58. Wednesday after the Epiphany

Meditations no. 52 (unofficial computer-aided translation)

Contemplating and imitating the hidden life of Jesus.

And Jesus increased in wisdom and in years, and in favour with God and man. For thirty years the great light that was to shine on the whole world had remained hidden. For a long time the great mystery of the Incarnation went unnoticed by the world, while the Son of God lived year after year in subjection to a man and a woman in a little town in Galilee and carried out his humble work there. Truly, you are a God who hides himself, O God of Israel, the Saviour.

The fact that Jesus grew up and lived just like us shows us that human existence and all the ordinary activity of men have a divine meaning. No matter how much we may have reflected on all this, we should always be surprised when we think of the thirty years of obscurity which made up the greater part of Jesus’ life among men. He lived in obscurity, but, for us, that period is full of light. It illuminates our days and fills them with meaning, for we are ordinary Christians who lead an ordinary life, just like millions of other people all over the world.

Christ chose to spend most of his earthly life hidden in the silence of Nazareth. St Clement of Rome asks: If the Lord wished to hide himself in that way, what are we to do who live for him under the sweet yoke of his grace? Let us consider once more Jesus’ hidden life, which we want to imitate.

That was the way Jesus lived for thirty years, as fabri filius, the son of the carpenter. There followed three years of public life, spent among the crowds. People were surprised: “Who is this?” they asked. “Where has he learned these things?” For he was just like them: he had shared the life of ordinary people. He was the faber, filius Mariae, the carpenter, the son of Mary. And he was God; he was achieving the redemption of mankind and drawing all things to himself.

Work and interior life.

As with other events in his life, we should never contemplate Jesus’ hidden years without feeling moved. We should realize that they are in themselves a call to shake off our selfish and easy-going ways.

Like Jesus, we too must grow in age, grace and wisdom. As we contemplate Jesus’ hidden life we discover practical pointers for our own lives. We see the unity of life, both simple and strong, which we strive for every day. In our souls this unity of life produces what the Catechism of the Work describes as the need and, as it were, the supernatural instinct of purifying all our actions and raising them to the order of grace, of sanctifying them and making them a means of apostolate.

We need to discover once again that all our life has a co-redemptive value, and that our souls will grow and mature supernaturally in the exact fulfilment of the obligations of the moment. As we read in The Way: That work - humble, monotonous, small - is prayer expressed in action that prepares you to receive the grace of the other work - great and wide and deep - of which you dream.

It may well be that that humble and hidden task, that silent toil, is the best anvil on which to forge an upright intention. Working for God in an unassuming way, day in, day out, with zeal for souls, not seeking applause, and often not even seeing the divine results of our work: all this helps purify our intention.

It could happen that particular circumstances cut us off from direct contact with souls for a longer or shorter period. For a while we may be ill, or we may need to dedicate the whole of our time to internal tasks in the Work. But if our intention is upright, that period of time, however long or short it is, will also be deeply apostolic, thanks to the Communion of Saints. We should meditate on our Father’s words: The plants lay hidden under the snow. And the farmer, the owner of the land, observed with satisfaction: “Now they are growing on the inside.”

I thought of you, of your forced inactivity.

Tell me: are you too growing “on the inside”?

Let us consider Jesus, the Word of God, hidden for so many years in a workshop in Nazareth. He is known only to the Father and the Holy Spirit, and to Mary and Joseph. This consideration will lead to a renewed desire on our part to stay near to him, and to imitate his hidden life at Nazareth, which was so supernaturally fruitful.

Daily work carried out with prayer and sacrifice makes us co-redeemers.

Let me go back again to the openness and simplicity of Jesus’ life, which I have brought to your attention so many times. His hidden years are not without significance, nor were they simply a preparation for the years which were to come after -those of his public life. Since 1928 I have understood clearly that God wants our Lord’s whole life to be an example for Christians. I saw this with special reference to his hidden life, the years he spent working side by side with ordinary men. Our Lord wants many people to ratify their vocation during years of quiet, unspectacular living. Obeying God’s will always means leaving our selfishness behind, but there is no reason why it should entail cutting ourselves off from the normal life of ordinary men who share the same status, work and social position as we.

I dream - and the dream has come true - of multitudes of God’s children, sanctifying themselves as ordinary citizens, sharing the ambitions and endeavours of their colleagues and friends. I want to shout to them about this divine truth: if you are there in the middle of ordinary life, it doesn’t mean Christ has forgotten about you or hasn’t called you. He has invited you to stay among the activities and concerns of the world. He wants you to know that your human vocation, your profession, your talents, are not omitted from his divine plans. He has sanctified them and made them a most acceptable offering to his Father.

Jesus’ hidden life speaks to us of silent dedication. It teaches us to pour out our love for God into all the ordinary things of life, and to keep rectifying our intention. For work, all work, bears witness to the dignity of man, to his dominion over creation. It is an opportunity to develop one’s personality. It is a bond of union with others, the way to support one’s family, a means of aiding in the improvement of the society in which we live and in the progress of all humanity.

For a Christian, our Father writes, these horizons extend and grow wider … Moreover, since Christ took it into his hands, work has become for us a redeemed and redemptive reality. Not only is it the background of man’s life, it is a means and path of holiness. It is something to be sanctified and something which sanctifies.

The more we contemplate Jesus’ hidden life and his many years of work in Nazareth, the clearer vision we will have of the model which, by divine vocation, we are called to imitate in Opus Dei. We ask Mary and Joseph to help us to make the life which they shared with Jesus part of our own lives too.