Pope at Audience: We are God's beloved children
By Deborah Castellano Lubov
“Thanks to Jesus, Christians know God the Father and entrust themselves to Him with confidence.”
Pope Leo XIV expressed this during his Wednesday General Audience, as he continued his catechesis series on the Second Vatican Council. He concentrated again this week on the Dogmatic Constitution Dei Verbum on Divine Revelation, which the Pope last week called “one of the most beautiful and important” documents of the Council.
READ POPE LEO'S FULL ADDRESS HERE
What happens in Jesus Christ
The Pope recalled that we have seen that God reveals Himself in a dialogue of covenant, in which He addresses us as friends. It is therefore a relational knowledge, which not only communicates ideas but also shares a history and calls for communion in reciprocity.
The fulfillment of this revelation, he explained, takes place in a historical and personal encounter in which God Himself gives Himself to us, making Himself present, and in which we discover that we are known in our deepest truth.
“It is what happens in Jesus Christ,” said Pope Leo, as he recalled that Dei Verbum states, “The deepest truth about God and the salvation of man shines out for our sake in Christ, who is both the mediator and the fullness of all revelation.”
Christ reveals the Father to us
The Pope stressed that Jesus reveals the Father to us by involving us in His own relationship with Him. In the Son sent by God the Father, “humanity might in the Holy Spirit have access to the Father and come to share in the divine nature.”
Therefore, he explained, “we reach full knowledge of God by entering into the Son’s relationship with His Father, by virtue of the action of the Spirit.”
“Thanks to Jesus,” Pope Leo said, “we know God as we are known by Him.” Indeed, in Christ, he recalled, “God has communicated Himself to us, and, at the same time, He has manifested to us our true identity as His children, created in the image of the Word.”
‘Your Father, who sees in secret will reward you’
The Pope recalled St. Matthew's Gospel, in which Jesus reassures, "Your Father, who sees in secret, will reward you," and adds that "your Father knows that you need all these things."
Jesus Christ, the Pope said, is the place where we recognize the truth of God the Father, while at the same time we discover ourselves known by Him as sons in the Son, called to the same destiny of full life.
He then quoted Saint Paul’s Letter to the Galatians: “When the fullness of time had come, God sent His Son … so that we might receive adoption as children. And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’”
The Lord’s own humanity
Finally, the Holy Father emphasized that Jesus Christ reveals the Father through His own humanity.
“Precisely because He is the Word incarnate who dwells among men, Jesus reveals God to us with His own true and integral humanity,” he noted, insisting that “in order to know God in Christ, we must welcome His integral humanity.”
“God’s truth is not fully revealed where it takes something away from the human, just as the integrity of Jesus’ humanity does not diminish the fullness of the divine gift. It is the integral humanity of Jesus that tells us the truth of the Father,” the Pope said.
Not only the channel of transmission of intellectual truths
“It is not only the Death and Resurrection of Jesus that save us and call us together,” Pope Leo stressed, “but His very person: the Lord who becomes incarnate, is born, heals, teaches, suffers, dies, rises again and remains among us.”
“If Jesus has a real body, the communication of the truth of God is realized in that body, with its own way of perceiving and feeling reality, with its own way of inhabiting and passing through the world.” In this way, “Jesus Himself invites us to share His perception of reality,” Pope Leo said.
Nothing can separate us from God’s love
The Holy Father concluded by telling the faithful that “by following the path of Jesus to the very end, we reach the certainty that nothing can separate us from God’s love.”
Quoting once more Saint Paul, Pope Leo said: “If God is for us, who is against us?”
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