Daily Mass Gospel Reflection - Coinherence

Word on Fire Ministry ^ | 03.22.24 | Bishop Robert Barron

[MurphsLaw]

John 10:31-42

Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus declares,
“The Father is in me and I am in the Father.”

Charles Williams stated that the master idea of Christianity is “coinherence,” mutual indwelling.
If you want to see this idea concretely displayed,
look to the pages of the Book of Kells,
that masterpiece of early Christian illumination.
Lines interwoven, designs turning in and around on each other,
plays of plants, animals, planets, human beings, angels, and saints.
The Germans call it Ineinander (one in the other).

How do we identify ourselves?
Almost exclusively through the naming of relationships:
we are sons, brothers, daughters, sisters, mothers, fathers,
members of organizations, members of the Church, etc.
We might want to be alone, but no one and nothing is finally an island.
Coinherence is indeed the name of the game, at all levels of reality.

And God—the ultimate reality—is a family of coinherent relations,
each marked by the capacity for self-emptying.
Though Father and Son are really distinct,
they are utterly implicated in each other by a mutual act of love.

The impossibly good news is that Jesus and the Father
have invited us to enter fully into their divine coinherence.
The love between the Father and the Son—
which is called “the Holy Spirit”—
can be participated in.

[MurphsLaw]

+++The Jews picked up rocks to stone Jesus.
Jesus answered them,
“I have shown you many good works from my Father.
For which of these are you trying to stone me?”
The Jews answered him,
“We are not stoning you for a good work but for blasphemy.
You, a man, are making yourself God.”
Jesus answered them,
“Is it not written in your law,
‘I said, ‘You are gods”‘?
If it calls them gods to whom the word of God came,
and Scripture cannot be set aside,
can you say that the one
whom the Father has consecrated and sent into the world
blasphemes because I said, ‘I am the Son of God’?
If I do not perform my Father’s works, do not believe me;
but if I perform them, even if you do not believe me,
believe the works,
so that you may realize and understand
that the Father is in me and I am in the Father.”
Then they tried again to arrest him;
but he escaped from their power.

He went back across the Jordan
to the place where John first baptized,
and there he remained.
Many came to him and said,
“John performed no sign,
but everything John said about this man was true.”
And many there began to believe in him.+++