Brothers:
blessed and praised it is our God and Lord that through Christ He has
revealed us His mistery and His plan of salvation for all the people
that believe in Him. He also has given us the gift of the freedom to
look for His will and to fulfill it in our life with His grace.
In our
colloquial language we say: “God willing...” when we want to do some
things: an encounter, a project, or simply something that we try
to undertake and to achieve with the God´s help. “God willing” it
is a conditional phrase with which we recognize the sovereign will
of God, as well as the conscience in faith of being in His hands;
and the conscience of that He, who sees and can do everything, wants
only our good. The phrase: “God willing”, expresses in humility (the
one that God asked us the last Sunday) a wise and prudent attitude
which is common to simple people.
My brothers,
I think that the phrase does not express an attitude that does not
take the responsibility and that does not practice the human cooperation
through the free participation in the happening of the events. This
phase expresses that the believer makes what he has to do, but God
(that has our lives in His hands) has the last word because He is
the Lord of the history.
This
phrase (God willing) also does not exclude that the believer wants
and can investigate what the God´s will is. We, the true believers,
want to do His will; in fact, we look for knowing what it is to do
the necessary thing and to adapt ourselves to His will in the most
conscious and responsible way. And How we are going to know what God
wants?
My dear
brothers, it is about centering life in the God´s project, in His
loving and wise will; we have (in the first place) the resource of
His Word which is given to us by many ways specially the Holy Scripture,
the teaching of the church, and the life of every one of us.
Understanding
the deepest sense of our individual and universal existence depends
on the fact of adapting ourselves to the divine plan, and it is not
the success the one that depends on it like the worldly criteria proposes
to us. Many attitudes that are very common between us: being the first
ones, having good health, reaching a good economic level, etc, all
of this is a deceptive and useless thing before what really has value,
and later on all this will be a source of frustrations and deep disappointments.
Brothers, it is very important to look
for the will of God. His will is that all of us save ourselves, but
to coincide with His sovereign will, it has its own exigencies. Today,
the Lord Jesus talks to us in His Gospel. It is indispensable to obey
to the call of Jesus to reach the kingdom of God, and it is very important
to leave everything and to walk through the way that was made by the
cross, but it only can be possible after a deep discernment, and after
a radical option for which it is necessary the wisdom that can only
come from the God´s Spirit, as the first reading of the book of the
wisdom wants us to understand it.
The text of the first reading says:
If You do not give the man your wisdom sending your Holy Spirit from
heaven, who will know Your aim?, it is the unique thing that we need
to inclines our will to follow Jesus, without this Spirit of love,
we do not have valid reasons to leave everything that impede that
we follow Jesus. We can not have everything in life, and many times
when we want to follow Jesus we find that many things, that we have
and that we love because they give us security, are incompatible with
the option that He offers to us. It is important that we know how
to decide about what we have to leave behind, also because of our
health. And the main reason it is to follow Jesus.
My brothers, being disciples of Christ
is a very serious and deep compromise that does not admit to acting
superficially. Today, the teaching of Jesus goes in this direction.
The Christian faith demands to live itself to depth in the love of
God, and in the love of fellow. This is a characteristic of the pursuit
of Christ: love. It is not about leave the things just by leaving
them, it is about abandoning all these things that impede that we
live in freedom to love God and to love fellow.
Once we are free of ourselves and of
the bond of the blood, we can say in an authentic way the phrase:
“God willing...”; the important thing is that once our will is free
from the blindness of from the myopia, as well as from pride, and
from the excessive yearnings, we have to do that this will coincide
with the God´s will in obedience. My brothers, we will be able to
do this with the time, patience and humility, because God, who is
the Lord of our history, leads us with our cooperation, with His mercy,
and with His love by the ways of His providence.
Brothers, in the celebration from
every Sunday we continuo in this permanent process of an adhesion,
that is every time more mature and radical, to Jesus while we contemplate
His redeeming work in the sacrifice of the cross. Every Sunday we
confirm our option with Christ. We can do it resigning all these things
that can be good for our own accomplishment but that they can be against
the loving project of God. we are living and celebrating faith dying
and raising, as Christ did it, while we take our responsibility that
we have with our tasks in the world.
Our little girl and sweet Lady from
heaven: holy Mary of Guadalupe, our mother and teacher, teaches us
to leave everything to follow Jesus over any other proposal. Amen.
