Jesus Christ

Grace for the Week:

I ask for the grace to see you, Lord; to let you stand out from the scripture passages of Lent—that in seeing you, I may love you and trust to follow you.

Jesus Christ

Recently someone gave me a card which said, “God’s deepest desire is that we let Him love us . . . and freely love Him in return.”  Jesus is the friendly face of God.  When we think of Jesus in the New Testament, we meet Jesus the Teacher, Jesus the Healer, Jesus the Sage, Jesus the Charismatic Leader of followers, Jesus the believing Jew and follower of the Torah, Jesus the grace-filled rebel, Jesus the Prophet, Son of God, Son of Man, Christ, Herald of the Kingdom, and other faces/masks.  The theologians tend to speak of the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith.  But when we meet Jesus in scripture and in the sacraments, we meet a real person who loves us, values our friendship, and wants to develop that relationship.

As Catholics it is often in solitude or on a retreat when we have the time to spend meeting Jesus, sometimes for the first time.  Our Protestant brothers and sisters speak of “being saved” or “being baptized in the Lord.”  They are often very effective in stressing the personal encounter with Jesus, his love for us, and his saving us.  We Catholics say that we are “saved” at baptism, often as children, and that we belong to a Church which is institutional—which knows what to do with us as a group—or through personal devotions—individually.  We are less effective in the personal encounter of faith—the encounter with Jesus as a person.  Pope Francis quotes Vinicius de Moraes on the encounter: “Life, for all its confrontations, is the act of encounter.”  Then the Pope adds, “Each of us can learn something from others.  No one is useless and no one is expendable.” (On Fraternity, #2)

Part of the formation of each Jesuit is the 30-day retreat, a retreat in silence for thirty days in which the retreatant speaks only to his spiritual director about his encounter with Jesus through scripture.  Through gratitude for the gifts received, we have a chance to think about our own sin and its consequences in our life.  Then we look to Jesus and his life as a model of a life well-lived for others.  Rooted in his relationship with his Father, Jesus becomes not just the model Son, but the Friend-Companion for us on a spiritual adventure to discover our true selves, sinners all yet much loved from the beginning.  We meet Jesus (and through Him, the Father) who accepts us, loves us, and asks us to look at our life through the lens of love and to see whether there are changes we would like to make.

The reflections of this Lenten program, which follow the path of this retreat, explore our relationship with Jesus, this friendship and love which erupts in our life with great results.  Pope Francis comments, “Let us be committed to living and teaching the values of respect for others, a love capable of welcoming differences, and the priority of the dignity of every human being over his or her ideas, opinions, practices and even sins.” (Fraternity, #191)

This love of God through Jesus prompts Pope Francis to pray:
Grant that we Christians may live the Gospel
discovering Christ in each human being,
recognizing him crucified
in the sufferings of the abandoned
and forgotten of our world,
and risen in each brother or sister
who makes a new start.
(Fraternity #287)

A Prayer for this Week

Guide my heart, O Lord,
to see you.  Let me find you in
the everyday environment.  Finding
you, let me be close enough to you
to follow you.  Let me be with you
now and forever.

Amen.

Fr. Matthew Roche, SJ