The Week of Our Salvation
by Robert Feduccia
We are saved. We being saved. One day we will be saved.
During Holy Week we are entering into our high holy days as Catholics because this is when we enter more deeply into the mystery of our own salvation. This is it. The entire cosmic drama is encapsulated in the span of a few hours.
We are saved. We being saved. One day we will be saved.
Any time I speak, any time I write, I feel compelled to retell the simple, yet seemingly little understood view of salvation for Catholics and it all begins with Christ Jesus.
Before time began, the only Begotten Son of God has been in an intimate, all-encompassing relationship of love with God the Father. He breathed his Love, the Holy Spirit, into the Son who returns his to the Father. This dynamic flow of Love between the Father and the Son is the essence of God. It is through this dynamic relationship, this community of love that creation spilled forth. It is this dynamism of love that created you and created me.
Because God is love and because God is Father, he wants to adopt all of us. He wants us to be in communion with his only Son and enjoy a relationship with him just as his only begotten Son enjoys a relationship with him. Because of this desire, the only begotten Son became one of us.
Because love empties itself for the sake of another, love did what love does when it became flesh: it self-emptied. He emptied himself of everything on the cross and in his emptiness, room was made for us to enter into communion with him.
On the day we were baptized, the Love of God chose us. It enveloped us. It brought us into communion with Jesus. Love adopted us. We were saved.
We are saved. We being saved. One day we will be saved.
We still rebel from this relationship. I don’t know why. I wish I did. We still resist this gift of God’s very presence, his grace. We still turn to other things beside the fulfilling love of God. While we are loved by God as he loves his only Son, we do not love the Father as God the Son loves the Father. We still need to be saved. We still need to self-empty. We still need to have Love burn away everything that is not love. This is what Holy Week is. We are being saved to conform our lives to the self-emptying love of Jesus.
Jesus self-emptied to make room for us. Salvation is when we empty ourselves to make room for the piercing love of God. The all-consuming fire of love. The fire that burns every desire that is not love. This is who Jesus was. This is who Jesus is. In communion with his passion, death, and resurrection, this is who we are to become. Then, we will be saved.