How Surrender to God Sets us Free!
Fr Lubabalo Mguda baptises a convert during this year’s Easter Vigil Mass at Sacred Heart church in Kabega Park, Port Elizabeth. Photo: Lisa Faith Augustine
God created us in his image so that we can choose to be love. Jan Smits reflects on how we can achieve total freedom by surrendering to the Triune God.
One sentence in the Bible has had a great significance in my life: “And God said: ‘Now we are going to make man in our image, in our likeness’” (Genesis (1:26)). It is so extraordinary, almost incomprehensible — God wanted to create every human being in his own image and likeness!
Who is this God then? So that I may understand who I am. In Exodus, Moses had an exceptional encounter with God, in a burning bush. He asked God: “What shall I say to my people and to Pharaoh, to whom you are going to send me? And God said to Moses; ‘Tell them, I AM who is’” (3:14). We could understand from this answer that God is “Being”. Still a mystery. We may wonder: What or who is this “Being”?
We read in the Gospel of Matthew: “… and one of them, a lawyer, asked to test him: ‘Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the law?’ Jesus said to him: ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. That is the greatest and first commandment. The second is like it: You shall love your neighbour as yourself. On these two commandments hangs all the Law and the Prophets’” (22:35-40).
In Luke, we see that the Pharisees and scribes are not yet satisfied and ask: “Who then is our neighbour?” Jesus tells that stirring story, so well known, of the Good Samaritan (10:25-37).
These passages allow us to understand in a profound way that the being, the Being of God, is Love; therefore, if we are in his image, then our nature is love! The First Letter of John states unmistakably: “Beloved brothers and sisters, let us love one another, for love proceeds from God. Anyone who loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God, for God is love” (1 John 4:7-8).
One particularly enlightening moment from the Gospels is when Jesus is baptised by John the Baptist. Jesus did not need John’s baptism, since he was without sin. Yet Jesus went down into the water to be baptised by John. After the baptism, Jesus immediately rises from the water. Then the heavens opened, and the Spirit of God descended in the form of a dove upon Jesus. A voice from heaven spoke: “This is my Son, my beloved, in whom I am well pleased” (Matthew 3:17).
We clearly see that God is not alone, but he reveals himself as a Triune God. His nature, his image in us, is therefore that of a Trinitarian God. If we allow God into us, our love to him and to our neighbours is not just any love. It is a Trinitarian Love, shining from our eyes, full of fire, and melting the hearts of men.
God’s love gives freedom
True love is expressed in freedom. Therefore, God created us in such a way that we are totally free — free even to choose not to love and, in a way, deface the image of God within us. Nonetheless, his infinite love does not abandon us. He is always near us, through his grace, waiting to show us the way to be wholly his.
However, pure love can only be in us if we are completely detached from everything. This is a real challenge. Overcoming it demands from us a total surrender, which is not easy to achieve. It surely requires great generosity. What is certain is that if we cling to anything, we are not wholly free. Jesus is “the Way”. God loves us infinitely and shows us ways to let his image within us shine more and more, if we are open to it.
Jesus says: “So each of you must renounce everything that he has, otherwise he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:33). He also says: “And everyone who has given up his house, brothers or sisters, father or mother, wife and children or lands, for my name’s sake, shall receive a hundredfold and have eternal life” (Matthew 19:29).
In order to have his love in us, God requires that we are not attached to anything — not even to our own soul and personality, which may be another of our possessions. On the other hand, God also promises the hundredfold to those who leave everything behind to possess his pure love.
Our love will not be just any love, but it becomes more and more like the pure love of God. It is Jesus’ presence in us. We live with him and through him in unity with the Father and the Holy Spirit, with Mary, the Mother of God, and all the angels and saints.
Jesus’ intervention for us
Before his death on the cross, Jesus expresses the deepest desire he has for each of us, “that they may all be one, as you, Father, are in me and I in you: that they also may be in Us, that the world may believe that you have sent me” (John 17:21). Jesus wanted to bridge our separation from God — which is typically caused by non-love, by sin — and destroy it on the cross.
On the cross, he cried out: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46). If we let him, Jesus will annul every separation caused by non-love, by sin, so that we can be completely one with him again and start all over again.
Jesus also gave us his new commandment: “Love one another; as I have loved you, so you also must love one another” (John 13:34). This “as” is a great mystery. He also wants us to undo every separation and to be ready to lay down our lives for each other, to forgive each other from the heart, so that this divine unity may be made possible among us.
The promises of God
Then the Triune God will truly live in us and we will experience his constant presence! He knows our every thought, our every desire. We will constantly feel in love, our eyes shine, already alive in that heaven that awaits us. Prayer will become constant in our hearts. He will guide us on his ways, which therefore acquire an unmatched beauty. Life will turn into an adventure we never dreamed of. We will experience an unprecedented freedom and our personality will become an expression of God. Every day God will surprise us with the hundredfold. Temptations will have little or no hold on us anymore.
Why should we, being in God, something exalted so high, look for something less?
On the evening before his death, Jesus also gave his body and blood, so that through this immense grace the image of God and his likeness could become more and more a reality in us. But to carry his divine nature within us means not only that we do not sin but also, above all, that we are love in the image and likeness of God.
Does Jesus not come especially for those in need? The passage of 1 John 3:17 is beautiful: “But if anyone has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him?”
Finally, the Virgin Mary should not be missing. Who more than she has realised the image of God and his likeness in her life. She was without sin, immaculate. And, through the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit, she was allowed to bear the Son of God within her and thus became Mother of God and also mother of each of us. For sure, the Virgin Mary, together with the Holy Spirit, can be a great help to us, so that the image of God, Jesus son of the Father, would be born in us.
Does Jesus not invite us to be perfect as the Father? How can this be unless we are made totally his image and likeness?
Jan Smits lives in the Focolare Community in Taung, North-West Province.
Published in the June 2023 issue of The Southern Cross magazine
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