English
EspañolThe image and likeliness of the Trinitarian God sealed into humanity, from “the beginning” until today, is the family founded upon the marital union.
Text
Those first pages of the Bible make a number of very clear statements. The first, which Jesus paraphrases, says that “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” (1:27) (The Joy of Love, n.10). The couple that loves and begets life is a true, living icon – not an idol like those of stone or gold prohibited by the Decalogue – capable of revealing God the Creator and Saviour… The triune God is a communion of love, and the family is its living reflection… (and is added quoting John Paul II) “Our God in his deepest mystery is not solitude, but a family, for he has within himself fatherhood, sonship and the essence of the family, which is love. That love, in the divine family, is the Holy Spirit” (The Joy of Love, n.11)
Commentary
The core of every human being, the heart of each one of us, is not made up of solitude but of intimate companionship. We are familial beings. The more men and women love each other, unite and generate human life. The more they resemble God Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
We know more about how God is in his intimacy when we call him father or son or Holy Spirit than when we simply call him God thinking about his eternity or his omnipresence.
If only this image of the Triune God sealed in human sexuality, in our creation as men and women, in our capability to unite in the intimate communion of marriage, in our paternity and maternity, in the vocation of building and maintaining a warm, tender, loving home, had been better taught to us from the beginning of our education! If it had been taught with simplicity, clarity, without too many scruples or scones, with the joy of love shared between people. We would have saved ourselves many errors regarding sexuality, marriage, and family so often misrepresented and not taught as an image of God Triune but in the likeliness of animals as a simple manner of perpetuating the human species and as hidden structures of patriarchal, cultural, and economic interests of ever-changing human societies.
The family founded on the union of love does not belong to the world of species. However, to the universe of people, the image and likeliness is nothing less than God himself in his intimacy: His eternal love union between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Such a way of being and living in an intimate communion of love and life such as the Triune God is the essence of the vocation that spouses, fathers, mothers, and children strive to live as within the family.
