How can I get to know Jesus better?
By reading the New Testament every day.
Our zeal to know Christ better each day springs from our love for him: hence our meditation, prayers, and Gospel reading.
Christian life consists of falling in love with Christ and becoming identified with Him. Jesus has lived among us and continues to do so. Reading the Gospel, 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 his glorious Ascension into heaven. We see him with the Apostles, how he chooses them and instructs them in the mysteries of God's kingdom.
We need to enter deeply into the Gospel. Thus, 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 a greater presence of God. As St. Josemaría said: “We must live so immersed in the Gospel that each of us could say with St John that we have heard with our ears, seen with our eyes, touched with our hands the Word of Life."
Knowing Jesus better makes it easier to love him.
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. “I advised you to read the New Testament and to enter into each scene and take part in it, as one more of the characters. The minutes you spend in this way each day enable you to ‘incarnate’ the Gospel, reflect it in your life, and help others to reflect it.”
Put on the Lord Jesus Christ, St Paul urges us. 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 here by sanctifying grace and brought to fullness in the glory of heaven.
Love stems from knowledge, from a personal, trusting relationship. Thus, we need to be familiar with Jesus' life. By meditating on the Gospel, we learn to fall in love with him; we see that Jesus is human and has a heart like ours. He became man so that we could draw near to him with greater trust. When reading the Gospel, we need to listen closely to Jesus' every word, dwell on each gesture, and allow it to move our hearts. “I would like you to close your earthly eyes and contemplate Christ's life as in a film, and take part in his life with the Apostles and the holy women, even closer to Jesus than St John. If not, it's not good enough."
Oct 17 Fri