The man who defined God!

The Bible, in an effort to help us better understand God, personifies Him. So we see many sides of His persona throughout the Bible - the Creator, the Provider, the Protector, the Liberator, the Healer, the Lover, the Punisher, the Redeemer, and so on. In line with the Bible, the Catholic church also profess the Doctrine of the Holy Trinity, which is defined as three persons - the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit- in one God. But what is God, what is it that makes God who He is?

Today the Church celebrates the Feast of St. John the Apostle, son Zebedee and brother of St. James. Of the twelve, John was the only disciple who didn't forsake Jesus in the hour of His Passion. He stood faithfully at the foot of the cross along with Mother Mary and watched his hero die on a cross. It is believed that John was a teenager at the time of Christ's death. Being the youngest of the disciples, Jesus alway had a special relationship with John. While other disciples watched and followed Jesus as an authoritative figure, John was His "beloved disciple" - someone who "rests his head on the chest of Christ". After the Ascension of Christ, all the disciples commenced upon spreading His word and establishing His kingdom on earth. But John had a bigger task at hand - guarding the Mother of God, a task assigned to him by Jesus while on the cross. The gospel, the epistles, and the Revelation of St. John were among the last books to be written in the New Testament. All the other writers of New Testament wrote with the purpose of recording the life of Jesus and to establish the framework of an early church, they feared the messages of Christ might get lost after their lifetime. By the time John began to write, the Church was already established and flourishing in many parts of the world. For this reason, John didn't have to write just to chronicle the life events of Jesus. So he went onto write about the hidden dimensions of Christ, the one he came into contact with while he was a young man - while he was a fan of Jesus rather than a disciple. In doing so, John defined what God is, something nobody before him dared to do.

"God is Love" (1 John 4:8) is a phrase we see everywhere nowadays, but in the Bible it can only be found once. We could see God as loving all over the Bible, but that is a nature of the person of God. The God that John came to know was not a person who could just love, but it was love itself. Many years of his life with Mother Mary, in communion with the risen Christ, gave John the time he needed to reflect upon the reason behind Jesus' birth, death and resurrection. It wasn't mere compassion of a creator to its fallen creation, rather it was love. So he wrote in Jesus' words: "No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends" (John 15:13). As a young man, John might have stood at the foot of the cross wondering what God was doing by allowing Himself to be mocked, tortured and be killed. As an older man being filled with the Holy Spirit, John found the answer - he realized love was more than a nature of God, it was God itself. Everything God does - creation, provision, protection and salvation; He does it not because He just loves us, rather He does it because God is love and love knows no other way of doing it.

It you are anything like me, then you too might find it hard to love God. He seems too demanding, requires too much sacrifice, and never to be found when I need Him. But I feel this way because I only see the actions of God and its effects on us. I never bothered to look for the essence of God - the reason behind His actions. What we fail to realize is that we can never love God on our own, we can only respond to His love by loving Him Back. Our selfish self often receives the love of God and absorbs all of it, rather than reflecting some of it back. I still have reservations against surrendering completely to God's will because I have difficulty understanding the length, breadth, height and depth of a God who is all-love. The Good News is that through the Incarnation, Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, God has opened a way for us to respond to His love and to understand Him better. St. John made God the center of his life and surrounded it with the presence of Mother Mary, and he understood what God is. This is the essence of Catholic life - to know God by making Him the center of our life, always in the presence of the Virgin Mother.

"In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as expiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also must love one another. No one has ever seen God. Yet, if we love one another, God remains in us, and his love is brought to perfection in us" (1 John 4:10-12).