Luke 10:21-24
In today’s gospel, Jesus claims a special relationship
between the Son and the Father: “No one knows who the Son is except the Father,
and who the Father is except the Son” (Luke 10:22). Into this relationship, other
Christians would include the Holy Spirit, thus creating a trinitarian
description of God. Later Christian theology would assert that God is in a
relationship with itself, with the members of the trinity knowing and loving
one another. When I was on the Assisi pilgrimage this October, I learned that
the Franciscan tradition refers to all aspects of the relations between the
members of the trinity as the “good.” Christian theology maintains that
humanity is able to participate in this goodness of God. Through the
incarnation of the Son, humanity is incorporated into the Son, and thus brought
into participation in God’s relationship with itself, that is, the good. While
this may sound like a lot of heady theology, and perhaps therefore irrelevant,
it is actually essential for one of the central values of St. Francis College:
Religious Pluralism. When humans do the good they participate in God, and we at
SFC place a high value on every religious tradition represented at the college,
and also those intellectual traditions not identified as religious, because
each of them call their members to do the good and thus to find grace and
salvation in the knowledge of God.
The below photo of St. Francis is located at a hermitage on
the mountains north of Assisi, Italy. It serves as a visual proclamation of the
Franciscan commitment to the goodness inherit in every religious tradition.
Amen.
Dr. John Edwards
Associate Professor and Chair
Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies
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