Christ could not trust Himself to the Jews who did not listen to Him or love Him. They did not pursue Him, Who Alone could merit grace.
I can trust a person who is attempting to live in the Truth and not be content with egotism and self-will. I have time for those who really want to convert and be saints, but to those who are closed and do not listen, I can only pray and offer up penance for them. I cannot play God and force anyone to convert. We all have free will.
Those who are baptized with the Trinitarian form of baptism I can trust, as they are in God and God is in them.
God, states Aquinas, is not loved as a friend who is absent, but One Who is Present. The act of adoption, which happens at baptism, is an action of all Three Persons of the Blessed Trinity.
Garrigou-Lagrange states this:
If the Blessed Trinity lives in the just soul as in a temple, [589] a living temple of knowledge and love even while the just man lives on earth, how wondrously intimate must be this indwelling of the Blessed Trinity in the blessed who form the temple of heaven! [590].
This doctrine of the indwelling leads from the treatise on the Trinity to the treatise on grace. Grace is the created gift, brought forth and preserved in us by the Holy Spirit, who, by appropriation, is the Uncreated Gift, or by the Blessed Trinity, wholly present in us. Adoptive filiation, says St. Thomas, [591] comes to us, by appropriation, from the Father, who is the principle of natural filiation; but it comes also by the gift of the Holy Spirit, who is the love of the Father and the Son. The act of adoption by grace, he says elsewhere, [592] though it is common to the entire Trinity, is appropriated nevertheless to each person singly, to the Father as author, to the Son as exemplar, to the Holy Spirit as imprinting on us the likeness of that exemplar.
The Father gives us grace and makes us His children, the Son shows us how to live in grace, and the Holy Spirit brings back the likeness gone through sin by imprinting this likeness on us, Who also gives us the gifts which come from the love between the Father and the Son. I merely repeat Church teaching.
As St. Bernard of Clairvaux writes, "We have been made in the image and likeness of God, but we have kept the image and lost the likeness."
This likeness is sanctifying grace.
Christ merited grace for us, points out Garrigou-Lagrange, on the Cross. We do not merit this grace of being returned to the likeness of God. The entire lesson of this past weekend has been about our debt to Christ Who merited grace for us to be adopted children of God.
One may ask, why do we not perceive the Indwelling of the Trinity?
to be continued...
