Rosary #36 The Image of God

The Image of God

The measure of our love for God is our love for neighbor.  We must love those who live around us and see in them the image of God. G. Giaquinta

 

INTRODUCTION: We will not relent in helping our neighbor, even when we see in them more human elements than the image of the Creator. We will discover the image of God in them, perhaps marred and distorted, or perhaps even made unrecognizable by passions and sin. Our supernatural vision - which is not ruled by either affinity, aversion or a purely human estimation - will be able to see in our neighbor's soul what human eyes are unable to see.

 

From a supernatural perspective, we must conclude that we must never discriminate against anyone or show partiality for one person or another, nor may we entertain feelings of human preferences; rather, we must try to love everyone in the Lord. Moreover, we must extend our apostolate to all those to whom - in our enlightened zeal – we believe we can offer some good.

 Program of Spiritual Life, Chapter 9

1st Mystery: The Redeemer of the world! In him has been revealed in a new and more wonderful way the fundamental truth concerning creation to which the Book of Genesis gives witness when it repeats several times: "God saw that it was good". The good has its source in Wisdom and Love. In Jesus Christ the visible world which God created for man-the world that, when sin entered, "was subjected to futility"- recovers again its original link with the divine source of Wisdom and Love. Indeed, "God so loved the world that he gave his only Son"

2^nd Mystery:  Christ the new Adam, in the very revelation of the mystery of the Father and of his love, fully reveals man to himself and brings to light his most high calling". And the Council continues: "He who is the 'image of the invisible God' (Col 1:15), is himself the perfect man who has restored in the children of Adam that likeness to God which had been disfigured ever since the first sin. #8

3rd Mystery Jesus Christ, the Son of the living God, become our reconciliation with the Father. He it was, and he alone, who satisfied the Father's eternal love, that fatherhood that from the beginning found expression in creating the world, giving man all the riches of creation, and making him "little less than God"⁴⁹, in that he was created "in the image and after the likeness of God". He and he alone also satisfied that fatherhood of God and that love which man in a way rejected by breaking the first Covenant and the later covenants that God "again and again offered to man".#9

4^th Mystery: Every man comes into the world through being conceived in his mother's womb and being born of his mother, and precisely on account of the mystery of the Redemption is entrusted to the solicitude of the Church. Her solicitude is about the whole man and is focused on him in an altogether special manner. The object of her care is man in his unique unrepeatable human reality, which keeps intact the image and likeness of God himself.#9

5^th Mystery: The "price" of our redemption is likewise a further proof of the value that God himself sets on man and of our dignity in Christ. For by becoming "children of God", adopted sons, we also become in his likeness "a kingdom and priests" and obtain "a royal priesthood", that is to say we share in that unique and irreversible restoration of man and the world to the Father that was carried out once for all by him, who is both the eternal Son and also true Man.

 

Rosary Meditations taken from Pope John Paul II, Encyclical Redeemer of Man