In his Thursday morning Mass, Pope Francis talked about God's love. In his homily, he said that God's love and grace cannot be controlled or even accumulated like merchandise.
POPE FRANCIS
'In this way this beautiful truth of God's closeness slips into a kind spiritual book-keeping: Some will say, 'I will do this because it will give me 300 days of grace ... I will do that because it will give me this, and doing so I will accumulate grace'. But what is grace? A commodity? It seems to look that way. Throughout history, God's closeness to His people has been betrayed by this selfish attitude, selfish, by wanting to control grace and turn it into merchandise.â?
The Pope went even further, adding that God's love is completely free, just like the love a mother has for her child.
SUMMARY OF POPE'S HOMILY:
(Source: Vatican Radio)
'Godâ??s closeness is such that he is presented like a mother, a mother who talks to her baby, and sings lullabies to her babyâ? The Pope said that the mother even taken on the voice and the language of a child so much so she can seem ridiculous if one does not understand how great the context actually is: â??Do not fear, you little worm Jacobâ??. How often â?? Francis pointed out â?? does a mother say this kind of thing to her child as she caresses him? â??I will make of you a threshing sledge, sharp, new, full of teethâ?¦ I will make you grow bigâ?? and she caresses him again and holds him close. And so does God. This is Godâ??s tenderness. And He is he expresses his closeness with tenderness: the tenderness of a motherâ?.
God loves is free - the Pope continued - just as a motherâ??s love is for her child. And the child 'allows himself to be loved': 'this is the grace of God.' 'But many times, just to be sure, we want to control the grace'. He said that 'in history and also in our lives we are tempted to transform grace into a kind of a merchandise, perhaps saying to ourselves something like 'I have so much grace,' or, 'I have a soul clean, I am graced.â?
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