Cathal BarryThe Church teaches that every creature has its origins in God, writes Cathal Barry
The Church teaches that the Word of God and his breath are at the origin of the being and life of every creature.
According to the Byzantine liturgy, it belongs to the Holy Spirit to rule, sanctify and animate creation, for he is God, consubstantial with the Father and the Son… power over life pertains to the Spirit, for being God he preserves creation in the Father through the Son.
As St Irenaeus notes: “God fashioned man with his own hands [that is, the Son and the Holy Spirit] and impressed his own form on the flesh he had fashioned, in such a way that even what was visible might bear the divine form.”
Disfigured by sin and death, the Church teaches that man remains in the image of God, in the image of the Son, but is deprived “of the glory of God” (Rom 3:23), of his “likeness”.
Church teaching holds that the promise made to Abraham inaugurates the economy of salvation, at the culmination of which the Son himself will assume that “image” and restore it in the Father’s “likeness” by giving it again its Glory, the Spirit who is “the giver of life”.
As it states in the Scriptures, against all human hope, God promises descendants to Abraham, as the fruit of faith and of the power of the Holy Spirit. In Abraham’s progeny all the nations of the earth will be blessed. This progeny will be Christ himself, in whom the outpouring of the Holy Spirit will “gather into one the children of God who are scattered abroad” (Jn 11:52).
According to Church teaching, Theophanies (manifestations of God) “light up the way of the promise”, from the patriarchs to Moses and from Joshua to the visions that inaugurated the missions of the great prophets. Christian tradition has always recognised that God’s Word allowed himself to be seen and heard in these theophanies, in which the cloud of the Holy Spirit both revealed him and concealed him in its shadow.
This divine pedagogy appears especially in the gift of the Law, the Catechism states. God gave the letter of the Law as a “guardian” to lead his people towards Christ (Gal 3:24). However, the Law’s powerlessness to save man deprived of the divine ‘likeness’, along with the growing awareness of sin that it imparts, enkindles a desire for the Holy Spirit. The lamentations of the Psalms bear witness to this, the Catechism notes.
The Law, the sign of God’s promise and covenant, ought to have governed the hearts and institutions of that people to whom Abraham’s faith gave birth. “If you will obey my voice and keep my covenant… you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Ex 19:5-6 – 1 Pet 2:9).
The Catechism notes that, after David, Israel gave in to the temptation of becoming a kingdom like other nations.
The Kingdom, however, the object of the promise made to David, would be the work of the Holy Spirit; it would belong to the poor according to the Spirit.