“Whoever receives you receives me, and whoever receives me receives the one who sent me.”
Do we receive Jesus into our hearts? More precisely, since he is already there as Saint Augustine wrote, are we open to an encounter with him there? Are we open to a deep and profound relationship with Christ that unites us to him? Are we open to the graces of the Holy Spirit that help to bring about that union?
Jesus comes to unite us to the Father through the work of the Holy Spirit. He is the mediator for us with the Father. The nature of God is open to us in a special way because God the Son, fully divine, took on a human nature to become one with us. It is in his Person that humanity most fully touches divinity. It is through the grace of the Holy Spirit that we might touch divinity. That we might partake of divinity.
This is a beautiful and mystical truth. The promise of what awaits us. The end for which we were made. To become one with God. Being brought to the Father by Christ through the work of the Holy Spirit.
It is an end for which there is a beginning. In our Baptism, we are welcomed as child of God. We are claimed by Christ. It is the start of a journey in which we grow closer to Christ in this life. With faith and hope for being fully united with Christ in the next that he might bring us to the table of the eternal banquet with the Holy Trinity.
It is a journey that happens in a relationship. Grounded in prayer. Aided by the sacraments. When we break down or run into the ditch, we are brought back onto the right road by the Sacrament of Reconciliation. Restored by the sacrament of mercy.
Do we want that relationship? Do we want that union with Christ? That, in receiving Christ, we might receive the Father too. Do we want that more than anything else? Because, as we pray in one form of the Act of Contrition, we love God “above all things?”