Praise be Jesus and Mary. Now and forever.
Continuing our series on Franciscan spirituality and its Christocentric foundation.
Today we'll begin looking specifically at Christ's mediation, His unique mediation.
Jesus is a mediator like no other.
You know, a mediator is basically a go-between.
Someone who helps bring about an agreement between two parties.
Or someone who reconciles separate or opposing parties.
I think we understand that concept pretty easily.
For example, if a couple can't communicate with each other, sometimes they'll invite in a third party.
Be a friend or a counselor or a priest.
Someone who will act as a mediator between them.
Jesus is the mediator in our relationship with God.
Father Ciccarelli in his book talks about how the works of God are distinguished for their harmony, their order, and their unity.
The relations of cause and effect.
And the agreement between the means used to reach specific ends.
All this harmony, order, unity.
Plays out brilliantly in God's supreme work, which is the mystery of Christ.
And remember when we talk about Jesus Christ, we talk about Jesus as one divine person with two natures.
Human nature and a divine nature.
So sometimes we will speak of Jesus as God.
Sometimes we will speak of Him as a creature.
Talking about His human nature.
Here we're going to speak mainly about His creatureliness.
As we noted in a previous reflection, the primacy of Christ isn't something that's just static, like a beautiful statue.
His primacy is dynamic and it's operational.
Christ was conceived not only as the most perfect creature, but also as the creature with a capital C who, thanks to His unique mediation and unique perfection, has the greatest influence on all other creatures.
You can say it maybe in a better way.
It's that Christ was willed by God as the one upon whom all creatures would depend.
So we'll talk for a minute about Christ's primacy and universal causality or causal universality.
It might sound a bit complicated, especially when I say it wrong, but it's not.
Primacy means being first.
Universality means being everywhere, affecting everything.
Causal means simply to be a cause of something.
Christ's primacy, so as being first in God's plan, has what's called a causal universality.
So it has a causal effect on everything.
One has a causal effect in everything in God's divine intention.
Why?
Because Jesus is the perfect exemplar.
He's the model of everything.
And all rational creatures were predestined to be conformed to Him.
This is called an ideal causality.
So God's intention in creating is to have Christ as the center of everything.
Christ is the creature, again with a capital C, for whom God predestined all the other creatures with a little c to existence, to grace, and to glory, so that everything might have primacy in Him, says St. Paul in Colossians 1.18.
Christ's primacy has a causal universality also, too, in reality.
So not just in intention, but also in reality.
It's what theologians would call simply a real causality.
Why?
Because He's the firstborn of every creature, as St. Paul says.
And He came into existence in the fullness of time, Galatians 4.4.
Christ is also the meritorious cause of every grace.
So He merited every grace, even the grace that Adam had in his innocence in the Garden of Eden.
Also the grace of the angels, too.
That was merited by Christ.
As the image of the invisible God, as St. Paul says in Colossians 1.15, Christ is the universal revealer as well as the universal reconciler or peacemaker by means of His blood.
We read that in Colossians 1.20.
The influence of Jesus Christ on all creatures is exercised principally through that mediation, His mediation.
St. Paul proclaims Him to be the one mediator between God and men, 1 Timothy 2.5.
Of all the works of God, only the incarnation of the Word is considered an absolutely gratuitous work.
All the other works of God are merited by Christ and are accomplished with the foreknowledge of His merits.
So Jesus' predestination, His hypostatic union, His absolute and universal primacy, those things were all completely free, they were gratuitous, but Christ's response to those free gifts was meritorious.
Because of His response, we are here, we exist.
For example, if you think about the first instant of Jesus' existence in the womb of Our Lady, the act of love, adoration, and of submission that He gave to the Father in that first second of His existence on the feast of the Annunciation, that first act was so pleasing to God and so infinitely meritorious that every other good for every other creature derives from it.
So in that first moment of His conception, Jesus exercised His function of mediating the gifts of nature, our existence, the gifts of grace, and the gift of glory to all creatures.
So Christ, again, mediates nature, grace, and glory to all creatures.
We'll look at that for a minute as we close here.
As mediator of nature, Jesus merits for us, again, our being, our very existence.
As mediator of grace, He merits our sanctification.
As mediator of glory, He merits for us the beatific vision, the possession of God in paradise.
When we talk about merit, we mean that Christ earns for us.
He earns rewards and gifts for us.
A merit is a reward or a gift that someone receives for doing a good work.
So Jesus merits for us our existence, our sanctification, and our glorification.
This is why we owe everything to Him.
Everything.
This is why He says in John 15, 5, Apart from me you can do nothing, right?
Because I merited everything for you, even your very existence.
There's a perfect rhythm also and harmony and order and hierarchy in that chain of realities.
There's a perfect connection between nature, grace, and glory.
Nature, which comes first.
Nature is ordered to grace.
Then grace, which perfects nature and is ordered to glory.
However, in the order of intention, so you have to reverse those things.
Meaning in the mind of God, you reverse those things.
Glory comes before grace in God's mind.
Grace comes before nature.
Why? Because God wills the greatest things first.
First is glory, the greatest thing that He willed.
But in the order of execution, it's backwards.
Nature comes first, then grace, then glory.
And how God's plan unfolds in reality?
In time.
First there's creation, then there's sanctification, then there's glorification.
So if we finish here by going back to Jesus as the mediator, and reframe these things in terms of functions or operations, we say that Christ, the creator, is ordered to Christ, the sanctifier, because nature is subordinated to grace.
And Christ, the sanctifier, is ordered to Christ, the glorifier, because grace in this life is ordered to glory in the next.
And Christ, the glorifier, brings everything to God.
God finds His dwelling, His place of rest in the life of the blessed Trinity, and He brings all things there with Him.
I hope some of that maybe makes sense.
If not, maybe you can reflect on it, listen to it again.
It takes a little while to understand these things, but it's actually very, very profound when you do reflect on them and become familiar with them, just how much we owe to Jesus.
We owe literally everything to Him, not just our redemption, everything.
Everything.
In our next reflections, we'll look more at the specific forms of mediation that we mentioned, the mediator being of nature, Christ, the mediator of grace, the mediator of glory.
Let's ask Our Lady, then, the Mediatrix of all graces, for the grace to understand and take to heart what the Lord would like us to glean from these reflections.
Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.
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Ave Maria.