Saturday, January 28, 2023

 

Saturday, January 28, 2023


Psalm 71

Genesis 18:1-22

Luke 1:67-80


Observance: Thomas Aquinas, theologian (d. 1274)


“How great is the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah and how very grave their sin! I must go down and see whether they have done altogether according to the outcry that has come to me; and if not, I will know.”


It is truly an amazing thing that our God is a God Who Comes Close. He is not a galactic watchmaker, winding up the universe and letting the mainspring unwind while He watches from His palace. Nor is He like us, in that He cannot see any further than we can, only able to provide moral support from the spiritual grandstand.


God is the creator, the “Prime Mover”, as Aquinas put it, borrowing language from Aristotle. Since there is motion, Aquinas argued (again, adapting Aristotelian metaphysics), there must be something to cause that motion, and we cannot logically accept an infinite series of moving movers. Something must have set everything off, and Aquinas said that this was not something, but Someone: God.


Tremendous power and wisdom must be inherent to that Prime Mover, since there is not enough room in the human brain for even a percentage of a percentage of all the information in the universe. And humans are also limited in our powers of creation: we can adapt that which already exists, but never have we truly been able to create something from nothing.


Something missing from Aristotle, and which therefore hindered the efforts of Thomas Aquinas, was the personhood of the Prime Mover. The prime mover is not an impersonal force of nature: logically, because something impersonal cannot create the personal, that is, people; and, because the prime mover has revealed Himself throughout human history in space and time displaying His facility of speech, His breadth of emotion, His opinions, and His ability to act on His opinions.


Most beautifully was the revelation of the Prime Mover in the person of Jesus Christ. He was there, beginning the movement of the universe on the first day. He called out to Adam and Eve in the garden, during the cool of the afternoon. He spoke to Abraham, making promises. And so on, until His cousin, John the Baptist, prepared the way for Him and His incarnate ministry: “Repent and be saved, for the kingdom of heaven has come near to you”.


He came to us, lived with us, heard our cries with physical ears, saw our pains with physical eyes, tended to us with physical hands, and eventually died on the cross of a broken physical heart. Despite the great distance between the Prime Mover and us, those final works of His creation, He comes close to us without losing any of His glory and power. Truly and in every sense of the word, our God is awesome.

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