. The Council Fathers, in the Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes, teach that “the Lord
Jesus Christ, when praying to the Father ‘that they may all be one ... as we are one' (Jn 17:21-22), has
opened up new horizons closed to human reason by implying that there is a certain parallel between the
union existing among the divine Persons and the union of the children of God in truth and love. It
follows, then, that if man is the only creature on earth that God has willed for its own sake, man can
fully discover his true self only in a sincere giving of himself (cf. Lk 17:33)”[37].
35. Christian revelation shines a new light on the identity, the vocation and the ultimate destiny of
the human person and the human race. Every person is created by God, loved and saved in Jesus Christ,
and fulfils himself by creating a network of multiple relationships of love, justice and solidarity with
other persons while he goes about his various activities in the world. Human activity, when it aims at
promoting the integral dignity and vocation of the person, the quality of living conditions and the
meeting in solidarity of peoples and nations, is in accordance with the plan of God, who does not fail to
show his love and providence to his children.
36. The pages of the first book of Sacred Scripture, which describe the creation of man and woman
in the image and likeness of God (cf. Gen 1:26-27), contain a fundamental teaching with regard to the
identity and the vocation of the human person. They tell us that the creation of man and woman is a
free and gratuitous act of God; that man and woman, because they are free and intelligent, represent
the “thou” created by God and that only in relationship with him can they discover and fulfil the
authentic and complete meaning of their personal and social lives; that in their complementarities and
reciprocity they are the image of Trinitarian Love in the created universe; that to them, as the
culmination of creation, the Creator has entrusted the task of ordering created nature according to his
design (cf. Gen 1:28).
37. The Book of Genesis provides us with certain foundations of Christian anthropology: the
inalienable dignity of the human person, the roots and guarantee of which are found in God's design of
creation; the constitutive social nature of human beings, the prototype of which is found in the original
relationship between man and woman, the union of whom “constitutes the first form of communion
between persons”[38]; the meaning of human activity in the world, which is linked to the discovery and
respect of the laws of nature that God has inscribed in the created universe, so that humanity may live
in it and care for it in accordance with God's will. This vision of the human person, of society and of
history is rooted in God and is ever more clearly seen when his plan of salvation becomes a reality.
b. Christian salvation: for all people and the whole person
38. The salvation offered in its fullness to men in Jesus Christ by God the Father's initiative, and
brought about and transmitted by the work of the Holy Spirit, is salvation for all people and of the whole
person: it is universal and integral salvation. It concerns the human person in all his dimensions: personal
and social, spiritual and corporeal, historical and transcendent. It begins to be made a reality already in
history, because what is created is good and willed by God, and because the Son of God became one of
us[39]. Its completion, however, is in the future, when we shall be called, together with all creation (cf.
Rom 8), to share in Christ's resurrection and in the eternal communion of life with the Father in the joy
of the Holy Spirit. This outlook shows quite clearly the error and deception of purely immanentistic
visions of the meaning of history and in humanity's claims to self-salvation.
39. The salvation offered by God to his children requires their free response and acceptance. It is in
this that faith consists, and it is through this that “man freely commits his entire self to God”[40],
responding to God's prior and superabundant love (cf. 1 Jn 4:10) with concrete love for his brothers and
sisters, and with steadfast hope because “he who promised is faithful” (Heb 10:23). In fact, the divine
plan of salvation does not consign human creatures to a state of mere passivity or of lesser status in
relation to their Creator, because their relationship to God, whom Jesus Christ reveals to us and in
whom he freely makes us sharers by the working of the Holy Spirit, is that of a child to its parent: the
very relationship that Jesus lives with the Father (cf. Jn 15-17; Gal 4:6-7).
40. The universality and integrality of the salvation wrought by Christ makes indissoluble the link
between the relationship that the person is called to have with God and the responsibility he has towards
his neighbour in the concrete circumstances of history. This is sensed, though not always without some
confusion or misunderstanding, in humanity's universal quest for truth and meaning, and it becomes the
cornerstone of God's covenant with Israel, as attested by the tablets of the Law and the preaching of the
Prophets.
This link finds a clear and precise expression in the teaching of Jesus Christ and is definitively
confirmed by the supreme witness of the giving of his life, in obedience to the Father's will and out of
love for his brothers and sisters. To the scribe who asks him “Which commandment is the first of all?”
(Mk 12:28), Jesus answers: “The first is: ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; and you shall
love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all
your strength'. The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself'. There is no other
commandment greater than these” (Mk 12:29-31).
Inextricably linked in the human heart are the relationship with God — recognized as Creator and
Father, the source and fulfilment of life and of salvation — and openness in concrete love towards man,
who must be treated as another self, even if he is an enemy (cf. Mt 5:43-44). In man's inner dimension
are rooted, in the final analysis, the commitment to justice and solidarity, to the building up of a social,
economic and political life that corresponds to God's plan.
c. The disciple of Christ as a new creation
41. Personal and social life, as well as human action in the world, is always threatened by sin. Jesus
Christ, however, “by suffering for us ... not only gave us an example so that we might follow in His
footsteps, but He also opened up a way. If we follow this path, life and death are made holy and acquire
a new meaning”[41]. Christ's disciple adheres, in faith and through the sacraments, to Jesus' Paschal
Mystery, so that his old self, with its evil inclinations, is crucified with Christ. As a new creation he is then
enabled by grace to “walk in newness of life” (Rom 6:4). This “holds true not for Christians alone but also
for all people of good will in whose hearts grace is active invisibly. For since Christ died for all, and since
all men are in fact called to one and the same destiny, which is divine, we must hold that the Holy Spirit
offers to all the possibility of being made partners, in a way known to God, in the Paschal Mystery”[42].
