Church of Jesus Christ of the Universe

by Mauro
(translated audio)

XI Week of Ordinary Time – Year II
1Cor 1, 26-31; Ps 32; Mt 25, 14-30

The readings of this Saturday of the 21st Week, as the entire Gospel, always bring us to the centrality of what a Christian is, the centrality of Christ. I think the words spoken to us by God the Father immediately come to our mind: “Christianity is not a religion”¹. Christianity is a person, it is Christ, and Christianity is children who are united to Christ and, through Christ, in the Holy Spirit, to the Father. It is a calling, it is a life, it is a way of living, it is a way of thinking.

St Paul says it in his letter to the Corinthians: “Consider your vocation”; being a Christian is a vocation, it is to give meaning to life, to give a direction to life. And he says: “You see that there are not many wise, many learned, many intelligent; but all those who are there are those called by the Father, by Christ, through Christ; and through Christ they are used to confuse the wise, the intelligent, the powerful, through what is the opposite”. But it is always a gaze not to confuse or set oneself against what is the world (and the prince of this world we know who he is), it is the gaze of those who welcome and accept Life, true life. It is that gaze that leads Jesus to exult in the Holy Spirit several times in the Gospel and say: “I bless you, O Father, because to the simple ones you have revealed the mystery of the Kingdom of Heaven”².

So, I asked myself: but what does it mean to have the centrality of Christ, who is the only thing that gives meaning to life? What does it mean to welcome the Holy Trinity into one’s heart? Is it something for mystics, for saints? It is the normality of every Christian, who already at Baptism – when they anoint us and pour water on us – is told: “Your life is buried in Christ. It is no longer you who live, but it is Christ who lives in you”³, and this should be the beginning of a life, of a person, of a soul that rediscovers what true Life is with Christ at its centre. So, we can say: Christ’s centrality is the juice of life, it is the reason for life, it is the reason for all joy, it is that hidden treasure⁴; it is the light that illuminates the darkness, it is having understood what the way is. It cannot be something parallel, it cannot be something superfluous, it cannot be something outside our life: it is true life; it cannot be something you cling to, as you would cling to any other idol: it is true life.

The sacraments, the offering of life through the Immaculate Heart of Mary, the three pillars (offering of life, integrity and communion), the particular consecrations that we can make, this white habit for which we are now preparing, are all means to keep the centrality of Christ, but they are all not the centrality of Christ. They are tools, they are indications, they are aids, but the centrality of Christ is Life, to have seriously decided in our life that He is our Bridegroom.

Life should be precisely to develop this centrality, it should be to develop – through our priesthood – prophecy, kingship; to be Christian and to have the Bridegroom in Christ, to seek Him always (always!) to speak with Him always; to have a continuous relationship with Him; to live with Him the whole day and in all events, from small to great, with the Bridegroom. This is the centrality of Christ. Then all our actions will start from Christ, they will be guided by the Holy Spirit, they will enter the Trinitarian vortex, they will receive the Father’s love, and they will be actions in the spirit. They will have all the graces of the Church, all the prayer of the Church, they will have the power of the Church.

Welcoming the Holy Trinity into our heart: what does that mean? Again, it is something we must participate in. It cannot be something detached from us. It cannot be “I love God, I love the Holy Trinity”, but the Holy Trinity is not in me, it does not live with me, it does not cry and laugh with me. Instead, it must cry and laugh with me, it must dine with me. St John in his Gospel says: “I knock. To those who open I come in and we dine together”⁵. Dinner, the most normal thing, it means we experience Life with Him if we open to Him. This is welcoming the Trinity. It is welcoming a Father who is God. It is welcoming the love of the Father who gives us the Son and does so every time we recognize our limitation; He has done it once and for all. But every time we recognize our limit we welcome the Son again, as a gift from the Father. It is recognizing the action of the Holy Spirit that guides our life, not just because we have charisms, locutions or we see the future. He guides it all, all of it. There is nothing in our life that is detached from the Holy Trinity.

Mary Most Holy – through whose Heart we offer our lives to Jesus – is precisely this instrument, the Mother, precisely a Mother, who places herself between our limitations, between our thinking which is often detached from God, between our being which struggles, and God, in order to intercede. It is She who prepares us, She who comforts us, She who guides us, but She takes us there, She does not guide us through life here as we imagine it. She did not choose this life; She did not choose it as a child, She did not choose it as the Bride of the Holy Spirit, She did not choose it as the bride, as the companion of St Joseph or as the Mother under the Cross. She has always and exclusively welcomed the Holy Trinity with its gifts. And that is what She wants to show each of us, the same path. Because the path will be different for everyone, but it will always go through the Trinity.

