“But where sin abounded, grace did much more abound.” –Romans 5:20
God is a God of superabundance; some may even ignorantly accuse him of waste.
He delights in the extra, or the useless, that which seemingly tends to no end but the delight of itself. He creates a lavish world intended for abundance, which we often mistake for messiness.
Look at how man is created. The waste from our noses, mouths, sweat pores, dead skin, and other more earthy parts of our bodies. Our hair needs to be trimmed, our nails cut.
This extends to all of creation. Trees must be sheared. Flowers must be pruned. Vines grow where they ought not to grow. Imagine counting every grain of sand, or every droplet of water. Such a task is far beyond the human mind's capabilities. Surely, there are countless stars and planets, as many as the grains of sand on the beach, with their own unique and beautiful abiotic miracles that man will never gaze upon, fragrances men will never enjoy, colors men will never see, siren songs men will never hear—all of these for his pleasure.
Origen would subscribe (maybe?)…
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And look at the death of Christ. It is not merely that he died, which is already beyond any expectation we could rightly have. But examine the way he died. Yes, he must be whipped. He must have a crown of thorns placed upon his head. He must have his persecutors divide his robe. He must be nailed to a tree. He must thirst. He must give up the ghost. And he must ultimately be pierced by a spear.
But must he die in this way? Yes. Because it is fitting. It fits his nature of love and opulence. It is a fitting fulfillment of Old Testament sacramentalism. It fits prophecy. But because God tells the story, because everything from eternity past to the cross and far beyond is God’s providential plan, it is God who predestined the passion of Christ, that it must happen as it did with all of its abundant messiness, to be the fitting introduction to his reign.
He could have made a quick death fitting. A noose. A quick snap. Privately with less shame and suffering. And he could have made this sufficient had he predestined different Old Testament signs and prophecies so that the ones concerning the passion had never been written, but he did not. It must be apparent to us that such a quick and painless death would not be fitting according to his nature, wisdom, and love precisely because he did not choose to die in that way.
Why? Because he is superabundant in all that he does. Surely, one drop of blood can wipe away the sins of all mankind when that drop of blood flows from the heart of God. And yet, Christ did not shed one mere drop of his sacred blood, the amount of which, if we possessed it, would be the most priceless gift we could enjoy. He spilled all of it. And he continually and forever calls us to drink of it in the eucharistic wine. His sacrifice is infinitely more abundant than our sin is sinful, so that our cup is constantly and eternally overflowing with his love, and the world becomes a reservoir of grace from the overflow, like a saucer waiting to catch tea. Except then even the saucer overflows, and our tea gushes all over the floor!
So much grace, we don’t know what to do with all of it. So much grace, we wonder if there is even an “all of it.” Its use? None beyond itself. Love for love’s sake. God for God’s sake. An eternal testimony of itself, an ever-flowing fountain bursting forth with magnificent streams of God’s love, larger than any river, enough to embrace infinitely more than all the souls of the whole world in its overwhelming ocean. When his love pours on us, our sin is but a grain of sand in the face of a hurricane: atomically inconsequential.
Ah, yes, let them call him a wasteful God; he takes pleasure in his waste.
And for this cause, he does not here say ‘grace,’ but superabundance of grace. For it was not as much as we must have to do away the sin only, that we received of His grace, but even far more. For we were at once freed from punishment, and put off all iniquity, and were also born from above, and rose again with the old man buried, and were redeemed, sanctified, led up to adoption, made brothers of the Only-begotten, and of one Body with Him, and counted for His Flesh, and even as a Body with the Head, so were we united unto Him!1
–St. John Chrysostom
John Chrysostom, The Homilies of S. John Chrysostom, Archbishop of Constantinople, on the Epistle of St. Paul the Apostle to the Romans, A Library of Fathers of the Holy Catholic Church (Oxford; London: John Henry Parker; J. G. F. and J. Rivington, 1841), 153.
How much more would the Christian have, he but asked God?
I think of the prophet who went to the king in the Old Testament. The prophet gave the king arrows and told him to smite the ground with them. The king did so a few times, then stopped. The prophet then told the king that he should have kept going, for God was going to smite the king's enemies only as often as the king had smite the ground.
I wonder, then, what we Christians would have if we but kept asking, kept smiteing the ground, as it were.