♪ Bell tolling ♪ 
Praise be Jesus and Mary.
These reflections that we've been giving on the role of love or charity in Franciscan spirituality.
We're going to continue that today.
Today we're going to speak about the masterpiece of God's love.
And anyone who knows St. Francis and knows the Franciscans and their thought understands that in Franciscan terms, God's greatest work of love is the incarnation of the word.
It's the incarnation of Christ.
We've said in previous reflection that love is diffusive, that it tends to give of itself.
It pours itself out.
Even the recent revised translation of the formula of absolution for confession points to this.
It says, God, the father of mercies, through the death and resurrection of his son has reconciled the world to himself and poured out the Holy Spirit for the forgiveness of sin.
So love pours itself out.
It gives of itself for the one that it loves.
Just observe any good mom.
You'll see her doing that pretty much on a day to day basis, pouring herself out for her family and her children.
The love of God pouring itself out onto creation looks to find a creature which can welcome it totally and can return that love to God in a way that's worthy of him.
The only one who can do that in all creation is Jesus Christ, the God-man.
For this reason, as we'll see, Jesus Christ is the first willed by the Trinity among all created beings.
When God created, what did he first have in mind?
He first had in mind Jesus Christ.
See if we can follow Blessed John Duns Scotus' thinking on this.
Scotus says that God first loves himself and secondly, he loves himself in others and this is a pure love.
And thirdly, he wants to be loved by the one who can love him in the highest degree.
So Scotus is speaking of the love of a being which is extrinsic to, which is outside of God, so a created being.
Fourthly, God foresees the hypostatic union of this human nature which will love him immensely even if man had never sinned.
So hypostatic union, what's that?
It means the union of Christ's human nature to the person or hypostasis of the God, the word.
The Greek word for person is hypostasis.
So that's why they call it the hypostatic union.
So this is why Scotus and the Franciscan school see Jesus Christ as the sumum opus, as they say in Latin, as the masterpiece of God.
He's the first intention of the Trinity, the initial and principal object of all divine decrees.
It's from the infinite love of the adorable heart of Jesus that God, the God will be loved in the highest degree in all creation.
It's where he'll find the highest degree of love in the heart of Jesus.
This is why Franciscans say that there's no way the incarnation comes about simply as a remedy or a response to sin.
It's not a plan B. The incarnation is the continuation and the most perfect reproduction ad extra, outside of God, of the mystery of love by which the Father generates the Son in the Trinity.
So it's in the sacred humanity of Jesus that God, who is uncreated love, gives himself to a creature in the most complete and intimate way.
Jesus' humanity subsists, meaning it has its existence in the person of the word.
And so Jesus, even as man, is still Son of God by nature.
And it's the sacred humanity of Jesus gives itself so completely to God that it doesn't have its own personality, in the sense that it's the eye of Jesus.
What is the eye of Jesus?
It's the eternal word, which made the human nature his own.
The union of the word with the humanity of Christ is the highest, most perfect, most complete union that exists outside of the blessed Trinity.
So in Jesus, the mysterious marriage between divinity and humanity, between God and man, is celebrated in the fullness of a reciprocal love which finds no equal anywhere.
And it's in the heart of Jesus where the love of God and the universal love of neighbor perfectly cross paths.
Those two loves find their perfect home in the heart of Jesus.
This is one of the reasons why we say in the litany of the sacred heart that the heart of Jesus is a burning furnace of charity.
His heart of charity is where God's love and man's love perfectly meet, where they're perfectly united.
St. Francis himself intuited this profound love of God revealed in Christ.
Indifference towards Jesus, ingratitude, betrayal, they all cut Francis right to the heart.
He would weep and lament.
He would say, love is not loved, love is not loved.
He petitioned for the Father, for the grace to love him as he wanted to be loved, and Francis would pray, give us this day our daily bread, meaning the beloved Son and our Lord Jesus Christ in the Holy Eucharist.
It was in the Eucharist that St. Francis could repay the one who is love.
Francis would also pray to the Father, to our Lord as well, in his prayer known as the Absorbiat.
The Absorbiat is, may the power of your love, O Lord, fiery and sweet as honey, so absorb our hearts as to withdraw them from all that is under heaven.
Grant that we may be ready to die for love of your love as you died for love of our love.
St. Francis lived and prayed this way because he had his eye, the eye of his contemplation fixed on that adorable heart of Jesus.
And what caused the greatest wonder and love in the Franciscan doctors wasn't so much the death of Christ as much as it was the love in that death that he demonstrated for us, a love which drove him to be crucified for our sake.
Blessed John Dunskote said that it, again, wasn't so much the death of the Son that pleased the Father as much as it was the will of the Son who died, the will of Jesus to love us so much to the point of giving his life for us.
And as we've said in other Reflections, the virtue of love is there, it's in the will itself, willing the good for the sake of the one you love.
Lastly, for today we'll share a thought from St. Bonaventure, St. Bonaventure asks, how do we delve deeper into the love of God?
Well he answers by encouraging us to pass through the wounds of Jesus in order to do that, in order to penetrate into the abyss of his love, in order to penetrate into the most sacred heart of Jesus.
How do you get there?
Through the wounds of Christ.
In his work on the perfection of life, St. Bonaventure tells us this, he says, if at times things sad, burdensome, tiring, or bitter happen along the way, particularly if some good appears distasteful, run without delay to Jesus on the cross, he says, look at his crown of thorns, his iron nails, and the spear in his side, contemplate the wounds of the hands and feet, the wounds of the head and side, the wounds of the whole body, remember who it was that suffered so bitterly and bore such outrage for you, and how he must have loved you, believe me, at that thought you will instantly find every sadness joyful, every burden light, every chore of pleasure, and every hardship sweet, he says.
So if we want to reach the heights of love, and the heights of the spiritual life, and really the heights of life itself, we should look at the masterpiece of love, Jesus hanging there on the cross for us, and most particularly, hanging on the cross for you.
Let's ask our lady for the grace to fix our thoughts and our hearts more on her and on her son as we journey through the wonderful paths of Franciscan spirituality.
Praise be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.
♪ Bell tolling ♪