February 2020 - Message from Fr. Timothy - "God is Good"

February 2020 - Message from Fr. Timothy - "God is Good"

“God is Good”, I often hear this expression when a parishioner recovers from an operation, an illness or when some treatment they underwent is successful.  It’s a curious statement.  A very definitive one to be sure.  I absolutely believe that God is good.  I also believe that He wants us to be good too. His Commandments tell us as much, love God and honor our parents, treat others as we want others to treat us, it sounds very good.  God’s goodness and His desire for our goodness comes through loud and clear in the Gospels.  His divine instruction in the Commandments and the Scriptures is for us to do good and avoid evil.     

For ordinary Christians like us attempting to integrate what we hear, know and believe with the way we behave is often challenging.  We know we must ‘do’ the Gospel and not just ‘hear’ it.  The exciting thing here is trying to live out the Gospel in our everyday lives.  It requires us to have good hearts, healthy minds and honorable habits.  There is little doubt that we start out life wanting to be good.  As children we became attached to people who loved and cared and encouraged us and we behaved in ways that would meet with their approval.  From our youth we are aware of certain moral and ethical standards that we must strive to meet. 

“God is Good” and He made us as social beings with big brains and the freedom to choose alternative behaviors trusting that we too will be good.  He gave us an imagination to envision things that are not tangibly present.  He gave us the capacity to seek meaning in life and discover realities beyond what can be seen.  All this is ‘good’.     

In a religious context, our behavior is ‘good’ if it is directly related to the practice of our Faith.  Christians retain the genius of earlier religious peoples who worshiped God by loving one another, caring for the needy and dealing with others justly.  In a couple of weeks we’ll read the Gospel of the Last Judgment [ St. Matthew 25:21-46 ] reminding us that our place among the sheep or the goats depends entirely on how ‘good’ we are. 

Blessings, Fr +Timothy