As I again prepared another sermon, I thought to myself: What a loving God we say we believe in. He loves us so very much that He went to great lengths to show us how to live so that we can gain the greatest benefit out of this earthly life. I say this because I am thinking about the WAY He showed us how to live. He actually came Himself in the Person of Jesus and went through the struggles of life and showed us how to handle them. He didn’t complain how His life turned out and didn’t insist that life be exactly the way that He wanted it to be.
Now I know that many will immediately say: Yes, but He was also God and so He could live the way that He lived. This is always the typical response of people who don’t want to change and feel that the challenges they have to face in life are unfair. They stress Jesus’ divinity so that they don’t have to be challenged to live like He lived.
Our Church clearly tells us that Jesus was truly and fully man as well as being truly and fully God and that His divinity did not dictate how He lived His life. If it did, then He could not be a model for us.
Jesus lived His earthly life as a man in order to show us how to live. He found the strength to confront the challenges that life presented by faith, prayer and fasting. His divinity did not lessen the pain He felt from being: abandoned by His friends; frequently misunderstood; unjustly accused; cruelly tortured; and painfully killed! His belief in a loving God, plus the way He lived His life allowed Him to courageously face these challenges with nobility and grace. He showed us how to accomplish this in our own lives.
One of the things that He taught us was that our attitudes about God, life and others makes a difference. When our attitudes are like His, then we have the power to face the challenges of life with nobility and not spend all of our time trying to escape them.
One of the attitudes that He had was that life provides us with what we need in order to grow in our likeness of God. He also thought us, which was made very explicit by St. Paul, that we are the temples of God’s own Spirit, and thus have the power within us to live like Jesus lived. It truly depends on how we think about life.
When we begin to see that this earthly life is give to us in order for us to learn how to be children of our God-Creator, then things change. Ask yourself: What do I see as the meaning and purpose of life?