“I am well pleased…”

     The very idea ‘Will of God’ prompts a certain amount of resistance nowadays, especially when used in connection with obedience … One cannot altogether deny that a type of spirituality current in the last century had turned ‘the Will of God’ into something as capricious and menacing as the sword of Damocles hanging over one’s head, something that one was not going to escape and that would strike in one’s most unguarded moment.

     The biblical notion of the Will of God bears very little resemblance indeed to that. What the Vulgate translates as voluntas and beneplacitum goes back to the Greek thelēma (θέλημα) or eudokia (εὐδοκία). Both terms render the Hebrew rāṣôn (רָצוֹן) (and sometimes hps (חֵפֶץ)). Now the ambience of these terms is quite different: longing, desire, love, joy. Then again, being ‘in love’ and the sexual desire that a man feels for a woman are denoted by the same concepts.

     Thus the Love (Will) of God rests upon the people that He has chosen for Himself in His good pleasure. The prophet Isaiah uses the same terms with which to celebrate the salvation of Mount Zion: ‘You are to be a crown of splendour in the hand of Yahweh, a princely diadem in the hand of your God; no longer are you to be named “forsaken”, nor your land “Abandoned”, but you shall e called “My Delight” and your land “The Wedded”, for Yahweh takes delight in you and your land will have its wedding. Like a young man marrying a virgin, so will the one who built you wed you, and as the bridegroom rejoices in his bride, so will your God rejoice in you’ (Isa. 62:3-5). My delight stands for the same Hebrew word that the Vulgate persistently renders by voluntas–Will. So the Will of God here signifies the pleasure the Lord take in His people, the great love that He feels for His chosen ones. This is His Thelēma, His Will; that He should love the Jewish people despite the many times they have been disloyal.

     The fulness of that same Love now rests upon Jesus. He is the desire of His Father, His Delight. In Him the Father as it were finds repose. This is undoubtedly the gist of the all but solitary saying that the Father utters in the New Testament. It was meant for Jesus. He heard it at His baptism and at His transfiguration. In this saying the Father said all that He had to say. All other utterances are left to Jesus. We find it, with a few variants, in Matt. 3:17 and 17:5; in Mark 1:11; in Luke 3:22 and in the Second Letter of Peter 1:17. In translation: ‘You are My Son, My Beloved; My favour rests on You.’ Behind the Greek verb eudokein (εὐδοκέω) here there undoubtedly stands the semitic rāṣôn (which is also rendered by thelēma-Will). Thus the Father is here bearing witness that the fulness of His Will – in the sense of Love, longing, delight – rests upon His well-beloved Son.

     So Jesus Himself is the place par excellence where God reveals Himself, the human being in whom the thelēma, the yearning, the love and the Will of the Father are made plain. Jesus is the epiphany of the Father’s pleasure, the Father’s joy. How could it be otherwise? Was He not born before all ages from the bosom of His Father, born of His deepest desire and His abounding love? Now, in the fulness of time, the well-beloved Son has united Himself with what is essentially human. This being born of the Father He must now express in human fashion. This is to be His obedience. He must allow this Father-love to flow through His whole being-as-man. It must occupy and capture His human body and His entire psychology. In that way the Father’s Love will be realized and endorsed. Where the first man had said No, Jesus, the new Man, will say Yes. He will make the Will of the Father wholly His own. He has to become the first man in whom the fulness of God’s love can become a reality. That is His obedience, that is also His death. And these both cases – that of Baptism and that of Transfiguration – this utterance, this Word of the Father, was a response to the prayer of Jesus.

– André Louf, Teach Us to Pray: Learning a Little About Prayer 28-30 –