Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
Vatican City (Agenzia Fides) - Lent should be seen not only as a season in preparation for the Passover of Our Lord Jesus, but also as a time and a path of grace, as we make our way, amidst temptation and struggle with sin, towards the encounter with the glory of the Risen Lord, as a river flows towards its sea. The river, not yet sea, will one day become the sea.
The Lord asks us to follow him at all times, but especially when the cross is heavy. We cannot receive everything without emptying ourselves of self: “He called the people and his disciples to him and said, 'If anyone wants to be a follower of mine, let him renounce himself and take up his cross and follow me. Anyone who wants to save his life will lose it; but anyone who loses his life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.” (Mk 8, 34-35).
Defeat and victory, suffering and joy, the cross and resurrection, penance and celebration, are two sides of the same coin, the same Reality, they are a paradox of the one Truth of Faith: the power of Christ crucified and Risen can transform our life story, our whole life, made of frequent no and yes, into one great yes to God.
Humanity has been redeemed by Jesus, but for redemption to be effective, the individual must make an act of faith in Him. If we entrust ourselves completely to Jesus, then he "enters" our life, unifying it with his own.
Without this act of faith in Him, Jesus cannot perform the miracle which transforms life. Human strength and goodwill, are not enough: it is like trying to draw a line which continues to break; like building a road which keeps breaking and I cannot proceed. Without conversion to Christ, in faith, my life, is formed, or better deformed, of pieces of existence thrown here and there, right steps forward, wrong steps backwards. What remains: fragments of an unfinished project, so fragile, because it lacks the grace of Jesus, the Rock!
Without faith in Him and love for Him, life escapes us inexorably, stolen by time, like a tangled skein of events, often commonplace, of which we cannot find the beginning, because we do not know where to start.
But a meeting with Jesus changes everything: it means starting again with Him with his word, the "golden thread" which holds everything together, his Truth, which is not fragmented or altered, it is simply the Truth!
Then I can hear his voice, broaden my vision, here is somebody absolutely different who speaks words which are extraordinarily true, words for many a utopia, but for believers they open to marvellous realities: “I am the resurrection and the life; Anyone who believes in me, even though that person dies, will live ” (Jn 11, 25).
How many broken, thrown away lives, coming into contact with the saving presence of Jesus, are “resuscitated”, recomposed, like the countless bones in the vision of Ezekiel: “Thus says the Lord Yahweh to these bones: Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and you shall live. I will lay sinews on you, and will bring up flesh on you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live; and you shall know that I am Yahweh.” (Ez 37, 5-6).
With the vivifying power of the Spirit lives are healed, they are unified in the First Principle of existence and begin to live again. Not only the Gospel tells us of many such “skeletons”, which return to life, Jesus heals many suffering in soul and body y, mentally, morally, physically. The blind at heart, unable to see, have their life and sight restored, through faith, thanks to the miraculous intervention of Christ.
Not only the Gospel offers us testimony that the Christian message is not utopia, that miracles are the order of the day for those with faith. In two thousand years of Christianity, everywhere, at every latitude and longitude, in every epoch of history, we see the testimony of those who believed in the Lord Jesus and rewrote His Gospel, line by line, with their life. The saints are sublime witnesses of this and their tombs sing out one of the most beautiful truths: in God, life is forever!
Unless Jesus enters our life and operates with his grace, nothing happens in life, everything passes since without him everything is vain.
Jesus accepts us, as we are, where we are, with our qualities and our defects, with our faults and our virtues: at the tax bench like Levi (Mk 2, 14); in the middle of the road like the blind Bartimeaus in Jerico (Mk 10, 46); hidden in the crowd like the women with a haemorrhage (Mk 5, 32); if we believe in Him, He makes us new creatures, He gives us a new life, the life of the spirit!
This spiritual life, like the rising sun on the horizon, stands out against the life of the flesh occupied with the things of the flesh, horizontal things, restricted to a small fragment of the finite reality. But the more the sun, that is Jesus' life of grace, grows in the soul, the more it lifts us above everything else and we learn, as we walk with Jesus, that after pain there is always joy, after darkness light, after storm, calm. How wrong we are to seek happiness on only one side of the coin: in light, calm and joy…this sort of happiness, disappears when the other side of reality appears, the side the world rejects thinking to anaesthetise it and enjoy only the positive part of life. No, this is not what the Gospel teaches! The Lord came to take everything and to ransom everything in order to lift it up to God, to transform it into grace, into supernatural light, into divine joy: light and darkness, joy and pain, calm and storm. Jesus sleeps not only when the sea is calm, he sleeps also amidst the storm, because neither calm nor tempest can lift us up to God, only what is united to Christ in love, leads us to Heaven.
With the assistance of the most expert of guides, the Sorrowful Mother, who knows the path of pain which leads to glory, may this Season of Lent become for all of us a freeing space, open and projected towards Heaven where Jesus waits for us definitively. (Agenzia Fides 25/2/2009; righe 71, parole 1134)