It is a passage where an integral part is to recognize oneself as a creature, in need of Him. And even here we cannot only be in need of Him when we have a problem, in need of Him when we can no longer cope, in need of Him when things do not go as we would like. When we speak of accepting Jesus as our Bridegroom, of having the Trinity in our hearts, it means that we always need Him. It is the awareness that as creatures, we cannot even think if we do not first unite ourselves with the Trinity. We are not even able to say a word, “thank you” or “good morning”, to look at one with love or to say the right words. It is not the words that are important, but whether we are united with the Trinity or whether it comes from us, because even “thank you” or “I love you” can be the most wrong and painful words we can say to another if we are not united with the Trinity, because then they do not come from true Love.

As creatures, we must therefore not only believe every other day, but we must always believe and especially when it is difficult for us, because that is precisely when God is close to us. He does not put us to the test because He is evil; He puts us to the test because it is the only way to allow faith to grow in us. Because, if man here on Earth is not put to the test, I guarantee you (this is a cosmic law), he will quickly forget the Lord. Otherwise, God would not have made and allowed all the trials we go through. He does it out of love, He does it because it is the only way He has to keep us awake.

So it is precisely in these moments that it is important to know that the guidance of the Holy Trinity is also there now, that our lives are also being guided and transformed now. To know that the communion given to us by our brothers and sisters who accompany us, is the greatest grace and signifies our resurrection. Their gaze, their words, their advice when they correct us,… it is God Himself, it is the Trinity who participates in our lives in this way. This means welcoming the Trinity in our hearts, this means having the centrality of Christ in our faith.

The promises we have – living like this – are great. The first is the Kingdom of Heaven, and I do not think that this is a small, insignificant gift. The second is that we will lack nothing; that He will always be in front of us, behind us and around us, that He will always be there with a caress where someone is beating us, He will always be there with a hand that lifts us up when we have fallen. We shall lack nothing, neither spiritually nor materially, and we will receive a hundredfold of all that we seem to have renounced. In fact, we have renounced nothing; we have freed ourselves from burdens. It is not a renunciation, but a grace. But those promises presuppose that we allow God to act freely, that He is at the centre, that He is in our heart. But if our heart is divided into many affections, into many needs, into many idols – because that is what they are – our heart is disordered, and in this disorder reigns the disintegrating energy.

It is not that Jesus said: “He who loves father, mother, sons, daughters more than me is not worthy of me”⁶ because He wanted to be harsh, but because He knew that every affection, even for our father or mother, that does not come from Him, hurts us. It hurts us, sometimes it even hurts us fatally.

You see, God had also given these promises to the people of Israel, in a different form, and the people of Israel had experienced them. The whole history of Israel is like this: when they were faithful to the promises everything went more than well. As soon as they deviated from the promises, they were destroyed and taken into exile. Then a prophet would come forth and say: “But God…”, and the people of Israel would break free and make an impressive restart. And then everything started all over again.

So, I believe that we, as Christians, need to see what is being asked of us, and not what is asked of the people of Israel now. In the end, the people of Israel were meant to keep faith in God and welcome the Messiah. We know how that went. What is asked of us as Christians? It is a calling, it is a vocation, it is a way of life. He has asked us to live in such a way, with the centrality of Christ; He asked us to be witnesses of the resurrection, prophets, witnesses who announce the glorious return. He asked us to keep faith alive for when He returns, the faith I have described. He asked us to live like children, joyfully: “Give thanks for everything, always be glad, because this is the will of God in Christ Jesus”⁷. This is what He asks us to do, and behind this are all His promises: that He will provide for us, that we will lack nothing, that the very hairs of our head are numbered⁸, that no one who lives like this will perish, that everything we do here we will receive a hundredfold – as He says today in the Gospel speaking about talents. What are talents? If we are faithful in the little, we will share with Him in abundance.

Apart from saying where Christians stand now, it is important that each of us looks at where he stands, where the people around him stand, and that we help each other to stay alive in this call. Which is not a strange, new call, a call to go to Medjugorje,… You see, it is always and only the call of the children of God, to belong to Christ, because through Christ we belong to the Father. That is what it is all about.

So, may Mary Most Holy help us to live this call, may She help us to decide to be happy, may She give us the light to understand that, if we do not decide to put Christ first, we will always be lost in this life. May Her love awaken this in us, in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.