11. Qualities of The Divine Sonship

I. The Sonship of the Second Person, although true and real, differs in some important respects from that which is in Nature, and must not be judged of according to this last. In Nature, the father exists before the son. In God that is not the case, but Father and Son are equally eternal. So the Eternal Son speaks under the name of Wisdom in the Old Testament: “I was set up from eternity, and of old before the earth was made. The depths were not as yet, and I was already conceived . . . before the hills I was brought forth” (Prov. viii. 23, 25). In nature, a being may exist and is perfect without offspring. In God the production of the Eternal Son is not a voluntary circumstance, but is the necessary mode of God’s existence; it is the essential activity of the divine intellect. So the Father did not exist before the Son; He did not generate the Son at a definite epoch which is now past. The generation of the Son is outside the limits of time: it has no past, present, future; it is the actual activity of God. So the Father can always say: “Thou art My Son, this day have I begotten Thee” (Ps. ii. 7). The divine generation is co-extensive with the divine life; just as a man is reflected in a mirror the very instant he places himself before it; just as the force of attraction comes into effect between masses of matter simultaneously with their existence, without delay and without deliberation. Adore Our Lord Jesus Christ for this wonderful prerogative of His, when you contemplate Him in the arms of His Blessed Mother or dying on the cross. He existed in time, yet “His going forth is from the beginning, from the days of eternity” (Mich. v. 2).

II. In nature, the offspring is inferior to, and dependent on the parent, and owes a duty of submission. This is not the case in the Blessed Trinity. The Son is, and always has been, equal to the Father in all things. The Father possesses not a particle more of the Divinity and its perfections than the Son; for the Father begets the Son with all the fulness of His infinite activity, and communicates to Him the Divine Essence in its completeness. The Son is as necessary in the Divinity as the Father; the one cannot be Father without the existence of the other to constitute the relationship. There is necessarily the consciousness of infinite activity, and the consciousness of reflex activity; and this action and reaction are equal. St. Paul speaks of this dignity: “Christ Jesus, being in the form of God, thought it no robbery to be equal to God” (Phil. ii. 6); and straightway he speaks of Our Lord as humbled to the death of the cross. Hence learn that real dignity must be associated with humility.

III. The Sonship of the Second Person is the model of our sonship to the Eternal Father. He is Son by communication of the Divine Essence; we are sons by adoption and the communication of the divine life of grace. God “has given us very great and precious promises; that by these you may be made partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet. i. 4). He communicates Himself to us, as the Divine Essence to the Son. We too, being born of God by grace, abide in Him, as the Son proceeds from the Father and abides in Him. As the Divine Son is eternally proceeding from the Father, so we are continually receiving a new access of life from Him. All that the Father has is given to the Son, so we too shall inherit a certain fulness of glory and beatitude in His kingdom. What wonderful privileges belong to you as member of Christ’s body through His Church! But everything that is worth having costs something even when it comes to us from God. Is it not worth while to pay any price in the way of mortifying your passions, suffering persecutions and working hard for such privileges? 

10. The Second Person, as Son

I. “What is His name and what is the name of His Son, if thou knowest?” (Prov. xxx. 4). The Second Person is presented to us not only as the Word of God and the Image of God, but also as the Son of God. This last is the expression most frequently used in Holy Scripture, and it opens to us a new vista of mystery. The production of the Word is the supreme intellectual operation in God; and it is also a generation or begetting, according to the passage: “Thou art My Son, to-day have I begotten Thee” (Ps. ii. 7). The relation, then, of the First Person to the Second is that of Father to Son. All that exists in creation is in God supremely. He is the model of all being and all action. So the internal productive action of God by which the Word proceeds is the first example and the most perfect of all subsequent external production both by God and by creatures. From this “all paternity in heaven and earth is named” (Eph. iii. 15). That transcendent generation, and paternity, and sonship are represented in only an imperfect degree in creation. In imitation of it men are made sons of God, and He is our Father; and this not figuratively, but really, by the transmission of His likeness and supernatural life. So says St. John; we are “born of Him;” we are named and we are the “sons of God” (1 John ii. 29; iii. 1). And St. Paul adopts the expression of the Greek poet; we are the “offspring of God” (Acts xvii. 29). On a lower level still, there is a more imperfect and material representation of the divine fecundity in human generation and offspring. Remember that our sonship is not figurative for being spiritual, but is the more real inasmuch as it approaches nearer to the likeness of the divine generation. God is most really your Father, and has the sentiments of a father most perfectly. The Church too is in a very real sense your mother. Act worthily of this.

