188. Third Sunday of Ordinary Time (B)

Meditations no. 563 (unofficial computer-aided translation)

Universal call to holiness and apostolate.

AFTER John had been arrested, Jesus came into Galilee preaching the gospel of God, saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.”

From the beginning of his public life, Jesus addresses the universal call to holiness to all men and women, excluding no one. To this end, he affirms the need to convert and to believe in him with a practical faith, which embraces each of our actions. Conversion, the firm determination to live according to God’s will, is the first and indispensable step in a journey that will only end with the end of our existence on this earth.

This decision must be accompanied by the conviction that conversion is a matter of an instant. Sanctification is the work of a lifetime. Indeed, on the path of a Christian, every day, every moment of his passage through this world, marks the beginning of a new conversion, of placing himself in God’s hands, asking him to increase faith, hope and charity in us, and that these virtues continually inform Christian action.

God does not treat souls as a mass-production industry. For each one he has a unique and unrepeatable project, a vocation, which will be revealed and acquire indelible contours; normally, this universal call to holiness and apostolate is revealed to each one through a thousand circumstances, as it corresponds to the inspirations of grace. Because personal holiness is not an entelechy, but a precise, divine and human reality, which is constantly manifested in daily acts of Love.

People expect someone to help them discover God in their lives; and that someone can be each one of us. We turn to God with the words of the Psalm: show me the path I must follow, for I lift up my soul to you. May they see and respond generously, every day, to that call, in the state and situation in which they find themselves: each one of us remains in the vocation in which he was called, St. Paul warns. Faith and the vocation of Christians, St. Josemaría writes, affect our whole existence, and not just a part. Relationships with God are necessarily relationships of self-giving, and they assume a sense of totality. The attitude of the man of faith is to look at life, with all its dimensions, from a new perspective: the one given to us by God.

Loving one’s Christian vocation entails the effort to live in an attitude of gratitude, with the desire to direct all our actions to the fulfillment of God’s express will. Perhaps some of you, St. Josemaría wrote, think that I am referring exclusively to a sector of select people. Do not be so easily deceived, moved by cowardice or comfort. Feel, instead, the divine urgency of being each one another Christ, ipse Christus, the same Christ; in short, the urgency that our conduct should be consistent with the norms of the faith, since ours-the one we must claim-is not a second-rate holiness, which does not exist. And the main requirement that is asked of us-well in accordance with our nature-is to love: charity is the bond of perfection (Col 3:14); charity, which we must practice in accordance with the explicit commands that the Lord himself establishes: you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind (Mt 22:37), and you will not hold anything back from us. This is what holiness consists of.

That call may have a specific modality.

THERE ARE MANY, as many as there are souls, the paths that lead to holiness, and they all have a common denominator: identification with Jesus Christ. But within this unity of vocation, it must be considered that the Mystical Body of Christ is not a monolithic block, but is configured “as an ‘organic’ communion, analogous to that of a living and working body. It is characterized, in fact, by the simultaneous presence of diversity and complementarity of vocations and conditions of life, of ministries, charisms and responsibilities”. Because of this diversity and complementarity, the Lord calls some to carry out concrete tasks for the good of all.

In the Gospel of the Mass today we have an example of this peculiar call. St Mark recounts the Lord’s decisive encounter with the first four Apostles and his invitation to carry out a specific mission. As he passed by the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and Andrew, Simon’s brother, casting their nets into the sea, for they were fishermen. And Jesus said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.

The Lord’s gaze rests on those men who were exercising the trade with which they earned their living. There are no qualities in them that lead one to think that they were people especially suited to the task that Jesus entrusted to them; indeed, throughout the years of their stay at his side, their little capacity to understand the things of God, their human ambition, their lack of culture and their cowardice in the moment of trial will be palpable. However, the Lord calls them, so that it is clear that they are only instruments, while at the same time he grants them the appropriate graces to carry out the mission of fishers of men. Simon and Andrew do not doubt this: immediately, leaving their nets, they followed him. Once and for all, and for the rest of their lives, they have made the decision to follow Jesus with a particular mission, leaving aside everything else, to fulfill the task he proposes to them. Because divine choice means - and demands! - personal holiness.

