250. Tenth Sunday of Ordinary Time (A)

Meditations no. 577 (unofficial computer-aided translation)

God’s mercy is revealed in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

THE healthy do not need a doctor, but the sick. Go and learn what meaning it has: “I desire mercy and not sacrifice”; for I have not come to call the righteous but sinners. This is how the Lord expresses himself in this Sunday’s Gospel, showing that God’s characteristic attitude, what defines him above all other attributes, is mercy. Deus, cui proprium est misereri semper et parcere … , we pray every day in the prayers of the Work.

“In Christ and through Christ, God also becomes particularly visible in his mercy, that is, the attribute of divinity is highlighted, which the Old Testament already defined as ‘mercy’ using various concepts and terms. Christ gives a definitive meaning to the entire Old Testament tradition of divine mercy. Not only does he speak of it and explain it using likenesses and parables, but he himself also and above all incarnates and personifies it. He himself is, in a certain sense, mercy. To those who see it and find it in him, God makes himself concretely ‘visible’ as a Father ‘rich in mercy’ (Eph 2:4)”. We invoke the Holy Spirit as Comforter, because he understands us in the depths of our being. The whole Holy Trinity is Mercy.

To have mercy is not only to have compassion for the other. To have mercy is, above all, to eliminate the evil that is the cause of suffering. God is merciful to the highest degree because he is omnipotent and suppresses evil at its root. However, many ask the question: if there is so much evil in the world, why does God allow it? It is the scandal of evil that in all times has been and continues to be a challenge to faith in the merciful and omnipotent God. Either God is good and merciful, it is objected, and then he is not omnipotent, or God is omnipotent, but then he could not be good, since evil exists. Mercy and omnipotence seem incompatible.

Faced with this false dilemma, Pope Benedict XVI teaches that “an authentically religious attitude prevents man from setting himself up as God’s judge, accusing him of allowing misery without feeling compassion for creatures. … Often we are not made aware of the reason why God bridles his arm instead of intervening. On the other hand, he does not prevent us from crying out like Jesus on the Cross: ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ (Mt 27:46) (…). Saint Augustine gives the answer of faith to this suffering of ours:”If you understand, non est Deus” (Sermon 52:16), if you understand him, then he is not God.”

It is time to bow our heads and adore the inscrutable divine plans, which seek only our good. “In fact, Christians continue to believe, despite all the misunderstandings and confusions of the world, in the ‘goodness of God and his love for man’ (3:4). Even if they are immersed like other men in the dramatic and complex events of history, they remain firm in the certainty that God is Father and loves us, even if his silence remains incomprehensible to us.”

In Christ, true God and true man, omnipotence and mercy are united. God takes evil upon himself with his death on the Cross and conquers it with his Resurrection. As a good doctor, he heals not only the symptoms, but the root of all evil, pride. The true battlefield where the struggle between good and evil is waged is not the physical world, but the human heart. The heart is like the affective fund of the soul that gives direction to the intelligence and the will and that has to be clean in order to see God.

Our personal vocation is a manifestation of divine mercy.

“THERE ARE SOME who boast, not of riches, nor of physical strength, nor of the power of their dignity, but of their own holiness. This class of strong people,” writes St. Augustine, “… is to be avoided, feared, turned away, and not imitated. Such fortitude prevented the Jews from entering through the eye of the needle and passing into the kingdom of heaven. For, presuming to be righteous and considering themselves to be healthy people, they refused medicine and killed the physician.”

A few words of Jesus to the scribes and Pharisees give reason for the call of the publican Matthew to the apostleship. He saw a man sitting on the altar, whose name was Matthew, and said to him, “Follow me.” He got up and followed him. Divine mercy is the cause of Matthew’s call to the apostleship, for the Lord has not come to call the righteous but sinners; and he has called them to collaborate with him in the redemption of evil, in the extension of divine mercy to all men.

Our vocation is also a manifestation of God’s mercy to each one of us. There, in his mercy, we have the key to understanding our calling. God has granted us the immense joy of being close to him and of being sent by him to other people, because he is good, because his mercy is eternal. With this conviction, St. Josemaría was able to say: Never waver! From now on I tell you-and I do not know your personal problems, but the souls have a tremendous parallelism, even if they are different-that you have a divine vocation, that Christ Jesus has called you from eternity. Not only has he pointed his finger at you, but he has kissed you on the forehead. That is why, for me, your head shines like a star.

The specific vocation to Opus Dei is like a new light for discovering more deeply what Christ asks of all the baptized in the midst of the world. It is an unfolding “of the potentialities contained in the Christian vocation, through the effective impulse of a very particular grace of God that impels us to become aware that we are especially his children, and to behave in accordance with such sublime dignity.”

