July 9, 2025

Dear Parishioners,

When we speak of God, we automatically tend to use images and ideas from our own human and limited experiences, but these will never fully express what we are trying to say. The finite human imagination cannot grasp the infinite God. Yet there is a central foundation of our faith for which we do not have to “imagine” some image or think of a metaphor, and that is the core belief that through Jesus Christ we have been offered redemption. He is the one who has made peace by the blood of his cross, and by his proclamation of the kingdom he has shown us the way to live in a manner worthy of eternal life. 

The words Paul uses in his Letter to the Colossians are likely from an early Christian hymn that would have been known by the community and used liturgically. It offers a concise and clear teaching about who Jesus Christ truly is and how in him the very nature and person of God is revealed to us. This is the doctrine that unites all Christians: Jesus is both human and divine, he is God made man, the firstborn of creation and the one through whom all things were made and ultimately redeemed.

Only God can save those he has created, for only God can forgive, offer salvation, and bestow the gift of eternal life. To show us how much he loves us and how far he was willing to go to redeem us, God sent his only Son as a man to suffer and die. Here in the person of Jesus we fully realize not just the cost of our redemption but the very depth of that love.

It is this reality Paul sought to share with the Colossians and with us. The word redeem literally means to buy back: Jesus has redeemed us from the bondage of sin, death, and oppression and led us to the freedom of the children of God, to new birth and the promise of new and eternal life. 

The question about eternal life posed by the scholar of the law in the Gospel is “the question.” Jesus’ answer to him, told in the familiar parable of the Good Samaritan, is a central message of the Gospel: love one another as Christ has loved us. As redemption is found only in Christ, our challenge is to live according to his commands and to love the Lord as a lifetime response to his offer of life. To hear, understand, and go and do likewise.

God Love Ya,
Fr. Reilly