The Lord continued his way along the shore of the lake, and a little further on, he saw James of Zebedee and John his brother, who were in the boat mending their nets; and immediately he called them. And they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired servants and went after him. A new proof of trust on the part of Jesus, who obtains the same answer from the two brothers.

Without leaving the place where we were, the Lord wanted to illuminate the panorama of our lives with new light for us, opening before our eyes a path indelibly marked, and entrusting us with a concrete participation in the mission of the Church: to make Opus Dei on earth, being Opus Dei yourself. From that moment on, in identification with the spirit that our Father received from the Lord, it becomes a concrete reality that relationships with God are necessarily relationships of self-giving, and assume a sense of totality.

Holiness and apostolate demand of each other.

THE SPECIAL call to holiness and apostolate that we have received leads us to identify ourselves with Jesus Christ in the spirit of Opus Dei. We must live in love with this gift that God has given us, being aware that it is the specific path foreseen by the Lord for us to attain holiness and seek the good of souls. Thank the Lord for the continual delicacy, paternal and maternal, with which he treats you.

You, who have always dreamed of great adventures, have engaged in a stupendous undertaking … that leads you to holiness.

I insist: thank God, with a life of apostolate.

It is a joy to consider some words that St. John Chrysostom puts in the mouth of Jesus Christ, addressed to each of the Christians. “It is as if I were saying to you, ’I have kindled the light; but whether it continues to burn depends on your apostolic zeal. And this not only to attain your own salvation, but also that of those who will enjoy its splendor, and thus be led as it were by the hand to the truth.”

The Lord leans on us, and wants to make us participants in the task of the Redemption: Christ, who ascended the Cross with his arms wide open, with the gesture of an Eternal Priest, wants to count on us-we are nothing! -, to bring to “all” men the fruits of his Redemption. Isn’t that something wonderful? Isn’t it to go crazy-crazy with love-as St. Josemaría made us think?

Holiness and apostolate are intertwined and demand of each other. The desire for the apostolate is the exact, adequate, necessary manifestation of the interior life. When the love of God is savored, the weight of souls is felt. There can be no holiness where an apostolate full of works is lacking. It is not compatible to live according to the Heart of Jesus Christ, and not to feel sent, like him, sinners saved facere (1 Tim 1:15), because, as our Father reminds us, if you love the Lord, you must “necessarily” feel the blessed weight of souls, in order to bring them to God. The Second Vatican Council expresses it in strong terms: “The member [of the Mystical Body of Christ] who does not contribute according to his own capacity to the increase of the body must be considered useless for the Church and for himself.”

The thirst for souls, if it is authentic, is inseparable from the search for one’s own holiness. Agreed, our Father writes: your concern must be “them”. But your first concern must be yourself, your interior life; because, otherwise, you will not be able to serve them. And again: there are many people around you, and you have no right to be an obstacle to their spiritual good, to their eternal happiness.

“You are bound to be holy: not to disappoint God by the choice he has made you, nor those creatures who expect so much from your life as a Christian.

Therefore, we must cry out: Lord, make us crazy, with that catchy madness that attracts many to your apostolate.

None, in the Work, is a loose piece. With one soul and one heart, living a special Communion of Saints that makes us always united with each other and with the Father, we know that “the apostolic task of the Prelature - an exciting task, capable of fulfilling the noblest desires of service that God has placed in our hearts - will continue to be carried out with prayer and with the daily effort of each and every one in the place and in the circumstances in which Providence places us in the course of the years.”

In the second reading of the Mass we hear St. Paul’s exhortation: time is short (…). The appearance of this world passes away. It is an incentive so that each of the moments of our lives - without any escaping us - may be directed exclusively to holiness and to putting souls before the Lord.

Let us entrust to the intercession of our Mother the resolutions that the Holy Spirit has inspired in us throughout this meditation.