439. Thirty-first Sunday of Ordinary Time (A)

Meditations no. 619 (unofficial computer-aided translation)

Jesus Christ reveals to us the love of God the Father and our divine sonship.

Jesus Christ has revealed to us the depth of God’s love for men. In the face of the attitude of the Pharisees, who did their good works to be seen by others and to be considered teachers, he warns us to raise our supernatural aims: only one is your teacher and you are all brothers (…). Only one is your Father, the heavenly one (…). Your doctor is only one: Christ. And St. Jerome explains: “No one should be called teacher or father but God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ. Father because everything comes from him, teacher because everything is through him or because we have all been reconciled with God by the economy of his incarnation. We ask ourselves why, in contravention of this precept, the Apostle has described himself as a Doctor of the Gentiles (…). This would be the answer: it is one thing to be a father or teacher by nature, and another to be one by condescension (…). The existence of a single Father, of a single Master, does not prevent us, in a broad sense, from giving others the name of fathers and teachers.”

To those who believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God made man and receive Baptism, God makes them sharers in Christ’s filial relationship with his Father: he adopts him as his son in his only Son, incorporating him into the Mystical Body of Christ. And in this way, the baptized person can invoke God as Father; he can enter into communion with him and with his Son, Jesus Christ; he can adore him with his whole life, and feel lovingly cared for by the heavenly Father.

This aspect of the loving fatherhood of God and of the divine filiation of the Christian, we experience, by God’s will, in a particular way in Opus Dei. The foundation of the Work, St. Josemaría always taught, is not miracles, nor supernatural manifestations of an extraordinary nature, which have occurred because God willed, but divine filiation, the constant work of each day, always with optimism and a good face. And at another time he added: this typical trait of our spirit was born with the Work, and in 1931 it took shape: in humanly difficult moments, in which I was nevertheless certain of the impossible-of what you contemplate today come true-I felt the action of the Lord, which made germinate in my heart and on my lips (…) this tender invocation: Abba! Pater!

At Home we learn to treat God as Father, and to consider often - in the midst of the most common and habitual tasks of life - that we are his beloved children. For me, our Founder insisted, the most fundamental, the best, the most beautiful thing is that it makes me feel like a child of God. It gives a great serenity, even if it is a very stupid thing. We are all children of God, but some do not want to be or do not know it. We have the joy of knowing this, and so we can ask for help. When the difficulty arises: Abba, Pater! And serenity comes immediately.

How much peace we can find if we remember the words of Jesus in the Gospel of today’s Mass! In the fortunate or difficult moments of our lives, or when the Lord makes us feel the weight of the cross with our own suffering or that of others, may those words that God gave birth in the heart of our Founder also spring from our hearts. Let us feel that we are heirs of God’s glory, tenderly loved by a Father who, in heaven and on earth, seeks to give us the best that comes from his loving hands, and in this way we will always walk happily.

Rest in divine filiation. God is a Father full of tenderness, of infinite love. Call him Father many times a day, and tell him - alone, in your heart - that you love him, that you adore him: that you feel the pride and strength of being his child. It is an authentic program of interior life, to be channeled through your relationships of piety with God - few, but constant, I insist - that will allow you to acquire the feelings and manners of a good child.

The fatherhood of God is also manifested in moments of difficulty.

I AM the Great King, and my name is respected among the nations. The Lord treats us with infinite love and wants for us the greatest good he can give us: to participate eternally in his life in Heaven. The spirit of divine filiation is one of the fundamental characteristics of Opus Dei. There is one thing in which we are all equal-being very diverse: in the infinite love that God the Father has for each one of us, his children. Before God we are all small, like children, clumsy in our movements and capable of making mistakes, of falling; but if we seek God’s help, if we reach out to Him, He takes us and lifts us up, He gives security to our journey.

We can all make mistakes, and in fact we make mistakes many times. But God understands our mistakes and allows them, because He wants us free and is always ready to forgive us, if we know how to rectify and turn to Him with simplicity and humility.

It is logical that, at times, if his children suffer a mistake, or are a little unruly, God - as a good pedagogue - will educate them with a demand full of affection and strength. I, whom I love, I rebuke and punish, he says in the Apocalypse. But how delicate are God’s reproofs! Sometimes with a gentle hand, and sometimes with a strong hand, he makes souls mature through love, so that they assume God’s Will as the measure of their lives. My son, do not reject the Lord’s instruction, nor grow weary of his reproofs, because the Lord rebukes those he loves, as a father rebukes his beloved son. And, paraphrasing these words, he affirms the Letter to the Hebrews: what you suffer serves for your correction. God treats you as sons, and what son is there whom his father does not correct?

