Today’s Gospel situates us amidst a dispute in the Temple of Jerusalem. Jesus reveals who He is while the Pharisees snicker and sneer, accusing Him of blasphemy. In fact, John Chapter 8 ends with the Pharisees attempting to stone Jesus in the temple. As evil as the Pharisees’ response is, it reveals a deep truth to how we answer the question “Who is Jesus?” There are really only two options: “worship or stoning,” as Ven. Fulton Sheen puts it. Either Jesus is telling the truth, and deserves to be worshipped, or He is lying and blaspheming, and deserves to be stoned. C. S. Lewis writes, “You can shut [Jesus] up for a fool or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us.” Given this all-or-nothing choice, we, as Catholics, choose to worship. But what does it mean for us to “fall at Jesus’ feet and call him Lord and God?”

Perhaps this question invites us to a meditation on who God is—the great “I AM” that Jesus uses in this Gospel. I remember my grade 12 philosophy teacher explaining that God is not just a “nice guy in the sky,” but the uncaused cause of all existence, the one who loves the universe into existence at every single moment. Rather than thinking of God in terms of accidentally ordered series of causes, like father, son, grandson, where the first cause (father) is no longer active in sustaining the existence of the later members of the series (grandson), our teacher invited us to think of God in terms of essentially ordered series, like the links in a chain that suspend a chandelier from the ceiling. The first cause (top hook) must be present and active at every single moment to sustain the other members of the series (the chandelier). Similarly, God is necessarily active and present at every moment, sustaining our very lives.

Several Thomistic Institute lectures that I attended beautifully explained this idea. One speaker called God’s sustaining of our existence a “continuous creation.” Another speaker said that a simple proof of God’s love for each of us is the fact of our existence. Like an author who creates characters of a story by thinking about them, God willed us into existence and holds us in existence by virtue of his love for every single one of us at every single moment. I think this perspective rightly places us at the feet of Our Lord. Realizing our complete dependence on Him and acknowledging His Lordship over our lives, we can truly respond to Jesus with due worship.