“Gospel” comes from a Greek word that means “good news.” Today we can say that the good news has so many dimensions. First, there is a loving and beautiful God who brought us into existence along with this world and who wants to fill us with his beauty and goodness and truth. On days when the world seems cruel and meaningless, this is GREAT news!
The good news is also that this God loves us despite our manifest selfishness and lack of love and beauty so much of the time. He can love us because His Son became the mediator who suffered the punishment we deserve so that God and we can become friends after being enemies. And that same Son lived a perfect life to earn for us an eternity with this beautiful God and all his saints, whom we can enjoy and get to now for eternity.
But before we get to heaven, there is so much more to this life, where we can “partake of the divine nature” through the Church and its sacraments, being filled afresh each week or even day with the body and blood of the Son of God, in other words his humanity and not just his divinity.
So the good news is that there is real love and real beauty and real goodness that we can gradually know and become part of. Our lives then have meaning and purpose. And because God gives us gifts, a unique set to each of us, we can play a role in this life in God’s work of redemption. We can know what Mother Teresa called “the joy of loving,” and see the church and the world changed a bit by what we do and are. That is joy. . . and good news.