411. Twenty-seventh Saturday of Ordinary Time

Meditations no. 367 (unofficial computer-aided translation)

God became man so that we could love him more easily.

Our Lord’s words inspire the crowds with great enthusiasm, and many decide to follow him. From time to time, someone cannot help shouting aloud. The cry of praise for our Blessed Lady in today’s Gospel is also, above all, a cry of admiration for Christ’s sacred Humanity.

Our Father wrote: A village woman one day broke into praise for Jesus exclaiming: Blessed is the womb that bore you, and the breasts that nourished you! Jesus said in reply: Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it. It was a compliment to his mother for her fiat. She lived that “be it done” sincerely, unstintingly, fulfilling its every consequence, but never amid fanfare, rather in the hidden and silent sacrifice of each day.

We have to love Jesus’ sacred Humanity truly, and often express our love in unvoiced cries of adoration, reparation, and thanksgiving. But it cannot be limited to words, though these flow sincerely from our heart. Our love must lead to effective desires to identify ourselves with Christ, to become like him, to be, as our Father tirelessly insisted, alter Christus, ipse Christus: another Christ, Christ himself.

But to be ipse Christus, Christ himself, we must see ourselves in him. It’s not enough to have a general idea of the spirit of Jesus’ life; we have to learn the details of his life and, through them, his attitudes. And, especially, we must contemplate his life, to derive from it strength, light, serenity, peace.

This is the great mystery we never tire of contemplating: moved by love for all men and women, the Son of God came to bring us confidence of access through our faith in him. Our poor human intellect will never completely fathom this marvellous mystery. All this human behaviour is the behaviour of God. For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily. Christ is God become man: a complete, perfect man. And through his human nature, he shows us what his divine nature is.

Our Father taught us to meditate on Christ’s life frequently. Here we find the strength we need to follow our Lord closely and be apostolic: If we want to bring other men and women to our Lord, we must first go to the Gospel and contemplate Christ’s love. We could take the central events of his Passion, for, as he himself said: Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. But we can also look at the rest of his life, his everyday dealings with the people he met.

In order to bring men his message of salvation and show them God’s love, Christ, who was perfect God and perfect man, acted in a human and a divine way. God comes down to man’s level. He takes on our nature completely, except for sin.

It makes me very happy to realize that Christ wanted to be fully a man, with flesh like our own. I am moved when I contemplate how wonderful it is for God to love with a man’s heart.

Contemplating Christ’s sacred Humanity is the best way to love God.

Many years ago in a meditation our Father told us: Whenever I pray with my children … I like to look this way at the life of Christ our Lord: his birth in a stable, his growing up like all other children, his thirty years of hidden life, his Death on a Cross for all mankind. I contemplate him like this because I want to learn from him; and to learn from him, the best I can do is to get to know his life. I want to reproduce Christ’s life in you, God’s children in Opus Dei, by helping you read the Gospel and meditate on it. Thanks to prayer, we have Jesus’ entire life in our head, like a beautiful full-colour film that we can run whenever we want.

Christ’s love for us requires our generous response: love is repaid with love. And in order to love him, we need to get to know him, to contemplate his sacred Humanity, becoming very familiar with every detail of his life on earth. Our Father said: Talk with him in the word, in prayer, in a constant dialogue filled with words of affection and love: reading his life, following closely in his footsteps, being another character in the Gospel scenes. He became man to make it easier for us to talk with him. Don’t you like sharing confidences with old friends? I certainly do. Well, that is what Christ does with us. Do you see now why I want you to love our Lord’s sacred Humanity? So that you can go to him more trustingly. Many times a day I close my eyes because - let me repeat - I like to contemplate Christ’s sacred Humanity as in a film, for I love him with all my soul.

We can respond to Christ’s love by often praying about his sacred Humanity. We can bring to our prayer a gesture of his that moves our heart, his dedication to the Apostles, his continual self-giving. We enlist our imagination and memory, our mind and will, to live alongside Jesus, seeing ourselves as one more participant in the scenes. The whole secret of holiness is to become like him, our model. Therefore we read the Gospel daily, so that we never lack the fuel needed to keep the flame of our love enkindled.

Among the many scenes from Christ’s life, our Father taught us to meditate especially on the Passion, since it so clearly manifests the depth of God’s love for us. Do you want to accompany Jesus closely, very closely?… Open the holy Gospel and read the Passion of our Lord. But don’t just read it: live it. There’s a big difference. To read is to recall something that happened in the past; to live is to find oneself present at an event that is happening here and now, to be someone taking part in those scenes. Then, allow your heart to open wide; let it place itself next to our Lord. And when you notice it trying to slip away - when you see that you are a coward, like the others - ask forgiveness for your cowardice and mine.

Putting our whole heart, without fear, into our relationship with Jesus.

My son, give me your heart, and let your eyes observe my ways. Our Lord wants us to love him as he has loved us: with all our faculties and senses, all the strength of our being, all the capacity of our poor heart. Ask Jesus, our Father encouraged us, to grant you a Love like a purifying furnace, where your poor flesh -your poor heart - may be consumed and cleansed of all earthly miseries… Pray that it be emptied of self and filled with him.

We have to love Jesus with the only heart we have - our heart of flesh, born to love - without fear of going too far. God does not want us to be dry and rigid, lifeless. He wants us to be filled with his love! We’re not bachelors or spinsters, who are often unhappy people who never had the generosity to love. We should live, work and die as people in love, if we’re faithful. But if we don’t put our whole heart into loving our Lord, we can’t claim we really love him. I don’t have one heart for loving God with, and another for loving people here on earth, our Father stressed. With the same heart with which I loved my parents, with the same heart with which I love my daughters and sons, I love Christ, and the Father, and the Holy Spirit.

On occasions we may find ourselves cold and listless. We should not then get discouraged and follow our Lord begrudgingly, as if fulfilling an onerous duty. Loving with our whole heart does not necessarily mean that our feelings will respond. What is essential is our conscious decision to love God, even if we feel nothing. If ever we sense our love cooling down, we should try to get our heart to react. If you want your heart to respond well, our Father taught us, I advise you to place yourself in one of our Lord’s wounds … My children, while always recognising how little we are, we need to come close to him, hold on to him tightly, and feel the beating of his Heart.

St Bonaventure urged: Let us enter Jesus’ humble heart through the door of his lanced side. Here lies hidden the treasure of charity that surpasses words. Here we find devotion and the grace of repentance; we learn meekness and patience in adversity, compassion for the afflicted, and above all, we learn to have a contrite and humble heart. Inside the Heart of Christ, our own love is enkindled and we always find peace: Cor Iesu sacratissimum et misericors, dona nobis pacem! Most Sacred and Merciful Heart of Jesus, grant us peace!

How truly lovable is the Sacred Humanity of our God! -You “entered” into the most holy Wound of your Lord’s right hand, and you asked me: “If one of Christ’s Wounds cleanses, heals, soothes, strengthens and kindles and enraptures, what will the five not do, open on the wood?”

Our Blessed Lady, Mary, ancilla Domini, will teach us to love God with our whole heart. She will let you partake of the treasures she keeps in her heart, our Father wrote, for “never has it been known that anyone who sought her protection was left unaided.”