II. The procession of the Second Person is aptly termed a begetting, and the Second Person is adequately the Son of the First, because He proceeds from the living substance of the Father, and is of the same nature and identical substance. This is a more perfect generation than what we are acquainted with on earth. With us there is a multiplication of the personality and of the substance in a specific unity of nature. In God it is only the conscious personality which is multiplied; the substance remains one and the same in both Persons as well as the nature: so there is a much more complete and noble unity. You too, being made a son of God, are also “partaker of the divine nature” (2 Pet. i. 4). What a splendid dignity! But it requires that there be conformity of action. Your life must be divine, and not a mere worldly animal one.

III. Another point in paternity is that the offspring is the reproduction of the parent, inheriting, with the blood, character, gifts, defects, facial resemblance, etc. This constituent element of Sonship is also in the Second Person. He not only possesses the Divine Essence by communication, as does also the Holy Ghost, but also has personal resemblance to the Father, reproducing the Divine Essence in His perfect likeness to the Father. This is, as we have seen, His special quality as the “Word of God.” He is the intellectual image and perfect reflection of the Divine Nature. This is peculiar to the Second Person, considered as to the mode of His procession, and not to the Third, whose mode of production is not that of intellectual reflection, but of the propension of the Divine Will, loving the Divine Essence as Supreme Good. The Second Person has also a further personal likeness to the Father in that He shares with Him in the quality of being the principle of a Third Person in the Most Holy Trinity. You must make your sonship perfect by cultivating the likeness to God. You will learn this in Jesus Christ. Reproduce in yourself His sentiments, His actions, His endurance of suffering; so that He may not be ashamed to acknowledge you as His second self.

9. The Second Person, as The Word

I. “Who shall declare His generation?” (Isa. liii. 8). The procession of the Persons in the Trinity is an ineffable mystery, deep in the secret recesses of the Godhead, never to be thoroughly comprehended. Scripture, however, conveys sufficient indications of it to guide our faith. The Second Person is called the Word by St. John. He is a Word that is in God, an internal word spoken to Himself; otherwise, a thought. St. Paul speaks of the Son of God as being “the brightness of His glory, the figure of His substance, the word (or expression) of His power” (Heb. i. 3), and also as the “image of God” (Col. i. 15). The Old Testament speaks of God the Son in a veiled manner as the Wisdom of God. “It is a vapour of the power of God, and a certain pure emanation of the glory of Almighty God. It is the brightness of eternal light, and the unspotted mirror of God’s majesty, and the image of His goodness. And being one it can do all things; and remaining in itself the same it reneweth all things” (Wisd. vii. 25-27). These passages convey to us some notion of the nature and of the proceeding of the Second Person from the First in the Trinity. This divine Word first proceeds internally in the spiritual being of God; secondly it proceeds externally in a visible form to convey to created intelligences the thought of God, and this is Jesus Christ the Word of God made flesh. You must produce the Word of God, the image of God, Jesus Christ, in your soul and actions by supernatural virtue and the reception of the Blessed Sacrament.

II. The names thus applied to the Second Person indicate the mode of His proceeding from the First. This is not corporeal, but intellectual and spiritual. A human mind conceives a thought, an image. This is inseparable from the mind, and yet it is different from the mind. God is a pure intelligence; His essential action is intellectual. His intelligence fixes its regard on the totality of truth and reality, that is, the Divine Essence itself. The perception of this is a full, and therefore infinite image of God’s substance, and is the adequate expression, or word, of His being. This perception is the product of the full exercise of God’s infinite activity; it is equal to that action; that is, it is infinite; that is, it is God. So perfect is this reflection of God in His own intelligence that it is itself the Divinity as communicated: and the conscious action produces a conscious reflex action, each equal to the other, each existing in the same substance, and differing from one another only in that one produces and the other is produced. How mysterious are the wonders of Infinite Being! They are utterly beyond our powers of discovery. Thank God for having granted you a glimpse of them as in a glass and in a dark manner, while waiting for the revelation of the perfect day.

