Oct 9 Mon
Reading the New Testament helps you to get to know our Lord better every day.
Knowing Jesus better makes it easier to love him.
Being able to love Christ, to be with him, and then to look at yourself in Christ enables you to be better every day.
And to love Christ is to assure your happiness.
Our zeal to know Christ better each day springs from our love for him. We love our Lord, and therefore want to know him: hence we meditate, we pray, and read the Gospel.
Christian life consists of falling in love with Christ, becoming identified with him. Jesus has lived among us and does so still. We contemplate each step of his earthly life: his birth in Bethlehem, his hidden life, his preaching throughout Palestine, his healing of the sick in body and soul, his proof of love on the Cross, his Resurrection and glorious Ascension into heaven. We see him with the Apostles, how he chooses them and instructs them in the mysteries of God's kingdom.
Saint Josemaría wrote: "You have often joined me as awe-struck spectators, as participants in these scenes. Right from the start, I taught you – who are also apostles, chosen by Jesus with preferential love – to get inside the Gospel story, and then live fraternally like the first Twelve."
How often we gain fresh insight while contemplating a Gospel passage we have already considered many times! Our reading of the Gospel should be marked by eagerness to learn, and to improve. It should be prayerful and reflective, and so influence our whole day. Sometimes a single word or gesture of our Lord helps us to have greater presence of God.
To meditate on the Gospel means to look attentively at Jesus in eagerness to imitate him. We seek to conform our life to his, to make his words and feelings our own, by the help of grace
Here is the goal of our sanctity. The struggle to achieve holiness is not centered on the fight against sin, although this will always be necessary. Rather it is a growing identification with Christ, begun now by sanctifying grace and brought to fullness in the glory of heaven.
We have to love what Christ loves and reject what he rejects, reproducing his life in our own.
Like our Mother Mary, who kept all these things in her heart, we want the example of Christ's life to accompany us at all times. “Remain with us, Lord!” "How sad it would be if you and I were not able to ‘detain’ Jesus who is passing by. What a shame not to ask him to stay!”