42. The inner transformation of the human person, in his being progressively conformed to Christ, is
the necessary prerequisite for a real transformation of his relationships with others. “It is necessary,
then, to appeal to the spiritual and moral capacities of the human person and to the permanent need
for his inner conversion, so as to obtain social changes that will really serve him. The acknowledged
priority of the conversion of heart in no way eliminates but on the contrary imposes the obligation of
bringing the appropriate remedies to institutions and living conditions when they are an inducement to
sin, so that they conform to the norms of justice and advance the good rather than hinder it”[43].
43. It is not possible to love one's neighbour as oneself and to persevere in this conduct without the
firm and constant determination to work for the good of all people and of each person, because we are
all really responsible for everyone[44]. According to the Council's teaching, “they also have a claim on
our respect and charity that think and act differently from us in social, political and religious matters. In
fact the more deeply we come to understand their ways of thinking through kindness and love, the
more easily will we be able to enter into dialogue with them”[45]. This path requires grace, which God
offers to man in order to help him to overcome failings, to snatch him from the spiral of lies and
violence, to sustain him and prompt him to restore with an ever new and ready spirit the network of
authentic and honest relationships with his fellow men[46].
44. Even the relationship with the created universe and human activity aimed at tending it and
transforming it, activity which is daily endangered by man's pride and his inordinate self-love, must be
purified and perfected by the cross and resurrection of Christ. “Redeemed by Christ and made a new
creature by the Holy Spirit, man can, indeed he must, love the things of God's creation: it is from God
that he has received them, and it is as flowing from God's hand that he looks upon them and reveres
them. Man thanks his divine benefactor for all these things, he uses them and enjoys them in a spirit of
poverty and freedom. Thus he is brought to a true possession of the world, as having nothing yet
possessing everything: ‘All [things] are yours; and you are Christ's; and Christ is God's' (1 Cor 3:22-
23)”[47].
d. The transcendence of salvation and the autonomy of earthly realities
45. Jesus Christ is the Son of God made man in whom and thanks to whom the world and man attain
their authentic and full truth. The mystery of God's being infinitely close to man — brought about in the
Incarnation of Jesus Christ, who gave himself on the cross, abandoning himself to death — shows that
the more that human realities are seen in the light of God's plan and lived in communion with God, the
more they are empowered and liberated in their distinctive identity and in the freedom that is proper to
them. Sharing in Christ's life of sonship, made possible by the Incarnation and the Paschal gift of the
Spirit, far from being a mortification, has the effect of unleashing the authentic and independent traits
and identity that characterize human beings in all their various expressions.
This perspective leads to a correct approach to earthly realities and their autonomy, which is
strongly emphasized by the teaching of the Second Vatican Council: “If by the autonomy of earthly
affairs we mean that created things and societies themselves enjoy their own laws and values which
must be gradually deciphered, put to use and regulated by men, then it is entirely right to demand that
autonomy. This ... harmonizes also with the will of the Creator. For by the very circumstance of their
having been created, all things are endowed with their own stability, truth, goodness, proper laws and
order. Man must respect these as he isolates them by the appropriate methods of the individual
sciences or arts”[48].
46. There is no state of conflict between God and man, but a relationship of love in which the world
and the fruits of human activity in the world are objects of mutual gift between the Father and his
children, and among the children themselves, in Christ Jesus; in Christ and thanks to him the world and
man attain their authentic and inherent meaning. In a universal vision of God's love that embraces
everything that exists, God himself is revealed to us in Christ as Father and giver of life, and man as the
one who, in Christ, receives everything from God as gift, humbly and freely, and who truly possesses
everything as his own when he knows and experiences everything as belonging to God, originating in
God and moving towards God. In this regard, the Second Vatican Council teaches: “If the expression ‘the
autonomy of earthly affairs' is taken to mean that created things do not depend on God, and that man
can use them without any reference to their Creator, anyone who acknowledges God will see how false
such a meaning is. For without the Creator, the creature would disappear”[49].
47. The human person, in himself and in his vocation, transcends the limits of the created universe,
of society and of history: his ultimate end is God himself[50], who has revealed himself to men in order to
invite them and receive them into communion with himself[51]. “Man cannot give himself to a purely
human plan for reality, to an abstract ideal or to a false utopia. As a person, he can give himself to
another person or to other persons, and ultimately to God, who is the author of his being and who alone
can fully accept his gift”[52]. For this reason, “a man is alienated if he refuses to transcend himself and
to live the experience of self-giving and of the formation of an authentic human community oriented
towards his final destiny, which is God. A society is alienated if its forms of social organization,
production and consumption make it more difficult to offer this gift of self and to establish this solidarity
between people”[53].
48. The human person cannot and must not be manipulated by social, economic or political
structures, because every person has the freedom to direct himself towards his ultimate end. On the
other hand, every cultural, social, economic and political accomplishment, in which the social nature of
the person and his activity of transforming the universe are brought about in history, must always be
considered also in the context of its relative and provisional reality, because “the form of this world is
passing away” (1 Cor 7:31). We can speak here of an eschatological relativity, in the sense that man and
the world are moving towards their end, which is the fulfilment of their destiny in God; we can also
speak of a theological relativity, insofar as the gift of God, by which the definitive destiny of humanity
and of creation will be attained, is infinitely greater than human possibilities and expectations. Any
totalitarian vision of society and the State, and any purely intra-worldly ideology of progress are
contrary to the integral truth of the human person and to God's plan in history.
