Pope Francis reflects on the gospel of the day during his Sunday Angelus, inviting the faithful to accept God’s call and respond to it only with love.
By Vatican News Staff Writer
In marking the second Sunday in ordinary time, Pope Francis reflected on the gospel of the day, which presents the meeting between Jesus and his first disciples.
Speaking from the Vatican’s Apostolic Library during Angelus Sunday, Pope Francis related the scene unfolding along the Jordan the day after Jesus’ baptism. It is John the Baptist himself, he explains, “who points out to the two the Messiah, with these words, ‘Behold the Lamb of God!’” The two, trusting in the Baptist’s testimony, follow Jesus. He realizes this and asks the disciples what they are looking for. When asked where Jesus stayed, He answers by saying, “Come and you will see”.
Pope Francis described this response not as a calling card, but as an invitation to a meeting. The two follow Him and stayed with Him that afternoon. “It is not difficult to imagine sitting, asking Him questions and above all listening to Him, feeling their hearts more and more inflamed as the Master spoke,” said the Pope. He explained that although it is evening, “they suddenly find that that light that only God can give exploded in them.” When they leave and return to their brothers, that joy, that light, flows from their hearts like a raging river. One of the two, Andrew, tells his brother Simon – whom Jesus will call Peter – “We have found the Messiah.”
“Let us pause for a moment on this experience of encountering Christ calling us to stay with Him,” said the Pope. He explained that “each of God’s callings is an initiative of His love.”
“God is calling life, He shouts to faith, and He calls to one certain state in life. God’s first call is to lifeby which He makes us persons; it is an individual call because God does not make things in series. Then God calls to us faith and to become part of his family as children of God. Finally, God calls us to one certain state in life: to give of ourselves in the path of marriage, or that of priesthood or consecrated life ”.
These, the Pope continued, are “different ways of realizing the design that God has for each of us, which is always a design of love.” The “great joy for every believer,” he emphasized, is to respond to that call to “present the whole being in the service of God and the brothers and sisters.”
Concluding his musings, Pope Francis noted that before the Lord’s call to “reach us in a thousand ways,” our attitude could sometimes be “rejection” and then “fear.” “But God’s calling is love and it must be responded to only with love,” said the Pope. “In the beginning there is an encounter, or rather, there is the meeting with Jesus who speaks to us about His Father, He makes His love known to us. And then even in us will arise the spontaneous desire to convey it to the people we love: “I met love”, “I found the meaning of my life.” In a word: ‘I have found God’ ”.
Finally, before reciting the Angelus Prayer, Pope Francis prayed that the Virgin Mary would “help us to make our lives praise to God in response to His call and in the humble and joyful fulfillment of His will.”