God Gives Jesus

Another quotation from Wells, summing up the thesis of his book: “God has given his people everything they need to worship him, to be his friends, and to eat with him. He has done this by giving them the body of Christ. He gives his people the body of Christ in three forms – Jesus, the Church, and the Eucharist. In each case he gives his people more than enough. He overwhelms them by the abundance of his gifts. His people may respond in three ways. They may turn away from his good gifts, and strive to make a life on their own resources. This is the perversity of sin. They may find that their imaginations cannot stretch to the enormity of grace and, fearing that they might drown in the overflowing gifts of God, they reduce God to a manageable size and deal only with the gifts they can comprehend. This is ignorance, the poverty of moral imagination. Or they can open heart and mind, body and soul to discovering and receiving these teeming gifts, and shape their lives and the lives of their communities according to the practice of embodying the abundant gifts of God. This is what it means to be transformed by Jesus, molded by the Church, and sustained by the Eucharist. This is what it means to be God’s companions.”