Dr. Junius Johnson

And Eve is like, but Lord –

I love all of my children.

Why have you blessed some more than others?

And he says, well, if they're all kings, who's going to grow the food?

And this is a very medieval notion that the beauty of the whole and the well-working of the whole requires this sort of differentiation.

And heaven isn't the undoing of that.

It's the revelation of the true glory that underlies all that.

Yeah.

And so the experience of you as a vessel of grace, as a receptacle of grace, your experience in heaven is of being filled to overflowing and grace is just pouring out of you, flowing out from every side.

And so you are full and that's your experience.

sure, I'm standing next to the apostle Paul and he is a big gallon jug compared to my thimble, but our experiences are both of being filled to beyond our satisfaction with the fullness of God's grace.

And so where's the complaint?

You can see why it was so important that envy be purged in Purgatory.

Because you can't have this perspective as long as there's a scrap of envy in you.

Yeah, it's so good.

And you see this show up in pastoral manuals, medieval pastoral manuals, because they want to say, if you can get people to really accept this, they can be happy, right?

Because contentment comes from resting with what God has allotted to you, not from counterfactual imaginings of what God could have allotted to you

and not from comparison of what God allotted to brother so-and-so.

Well, let's roll forward a bit.

Jonathan, there's a lot of, so many great passages, as with all of these texts, every encounter is gold and brings so much depth to it.