Fourth Sunday after Easter AD 2024

Our Lord Jesus Christ says in today's Gospel: “I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now. Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth.”

There is still a great deal that we do not know and cannot understand. How do we put the nature of God into human words? It is impossible: our finite mind is incapable of understanding the infinite God. However, we do know something. We know that God – the Supreme Being – must be perfect. And if someone is perfect, then he must also be unchanging. This is exactly what Saint James says in today's Epistle: in God there is “no variableness, neither shadow of turning”.

This means that whatever God does, He does without receiving anything in return. We cannot add anything to God, and when we are called to give ourselves to Him, it is not for His sake, but for our own sake. By surrendering to God, by loving Him with all our being, we become what God has created us to be in His infinite wisdom and love: true human beings in the image and likeness of God.

But the fact that God is unchanging does not mean that He is like a lifeless rock with no feelings. God is our Father, and being a Father inevitably involves affection for His children and self-sacrificing love. When we read the Lord’s Prayer in its original Aramaic language, Jesus teaches us not to address God as our Father, but as our Daddy. This means that God wants a truly intimate relationship with us, like the relationship between children and parents in a loving human family.

Of course, this also includes the fact that we, as God’s children, must strive to live according to His will. Our status as children of God is not based on our merits, but on God’s love and the sacrifice of His only-begotten Son on the cross. God has given everything into the hands of His Son and wants us to inherit the joy of eternal life in Him as His beloved children.