We take for granted God’s all-encompassing knowledge and care for us. These attributes are built into our definition of God. So great is His loving Providence that “Even all the hairs of your head are counted.” Both poetically expressive and literally true, what a powerful and intimate image of His concern for humans created in His image! This furnishes each of us with radical individual dignity, another groundbreaking notion that we presuppose without second thought. He comfortingly counsels us to “not be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.”
Contrast this gentle love of each cherished soul with the assiduous attention of our enemies, ready to capitalize on any tiny error: “All those who were my friends are on the watch for any misstep of mine. ‘Perhaps he will be trapped; then we can prevail, and take our vengeance on him.’” Notice, the impious plot in secrecy: “I hear the whisperings of many: ‘Terror on every side! Denounce! let us denounce him!’” Their methods may seem similar to His, but their intentions are not.
On the contrary, Christ will manifest the inner workings of all hearts, for “Nothing is concealed that will not be revealed, nor secret that will not be known.” Ultimately, He seems to be speaking of His divine identity, His mission as our Savior, which is sometimes dubbed the “Messianic secret,” since He often counsels the apostles to silence about it until the proper moment. The time will come when their task will be to announce everything to the world: “What I say to you in the darkness, speak in the light; what you hear whispered, proclaim on the housetops.”
In the meantime, we feel conflicted in the midst of a cosmic battle between good and evil, assailed by wicked forces all around but defended by God Who descends to us from on high. “But the Lord is with me, like a mighty champion: my persecutors will stumble, they will not triumph.” Through enduring this universal ordeal of human existence, God will “test the just” and “probe the mind and heart.” We should remember this deeper purpose in our trying moments.
RELATED | God still dwells among us
We know the desolation the Psalmist describes: “I have become an outcast to my brothers, a stranger to my mother’s children.” It foreshadows Christ in His Passion in a preeminent way, the sum of our malice-fueled suffering inflicted upon His flesh and spirit. Yet, that is precisely what He chose in taking on the consequences of sin that are properly ours. He alone can defeat “the one who can destroy both soul and body.” St. Paul meditates on the collective malevolence of humanity, personified in Adam: “Through one man sin entered the world, and through sin, death, and thus death came to all men, inasmuch as all sinned.” He calls him “the type of the one who was to come” because an absolute reversal awaited: the sure, dire fate of humanity would be transformed into a promise of eternal glory by the Resurrection. For “how much more did the grace of God and the gracious gift of the one man Jesus Christ overflow for the many.” Indeed, when he speaks of “the trespass of Adam,” he emphasizes that “the gift is not like the transgression.” Love shows itself immeasurably more potent than evil!
GOD | Give thanks for God’s presence
Most mysteriously, this whole unfolding of events in history and His attendant plan to rectify them were fully foreseen ahead of time, for each one of us particularly and all of us jointly. Nonetheless, the drama of our salvation, both in Christ’s redemptive suffering and its being applied over the course of our lives, retains its crisp and astounding freshness. Each choice we make is infused with meaning, upright or otherwise. Our judgement in the end comes as the summation of the graces we have received or rejected, constituting our relationship with the Lord: “Everyone who acknowledges me before others I will acknowledge before my heavenly Father. But whoever denies me before others, I will deny before my heavenly Father.” While that sounds punctiliar, in fact we experience it in the deepest conscious grapplings of our soul here in our fallen world. We desperately need a savior. Thankfully, He tends to us with “great kindness” and “constant help.” Our foes of every variety, within and without, might indeed be shrewd and vigilant, invested and intense, but they prove to be no match for our loving God, Who overwhelmingly supercedes the effects of Adam’s sin and ours by offering us redemption in Christ.