Vigils Reading – St Alphonsus

From a sermon by Saint Alphonsus Ligouri, bishop [1]

All holiness and perfection of soul lies in our love for Jesus Christ our God, who is our Redeemer and our supreme good. It is part of the love of God to acquire and to nurture all the virtues that make one perfect.

Has not God in fact won for himself a claim on all our love? From all eternity he has loved us. And it is in this vein that he speaks to us: “O consider carefully that I first loved you. You had not yet appeared in the light of day, nor did the world yet exist, but already I loved you. From all eternity I have loved you.”

Since God knew that we are enticed by favors, he wished to bind us to his love by means of his gifts: “I want to catch mortals with these snare, these chains of love in which they allow themselves to be entrapped, so that they will love me.” And all the gifts which he bestowed on us were given to this end. He gave us a soul, made in his likeness, and endowed with memory, intellect and will; he gave us a body equipped with the senses; it was for us that he created heaven and earth and such an abundance of things. He made all things out of love for us, so that all creation might serve us, and we in turn might love God out of gratitude for so many gifts.

But God did not wish to give us only beautiful creatures; the truth is that to win for himself our love, he went so far as to bestow upon us the fullness of himself. The eternal Father went so far as to give us his only Son. When he saw that we were all dead through sin and deprived of his grace, what did he do? Compelled, as the Apostle says, by the superabundance of his love for us, he sent his beloved Son to make reparation for us and to call us back to a sinless life.

By giving us his Son, whom he did not spare precisely so that he might spare us, he bestowed on us every good: grace, love and heaven; for all these goods are certainly inferior to the Son: He who did not spare his own Son, but handed him over for all of us; how could he fail to give us along with his Son all good things?

[1] The Liturgy of the Hours – vol. III – pg 1568 – Catholic Book Publishing Co – New York – 1975