64 — JESUS AND MEN

Presence of God. — O Jesus, teach me to love my brothers and sisters as You love them.

Meditation

1 — Although Jesus’ Most Holy Soul is always immersed in the most intimate union with the Most Holy Trinity and therefore in the deepest contemplation, He is not alien to earthly things, nor absent from men’s needs. On the contrary, Jesus came precisely for them, to save them, to lead them to the Father, and He gives Himself to them with utmost solicitude and dedication. The same charity that binds Him to the Father, through the Father, descends upon men, whom Jesus tenderly loves and wishes to redeem precisely because they are creatures of His Father, because He wants to restore in them that image and likeness of the Father according to which they were created by Him. Jesus expressed in the most moving way His tender solicitude toward men by comparing Himself to the good shepherd: “I am the good shepherd: and I know My sheep and Mine know Me, as the Father knows Me and I know the Father; and I lay down My life for My sheep” (Jn. 10, 14-15). Jesus compares His union of knowledge and affection with us to His union with the Father; it is, of course, only a comparison, and yet Jesus likes to speak this way. He sees and knows the Father in the splendor of His glory, but He also sees and knows each of us in the concreteness of our poverty, our sorrows, and desires; He loves the Father and gives Himself totally for His glory, and at the same time He loves each of us and gives Himself entirely for our salvation; indeed, Jesus sees and loves us in the Father and in relation to Him. Precisely for this reason He loved us so much and did so much for us: precisely His infinite love for the Father made Him the good Shepherd who lays down His life for His sheep.

2 — Recollection, the desire for intimate union with God, love and contemplation of God must not make us strangers to our brothers, must not prevent us from being sensitive to their needs and sufferings, from giving ourselves to them with true supernatural charity in the measure required by the duties of our state. There is no kind of life, not even the most contemplative, that excludes the duty and necessity of caring for one’s neighbor: if external works are reduced to a minimum, one must concentrate one’s strength in prayer and apostolic self-immolation.

Love of God, when true and profound, does not shut the soul up in itself, but always leads it, in one way or another, to embrace all who belong to God, because they are His creatures, His children, objects of His love.

Jesus, though God, did not keep Himself at a distance from men, but drew near to them to the point of wanting to feel and experience in Himself all their needs, even temptation, “except sin” (Heb. 4, 15); He wanted to share with them a life of privations, toil, hard poverty, and suffering. So too we, if we want to attain effective fraternal charity, must feel the sorrows, poverty, and material and spiritual needs of our neighbor, feel in order to sympathize, to help, and even to share. We must sacrifice ourselves, our comforts, our well-being to give ourselves to others. But we will be able to do this only if our love for neighbor is like Jesus’: that is, if it derives from our love for God. Only one who loves for love of God can have a strong and constant fraternal charity that never fails.

Colloquy

O Jesus, how can I not be moved before Your solicitude, Your tender love for us, poor creatures? You, who enjoy the continual vision of the Most Holy Trinity and find in It all Your beatitude and glory, did not want this beatitude and glory to be Yours alone, but wanted to share them with us. And behold, I see You share with us our poor human life, full of miseries and sufferings, so that by becoming like us in suffering, we might be made like You in glory.

Men did not understand You, did not return Your love... they put You on the cross, and You continue to love them because You love them not for Your own interest, but solely for the glory of the Most Holy Trinity. O Jesus, You who for love of Your Father so love us and gave Yourself entirely for us, grant that for love of You, for Your glory, I may know how to love my brothers and sisters and give myself to them with full generosity.

O Jesus, how great is the love You bear to the children of men! The service most pleasing that can be rendered to You is to leave You in order to attend to them and to their good: thus one comes to possess You more fully. Although the will shares and the soul is content to please You, and sees that as long as one lives in this mortal life earthly joys are uncertain, and may not come from You unless accompanied by love of neighbor. He who does not love neighbor does not love You, since by Your Passion and by the shedding of Your Blood You have shown Your love for the children of men” (T.G. Es. 2, 2).

Grant, O Jesus, that in imitation of You I may live united to God while remaining united to my brothers and sisters; that I may balance a life of continual recollection in God, of prayer and contemplation, with a life wholly spent in service of my neighbor.