The Relationship: doing God's will

THE WORD AND THE SAINT

January 28, 2025 - Remembering St. Thomas Aquinas  

Hebrews 10: 1-10; Mark 3:31-35

Relationship is the core of the Christian faith - but it is important to know what is the Covenantal or the Christian understanding of relationship. Let us consider our ordinary experience of relationship - with a person strange or just introduced we would be as formal as possible and as obliging as we could. But when the so-called relationship grows, we would beging to take the person for granted and would not mind doing what we want in relation to him or her. Is this really the Christ-ian or the covenantal significance of relationships? Certainly cannot be.

A Christian sense of relationship is not doing what I want, but wishing to do what the other needs! It cannot be even what the other deserves, but what the other needs, that is what the other intends to receive from us, even when the other has not expressed it to us. That is the crux of the definition of love, that the Saint whom we celebrate today gave: love is wishing the good of the other... doing whatever it takes to make the other feel good, be good, fare good. 

When the same is translated in the sense of faith - where the Other is God - it is being ready to do whatever God wants, wishes, wills. How often we begin to calculate in terms of saying, how close I am to God and God does not fulfil my wishes! It is not about God doing what we want, but we doing what God wills - that is what faith, or a covenantal relationship is all about! It is to say with sincerity of heart: here I am Lord, I come to do your will. That is how we shall become truly children of God, truly brothers and sisters of the Son.