III. The production of the Word of God, the Second Person, is an eternal action; it is not something which has taken place in a remote past; it never began or ended; it is always in progress; it is the actual mode of God’s existence. This action also is necessary and inevitable. It is not the association in equal dignity of a second (and of a third) being with one who is already all-sufficient; but it is that the Infinite Being has an infinite action in Himself, and this action has an infinity and reality of effect which is without example in our limited experience of finite actions. The productive action in the Trinity is within the infinite circle of God’s substance, so that there is no multiplication or increase of the Divinity. The terms of the operations in God are called Persons; the word is our nearest approximation to an ineffable fact, and we must beware of being misled by its current untheological sense of individuals who are substantially distinct from one another. Ask God to enlighten your understanding, to strengthen your faith, and to manifest Himself to you in this mystery.

8. Jesus Christ and The Father

I. Jesus Christ as man shows us an example of profound respect towards God the Father: 1. He addresses the Father in terms of honour, as “Just Father, Holy Father, Lord of heaven and earth. Abba, Father, all things are possible to Thee.” 2. He exhibits a profound deference and humility towards His Father, prostrating Himself when praying, as in the Garden of Gethsemani. “In the days of His flesh, offering up prayers and supplications, He was heard for His reverence” (Heb. v. 7). 3. During His life, in all His actions He sought, not His own glory or pleasure, but His Father’s. He led men to the knowledge and love of Him, He exalted Him in His preaching, He allowed Himself to be angered at the thing only, the profanation of the house of God. He attributes to the Father His own greatness and all His wonderful works: “I live by the Father” (John vi. 58). “The Father who abideth in Me, He doth the works” (John xiv. 10). [Imitate your great model in this regard. Show the most profound veneration in word and deed towards God, His name, His presence, His house, His representative the Church, His commands, His teachings. Avoid the smallest flippancy, carelessness, familiarity towards His infinite and most awful Majesty, before which the angels stand abashed.

II. Our Lord also manifested a vivid filial confidence in the Father. Before He came into the world He said by the mouth of David: “From my mother’s womb Thou art My God; depart not from Me. For tribulation is very near; for there is none to help Me” (Ps. xxi. 11, 12). On every occasion, in every need, He has recourse to His Father, to preserve His flock from evil, to sanctify them, to pardon His enemies, to co-operate in His miracles. He prepares for His daily work by spending the whole night in prayer; He returns thanks for His works when accomplished: “Father, I give Thee thanks that Thou hast heard Me, and I knew that Thou hearest Me always” (John xi. 41, 42). Above all, Our Lord’s confidence appears when He seeks support under His fearful burden on the night before His Passion, and when commending His soul into His Father’s hands on the Cross. Job had already indicated this when he said: “Although He should kill Me, I will trust in Him” (Job xiii. 15). Always remember the omnipotence, the love, the promises of your heavenly Father. [Ground your confidence on vivid faith and holy life, and it will never be disappointed. Few have real confidence; fewer still can maintain it under necessary trial and delay; and because that they waver they do not merit to receive anything from the Lord (James i. 6, 7).

III. Above all others the absorbing sentiment of Our Lord was love for His Father in heaven. This love extended to the works of God made in His image and likeness, that is, to man. Love was the motive which drew Him from heaven in order that He might vindicate the glory of His Father, and save our souls from destruction, by restoring under another form the order of salvation which Satan’s malevolence had overthrown. Divine love, embracing zeal for God’s glory and man’s salvation, was the fire which Our Lord brought on earth and wished to see enkindled in our hearts (Luke xii. 49). It was this same love too that led Our Saviour to His bitter death, as we learn from His words on leaving the supper-room for Gethsemani: “That the world may know that I love the Father, and as the Father hath given Me commandment, so do I. Arise, let us go hence” (John xiv. 31). [Let the love of God predominate in your heart, animate all your life, and drive out all that is opposed to it. This secures the fulfilment of all the law and the pardon of all sins; it is the sum of all religion.]