Jan 9 Thu
How should I meditate on the Gospel?
God became man so that we could love him more easily.
Our Lord's words inspired the crowds enthusiastically, and many decided to follow him.
When a woman shouted: "‘Blessed is the womb that bore you, and the breasts that nourished you!’ Jesus replied: ‘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 each day's hidden and silent sacrifice."
We have to love Jesus' human nature, his sacred Humanity, truly, and often express our love in unvoiced cries of adoration, reparation, petition, and thanksgiving. But we should not 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 another Christ, Christ himself.
"But to be ‘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."
St Josemaría taught us to meditate on Christ's life frequently. There 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 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."
“When you love someone a lot, you want to know things about them. We meditate on the life of our Lord, from his Birth in a manger to his Death on the Cross, and then his Resurrection. And we hold our Lord's life in our memory like a film. So, without needing a book, just by closing our eyes at any moment, we can contemplate him, and live with him and with our Lady, who is his Mother and ours, and with the holy women, and the Apostles. We conjure up his image, not as if we were watching a film, but as if we were part of that film, by our love."
To set out and follow Jesus, we must meditate on all that our Lord has done for us, and fill ourselves with a yearning to respond, to follow him without hesitation or indecision; in short, we should resolve to repay love with love, to give our life for Jesus Christ, who came down from heaven by the weight of his Love. Hence, our true love will lead us to joyous sacrifice.
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