God’s first gift

The first act of God was the creative burst of life. Life was God’s first gift in time, and first in prominence. It has been the preeminent grace. One might say that the coming to life is God’s only gift, repeated in myriad ways and over the entire expanse of creation history. Most significantly, this is seen in God’s act of redemption in the first-born from the dead, Christ Jesus.

As the collect for Christmas Day says,

O God, who wonderfully created the dignity of human nature
And still wonderfully restored it,
Grant, we pray, that we may share in the divinity of Christ,
Who humbled himself to share in our humanity.

If life is the great grace, then love is the motivation for it. Out of love, God made us in his image and likeness. Out of love, God redeemed us from our fall into death. Out of love, God has planted within us the hope of the promise of eternal life. As St Paul wrote,

Planted in love and built on love, you will, with all the saints, have strength to grasp the breadth and the length, the height and the depth … until you are filled with the utter fulness of God.

To commemorate the death of someone is to strike out towards this promise of life, created and sustained in love, that is God’s most telling gift. It is to see in the one who has left us the promise of God that each life has its influence on us.

Nick, I think, came to reveal this truth in three particular ways. Firstly—and most importantly—it was seen in the life that he lived as a husband and father. Secondly, it came through his intellectual pursuit in recognising the fundamental dignity of each person’s life. And thirdly, it was witnessed to in his long illness and courageous death. Nick lived his life as a pilgrim, such that it might lead to its destiny in God.

Later this evening, we will hear, I am sure, of the heroic leadership in faith and intellectual life that marked the public life of Nick. And that will be good to hear. At this moment, however, might our attention dwell, if only briefly, on the hope, in faith, we might receive from the witness he gave to God’s first gift.

As St Paul said to the Roman Church,

None of us lives to himself, and none of us dies to himself. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s (Romans 14:7–8).

In the life of Nicholas Tonti-Filippini, we see the great gift of life that came to him from God. So, in hope and with trust, and taking to heart the words of the angel to the women seeking the One who had died, ‘There is no need for you to be afraid. I know you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. He is not here, for he has risen, as he said he would.’

Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and may perpetual light shine upon him. May he rest in peace.