Jesus loved us to the cross, a mystery of love that defeats evil.
by Rosanna Tabasso
“Do you forget a woman of your child, so as not to be moved by the child's bowels? Even if they forget, I will never forget you "(Is 49,15). Thus God declares his unconditional, eternal love for each of us. He asks us to experience it personally, to dissolve the doubt that God really loves us and overcome the suspicion that he wants to "subdue" us more as a master than as a father. Indeed, reaching trust is essential for walking with God, for living on this earth with God in the heart. In the love relationship between God and me, he first declares his loyalty to me and I who experience it, enter into trust, to repeat with the psalmist: “My father and my mother have abandoned me, but the Lord and he picked me up ”(Ps 27.10).
The heart of our faith is to know that we are loved by God and believe in it. Jesus introduces us to this relationship of trust with God, because Jesus is one of us but he is also One with the Father. When questioned by a doctor of the Law on what the great commandment is, he does not turn words and replies: «You will love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. The second is similar to that: You will love your neighbor as yourself "(Mt 22,36-39).
This double you will love contains all the commands given by God to Moses and handed down to us by Scripture, and gives us a different way of living them: not out of obligation but out of love, not out of duty but out of choice, not out of fear of being punished or convenience but to respond to the love of God. The prophets of the Old Testament tried to help the people of Israel - and we too - to understand that God was different from the divinities of the great ancient religions, he was different from the idols: these were needed earning the favor to make life acceptable, sacrifices had to be made to obtain benefits. They repeated that God the creator and father does not want sacrifice, he wants love, he wants to be loved. And love does not know the duty, the force, the fear. Who among us would like to be loved out of duty or out of fear? We know what we want from those who love us, even God knows it. He has given us his heart and desires the heart of each of us.
From the trust of being loved so strongly by God our love flows, almost as a reflection of his: loved, we love.
Beloved, we love is also the heart of our Rule and summarizes exactly this path that each of us has done under the guidance of Scripture and by the grace of the Holy Spirit. It summarizes the experience that each of us lived when he felt he was loved without reservations by God.
We are so clumsy, we are so poor, that if we started from ourselves we would have very little to offer. There are moments in which we feel happy to belong to him and it is not a burden to be with him, happy moments in our life, moments of emotion in which we feel that the heart also opens to the prayer of thanksgiving, of praise and we feel that it is nice to be with Him. Then these moments pass and all our human labors and difficulties that Jesus knows well resurface. Often our love for him simply translates into a cry, in shouting at him our need for help in our solitude, in the pains, in the great trials that we have to face in our life. he knows it and what he wants from us is that we also look for him in the trial.
Our life flows through a thousand efforts, but we do not interrupt our dialogue born from the trust that he loves us, born from the search to respond to his love with ours. Our whole life can become a dialogue with him. Nothing separates him from us, not even the greatest sin. When the heart opens to the love of God, it feels the joy of feeling loved not for its merits, for the perfection it acquires, but as it is, with limits, defects, with fragility and sins. Jesus says “It is not the healthy who need the doctor, but the sick. Go and learn what it means: Mercy I want and not sacrifices. I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners "(Mt 9: 12-13).
It does not mean that I do nothing to change those bits of me that are not in the line of love; it does not mean that commitment is not necessary, so much God takes me as I am; does not mean to be satisfied with my mediocrity. Indeed, the more I feel loved, the more my not knowing how to love weighs on me. The more I recognize that he has done everything for me, the more I feel sinful for not giving him back myself. The more I feel sought, the more I forget my forgetting about him, the betrayal of sin, not knowing how to love the people I have close to me.
Knowing myself loved leads me to love in turn. And it pushes me to restore love to him and to the people he has placed next to me, as Jesus did. Knowing myself loved makes me walk in the desert also with confidence.