Denver Catholic

50 APR-MAY 2024 | DENVER CATHOLIC W hat came first: Creation, or God's covenants with the People of Israel and the New Israel, the Church? The question may seem odd, even silly. Chronologically, it's obvious that the divine act of creation preceded the divine acts of covenant-mak- ing: no creation, no "People" with whom God could enter a covenant relationship. But our sense of time is not God's. For as St. Thomas Aquinas taught, all that we know as "time" is an eternal present to God. In Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week, Pope Benedict XVI explains that God's covenant relationship with his chosen people in both the Old and New Testaments is not an add-on, a divine afterthought — or, as it's more often understood, a fix for something that had gone wrong. Rather, Bene- dict writes, God's covenantal bond with his people — the Jewish people and the people of the Church — is the very reason why God "created" in the first place: "According to rabbinic theology, the idea of the covenant — the idea of estab- lishing a holy people to be an interlocutor for God in union with him — is prior to the idea of the creation of the world and supplies its inner motive. The cosmos was created, not that there be manifold things in heaven and earth, but that there be space for the 'covenant,' for the loving 'yes' between God and his human respondent." Throughout the Lenten itinerary of conversion we have lived for six weeks, the Church has asked us to reflect on God's thirst for us. Thus, the paradigmatic Lenten gospel reading of Jesus and the woman at the well on the Third Sunday of Lent points to prayer as a "gift of God" (John 4:10): Prayer is our divinely-em- powered response to God's burning desire for our holiness. Other paradig- matic Lenten Sunday gospels strike a similar note: The cure of the man born blind (who is empowered to see Jesus as the Light of the World [John 9, 5, 38]) and the raising of Lazarus from the dead (which follows Martha's act of faith in John 11:27). God creates or "speaks" the world into being through his "Word" (John 1:3) and redeems the world through the Word incarnate (John 1:14) to share the divine holi- ness. God yearns, God "thirsts," for the holiness of the human creatures he has created, so that he might be in covenant relationship with them. The Redemption wrought in Christ is not, therefore, some sort of adden- dum to Creation. The paschal mys- tery of Christ's passion, death, res- urrection and ascension is the axial point of the entire drama of Creation: the decisive, definitive turning point that reveals why there is "Creation" at all. Thus, the answer that Christian faith, which is Easter faith, gives to a question philosophy has pondered for millennia — Why is there some- thing rather than nothing? — is, in a word, holiness. The Thrice-Holy God created so that the holiness shared among Father, Son and Holy Spirit might be shared ad extra: in a world brought into being to experience the eternal giving-and-receiving of love that is God's inner-trinitarian life. Like many others, I have been mesmerized by the extraordinarily beautiful pictures of the cosmos made available by the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope; I recently bought a print reproducing a small portion of what astronomers know as Messier 16, the "Eagle Nebula" (which the more lyri- cally inclined call the "Pillars of Cre- ation"). Some might consider this vast factory of new stars, 5,700 light-years away, as a benign accident rather than what biblical religion calls a "creation." Those who think that way tend to think of human beings the same way: We're accidents produced by billions of years by fortuitous cosmic biochemistry. Easter faith invites us to think dif- ferently — and more deeply. Easter faith and the optic on real- ity it creates suggests that the burden of proof lies with those who imag- ine that everything from the Eagle Nebula to the mysterious workings of human cognition and human altruism is just accidental. Easter, Creation, and TH E CATH O LIC D I F F E R E N CE BY GEORGE WEIGEL Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.

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