Letting Ourselves be Loved

For a long time, I have been helped by the strong conviction that living the Gospel primarily consists in experiencing the love of the Father, expressly that of the Father. When this happens, an irrepressible desire rises in our hearts, a desire to treat others as the Father treats us. That experience transforms the “other” into my brother and sister.

I am also completely assured, in the deepest part of my being, that the same thing happened to Jesus: He had an intense experience of the love of the Father when he was a young man. On the impulse of the dynamism of that love, Jesus went out into the world to treat everyone as the Father had treated Him. “As my Father has loved me, so have I loved you.”

This is the program Jesus proposes to all men. Here is the revolution, the profound and radical “novelty” of the Gospel. Jesus is the BELOVED SON of the Father. We are his beloved sons and daughters.

And so, we understand the motivations or the profound meaning of the gospel attitudes of Jesus. When, at the age of twelve, the Lord Jesus replies to his Mother that the Father is his only occupation and preoccupation, he is saying in other words: my Father is my mother- meaning that all the tender love his Mother could give him, he had already received from his Father.

When Jesus says that doing the will of the Father makes us father, mother, wife… (Mt 12:50); he is telling us that the love of the Father makes us feel a tenderness much more profound than that of a wife; is much sweeter than that of a most cherished mother, and is more satisfying than owning thousands of acres of land and properties. And so, the community emerges, as a necessity imposed by love. It becomes a vital space within which the energy and the warmth we have stored from the sun of the Father, may be spread.

From the book “Come with me” by Fr. Ignacio Larrañaga