The Lord leads us suaviter et fortiter on the path of love, which is the way of the Cross. When we abandon ourselves into God’s hands, He often allows us to taste pain, loneliness, contradictions, slander, slander, mockery, inside and out: because He wants to conform us to His image and likeness, and He also tolerates being called crazy and taken for fools… .

This is how Jesus sculpts the souls of his own, without ceasing to give them inwardly serenity and joy (…) and impresses on their lives the conviction that they will only be comfortable when they decide not to be comfortable.

If we take advantage of the occasions of each day, those that seem good and those that seem less good, to see behind God’s loving action, with which he spurs us on and corrects us, we will feel joyful in serving him as his children. Benedict XVI writes that “love is always a process of purification, of renunciations, of painful transformations in ourselves, and thus a path to maturity.”

With the clarity of God in our intellect, which seems inactive, there is no doubt to us that, if the Creator cares for everyone, even his enemies, how much more will he take care of his friends! We are convinced that there is no evil, no contradiction, that does not come for good: thus joy and peace are more firmly established in our spirit, which no human motive can take away from us, because these visitations always leave us something of their own, something divine.

The fatherhood of God is made present in the Work through the Father.

Saint Paul writes to the Thessalonians: we behave gently among you. Like a mother who gives food and warmth to her children, so, moved by our love, we wanted to give you not only the Gospel of God, but even our own lives, so much so dear to you!

The first Christians were well aware of this reality. If they considered their parents as instruments of God to bring them into earthly life, they also saw the divine fatherhood reflected in the Apostle. With all reason, therefore, I could assure them: although you have ten thousand pedagogues in Christ, you do not have many fathers, because I begot you in Christ Jesus through the Gospel.

This same reality is reproduced in the Work, as Don Álvaro made us believe. “The fatherhood of God, that of our Father and that of the Father-whoever it may be in the course of the centuries-are not different fatherhoods, but the same fatherhood, that which exists in God in infinite fullness (cf. Eph 3:15-16) and is shared by those whom He has loved, in the limited way that corresponds to creatures. Do you see that the spirit of divine filiation, for the children of God in Opus Dei, is inseparable from filiation to the Father? For this reason I have pointed out to you once that, if you were not good children of the Father, if we were not all good children of our Father, we could not be good children of God.”

Our Father, by the example of his life, by his prayer and his penance, by his teachings and by his loving whistles of the Good Shepherd, showed us that he would give God his way for his creatures. On many occasions he would tell us: I love you like all the mothers of the world put together: I love you all the same, from the first to the last. This affection was manifested in his mother’s and father’s care for those at his side, and for each and every one of his daughters and sons throughout the world. I would like to leave in your souls the assurance that the Father takes care of each of his children, that I love you-with all my heart-happy in Heaven and happy on earth.

The same is true now with the Father and so it will always be in the Work, because “fatherhood, and the correlative filiation, is a most divine and essential characteristic of our spirit: this is what the Lord wanted from October 2, 1928, when he opened the heart of our Founder to be the Patriarch of this great family that was to extend from pole to pole. And our Father has transmitted it, until the end of time, to all his successors.”

We thank God for having arranged “that, in the bosom of the Church, we should form a ‘little family’ - small, above all, because we are closely united - with a father and children who, if we are faithful, will be more numerous every day: like the sand of the sea, like the stars of heaven (cf. Gen 15:5-6). As happened to Don Alvaro, I feel in my heart and soul the same affection that our Founder felt for each one of us. It is a grace that the Lord grants to those who have the duty to lead the Work.

“Let us pray that, in Opus Dei, beyond the concrete circumstances in which each one’s life develops, no one may miss the warmth of home characteristic of our family. It is a mission entrusted to everyone, for this human and supernatural affection must be manifested in the solicitude of the directors and of all my children to support and help their brothers or sisters, not only in moments of special difficulty that they may go through - a serious illness, a particularly intense setback - but at all times: with prayer, with fraternal correction, with a smile that encourages, with help that goes unnoticed. This way of behaving, in addition to revealing a very tangible sign of fraternity, will indicate the best proof of your affection for the Father. The spirit of filiation necessarily leads to fraternity; and, on the contrary: fraternity well lived, in depth, impels us to be more united to the Father, to pray more constantly for his intentions.”

As we conclude our prayer today, we thank the Blessed Virgin for exercising her motherhood over Christians and over all men, and we ask her that at every moment of our day we may feel accompanied by the love of God, of the Father and of all the people of the Work.