Jul 22 Wed
How did the first generation of Christians live their faith?
"We must get to know and imitate the life of Jesus' disciples, of those who knew Peter and Paul and John, and who were close witnesses of the Master's Death and Resurrection." Among these, many first-generation Christians were chosen by God to bear the supreme witness of martyrdom; they paid with their blood for their faith in Christ.
The early Christians did not live in the catacombs, except occasionally, perhaps during an attack. They were ordinary people and citizens of the capital of the Roman Empire who lived in ordinary houses and walked along the streets. Each family was an "ecclesia domestica", a part of the Church.
They lived faithfully to our Lord in the midst of earthly affairs. Each community of the faithful gathered people from all social strata and all backgrounds. They were people converted to the faith of Christ, which kept them together. All professions were represented in these communities: there were doctors such as Luke; lawyers such as Zenas; financiers such as Erastus; academics such as Apollo; craftsmen such as Alexander; businessmen, small and great; jailers and their families; soldiers and officials; a proconsul, Sergius Paulus, etc. They were poor and rich; slaves and freemen; civilians and military men, like Sebastian.
A great diversity of personal circumstances enriched the Christian communities from the first moment. Upon contemplating this reality, St. Josemaría wrote: “How clear was that general calling to sanctity, within one's profession, without leaving one's own environment!”
“Nevertheless, for centuries, the majority of Christians did not understand this: the ascetical phenomenon of many people seeking sanctity without changing their professional situation; rather, sanctifying their profession and sanctifying themselves by means of their profession. And very soon the doctrine was forgotten, on account of not being lived."
Yet “By raising up his Work in these times, the Lord has willed that the truth about everyone having the duty to reach holiness would never again be unknown or forgotten... and that the majority of Christians should sanctify themselves in the world, through ordinary work."
“Opus Dei’s spirit is both as old as the Gospel and, like the Gospel, new. The very nature of our vocation prompts us to speak of divine things in the very language of men, to uphold the same wholesome social customs as everyone else, and to share the same honest mentality. We see God from the same secular and lay viewpoint from which others see the more transcendent questions of their lives. God can never be a cold or distant model, to be admired but not loved."
The members of Opus Dei work like everyone else and live in the midst of the world, just as they did before they joined.
Thank God, it is becoming ever clearer in new environs that, “to follow the footsteps of Christ, the modern apostle does not come to reform anything nor much less to separate himself from the historical reality surrounding him... It is enough for him to act as the first Christians did, enlivening their own environment."
Quiet and modest, but vibrant with divine impetus, let us walk in the newness of life.