Our call is a concretization of the universal vocation to holiness and apostolate in and through the activities of everyday and ordinary life, perhaps apparently monotonous. Like an overwhelming avalanche, our vocation embraces the whole of life, what we are and do, our projects, desires and thoughts. The whole of existence receives light and vibration from the specific grace of the call, a grace that is, after faith, the greatest that the Lord has been able to bestow on a creature.

Far from being a burden, the divine vocation means an ability to reach the highest goal that can be imagined in this life, to carry out the most ambitious project on this earth, supernatural and natural at the same time: holiness and apostolate in the midst of the world. So many people are capable of being enthusiastic about human plans and goals, and we too are full of enthusiasm for noble human tasks. Why then not aspire to the highest? Why not propose the most ambitious? Considering the beauty of God’s Love and the new light of our vocation, do we not want to cry out: fools, leave those worldly things that shrink the heart … and often debase it … , leave that and come with us after Love?

Certainly, fidelity to one’s vocation sometimes costs sacrifice and effort, like everything that is worthwhile. Tiredness or reluctance can occur, external and interior difficulties, coming from work, from living together, from lack of means. … It is time to look to Jesus Christ and to turn to Him. Like St. Peter who, following the word of the Lord, began to walk on water. But when he saw that the wind was very strong, he was frightened and, as it began to sink, he began to cry: “Lord, save me!” Immediately Jesus stretched out his hand, grasped him and said to him: “O man of little faith, why have you doubted?

When the gift is more difficult and the perception that our call is divine mercy is perhaps obscured a little, let us ask like Peter: Lord, save me! It also helps to consider the scene that occurred at the well of Sychar. The Lord asks the Samaritan woman for a small favor, but she resists. For whatever reasons, he does not want to do her this service. And Jesus answers: if you knew God’s gift and who it is that says to you: “Give me a drink”, you would have asked Him and He would have given you living water. We must be convinced that what at first glance seems like a sacrifice is in fact a gift with which God desires to purify the self-giving.

Gratitude, humility and joy.

THROUGH the vocation to holiness and apostolate in the Work, God has addressed his word full of mercy to us, as he did to Matthew. A word that is efficacious and creative: God of the fathers and Lord of mercy, who made all things with your word … , exclaims the Sage. It is not the mere communication of an intellectual content, but self-communication of God himself, the transmission of eternal life. God has looked at each one of us to call us from all eternity, before putting us into existence! In the face of the greatness of this choice, a proof of affection and mercy, we are filled with gratitude and humility, convinced - as St. Paul says - that he chose the foolishness of the world to confound the wise, and God chose the weakness of the world to confound the strong; God chose the vile, the despicable of the world, the things that are nothing, to destroy what is, so that no mortal can boast before God.

Every human person discovers the voice of God in the intimacy of his heart at a certain moment in his or her life. Surely we still remember the moment or moments in our personal history in which we accepted Jesus’ invitation. But vocation does not belong to the past, as if the present were only the continuation of an initial impulse whose driving force was gradually attenuated by natural habituation. Vocation always remains relevant. If we look at the lives of the Apostles, we realize that Jesus, in various situations, always calls them with the same words. He summons Simon and Andrew at the beginning of their mission: follow me and I will make you fishers of men. And in the same way he addresses Matthew: follow me. After the passion and the threefold confession of reparation of his love, Peter hears again from the Lord’s lips, after the years and so many experiences, the same word, the same call. At the beginning and after the passion, in such different circumstances, the same word, the same call.

We can imagine that Matthew must have experienced a great surprise when he heard Jesus’ imperious appeal. Undoubtedly, the joy of leaving everything to follow Christ out of love prevailed. But perhaps he also felt a certain concern: for the people who depended on him, for their sustenance. He entrusts everything to Jesus and leaves it entirely in his hands. Whoever calls us also takes care of the rest. God does nothing by halves: he knows what we need and foresees what is necessary. This is also an aspect of divine mercy, which awaits a response of trust.

Certainly there will be difficulties, the devil will try to sow fears or suspicions in the heart, as he did with Eve and Adam. He led them to think that God is not so kind, because he did not let them taste the fruit of the tree that was in the middle of the garden, and that it was good to eat, attractive to the eye. Eve is convinced that she will be happier if she does not obey God, who is our loving and wise Father. And since it is not possible to live without the aspiration to happiness, she begins to build a false happiness, outside of God’s plans, distrusting the infinite goodness of the Creator.

The Virgin Mary is the new Eve who collaborates with Jesus to heal the rebellion of sin; moreover, as mediatrix of all graces, she interceded for us so that we might receive our vocation. “My daughter, my son, the Lord has also kindled in you the light of the vocation to the Work. Perhaps a glance from his Mother moved him to the point of granting you, through the immaculate hand of the Blessed Virgin, that great gift (St. Josemaría, Notes on a Meditation, November 3, 1955).” She too will obtain for us the grace of perseverance: invoke the Lady and you will be faithful.