Title: God's Self-Delivery
Text: Matthew 12:1-8 Sermon: Sister Ok-Sung Cha
There is an interesting story circulating these days. It is a story about an old man in the mountains who visits his son's house in the city, returns to the village, and sits face to face with the old man next door.
“There are people who have died from being pierced by a nail.”
“Who is that, pierced to death by a nail?”
“Did you say his name is Jesus?”
"Jesus? Who is Jesus?”
“Writing: Seeing my daughter-in-law crying and saying, ‘Father, father, father, father, father, father, me and Gapso, a sadun…’
After hearing this story for the first time and laughing for a while, I suddenly thought of this. I thought that he is not far away, but now he is truly near to us in the world.
Recently, a professor at a Christian university was seen participating in a Buddhist event on TV, so he was eventually rejected for re-appointment.
Looking at this situation, I thought of today's scriptures (Matthew 12:1-8). Jesus responds to the story of the disciples being hungry and eating the gleanings on the Sabbath, the Pharisees’ accusation against it, and David eating the showbread with the hungry crowd, which only the priests could eat. The core of today's message, which leads to the warning not to condemn the innocent, and the declaration that the Son of Man is the Lord of the Sabbath, is at the heart of the message to us that human beings are more important than religious regulations or institutions. The Lord of the Sabbath is that man is. I think it also restores the basic spirit of the law: to love and be for our neighbor.
The reason for the existence of religion is to make humans live as human beings, but if religion acts as an obstacle and hinders harmonious relationships with neighbors, then that religion cannot be a true religion.
These things around us make us rethink what it is like to follow Jesus.
Karl Rahner says that man is inherently sanctified because God gave himself into man without any conditions. I see it as something that is already happening in our daily life. It is emphasized that our experience of God's grace does not actually happen outside of our ordinary lives, but "in the ordinary things of working, eating and sleeping." It also says that when you fill yourself up and do not live for yourself, but empty yourself and give to others, the grace of God, who gave yourself unconditionally, begins to incarnate in us.
God is giving himself to man, and man is ontologically receiving God, and God Himself accepted in man, that is, “grace”.
Rahner succinctly defines grace as "God's self-communication (Selbstmitteilung Gottes)." “It is that God communicates Himself to man in his reality.” It is that God does not impart to man a part of himself in the objective and material sense, but gives himself “so that God himself becomes the most profound core of the constitution of human existence.” Because God first gave and bestowed himself into man, man becomes able to turn to God. I think that's what defines human nature. It is grace, the supreme divine life that makes man human only by being in him and thereby brings salvation to man.
When God gives himself up and empties himself and does not want to be himself, that is, when God empties himself and materializes himself, God becomes man, and the original man is this self-expression of God (Selbstausserung). Grace is not only a gift from God to creation, but it is also an a priori condition that makes it possible to receive it. It means that since the grace has already been given, it is only possible to receive it.
Grace is an unconditional and free gift from God. Gratitude is the essence of grace. God gives himself to man as a gift without destroying our humanity in this way, and man is destined to accept the wonderful gift of love as it is.
Rahner pays endless attention to the fundamentals that make man human and Christ the Christ. The underlying point is that finite and infinite, transcendence and immanence, God and man, etc., are never opposed to each other. The same is true of the relationship between Christianity and other religions. This is because, on the original level, all human beings are precious children who transcend nature by God without any discrimination, regardless of status or sect.
The only concrete way to make visible the love of God, which is already present in everyday life and still not visible, is to give up the temporal self. When I no longer insist on mine, when I no longer belong to myself, and when I myself disappear, then it is time to share in the divine life.
Rahner sees this as the love demanded in the Gospels. To accept God's grace to communicate oneself in love, to surrender all of oneself to such possibilities, is to experience God on an existential level.