Isuse, adu-Ţi aminte de mine când vii în Împărăţia Ta!

Matei 5

„Ferice de cei săraci în duh,
    căci a lor este Împărăţia Cerurilor!
⁴ Ferice de cei îndureraţi,
    căci ei vor fi mângâiaţi!
⁵ Ferice de cei blânzi,
    căci ei vor moşteni pământul^[b]!
⁶ Ferice de cei flămânzi şi însetaţi după dreptate,
    căci ei vor fi săturaţi!
⁷ Ferice de cei milostivi,
    căci ei vor avea parte de milă!
⁸ Ferice de cei cu inima curată,
    căci ei Îl vor vedea pe Dumnezeu!
⁹ Ferice de cei împăciuitori,
    căci ei vor fi numiţi fii ai lui Dumnezeu!
¹⁰ Ferice de cei persecutaţi din pricina dreptăţii,
    căci a lor este Împărăţia Cerurilor!

¹¹ Ferice de voi când oamenii vă insultă, vă persecută şi spun tot felul de lucruri rele, (minţind)^[c] împotriva voastră, din pricina Mea! ¹² Bucuraţi-vă şi veseliţi-vă, pentru că răsplata voastră este mare în ceruri! Căci tot aşa i-au persecutat şi pe profeţii dinaintea voastră!

Etre disciple

Évangile de Jésus-Christ selon saint Luc 14,25-33. En ce temps-là, de grandes foules faisaient route avec Jésus ; il se retourna et leur dit : « Si quelqu’un vient à moi sans me préférer à son père, sa mère, sa femme, ses enfants, ses frères et sœurs, et même à sa propre vie, il ne peut pas être mon disciple. Celui qui ne porte pas sa croix pour marcher à ma suite ne peut pas être mon disciple. Quel est celui d’entre vous qui, voulant bâtir une tour, ne commence par s’asseoir pour calculer la dépense et voir s’il a de quoi aller jusqu’au bout ? Car, si jamais il pose les fondations et n’est pas capable d’achever, tous ceux qui le verront vont se moquer de lui “Voilà un homme qui a commencé à bâtir et n’a pas été capable d’achever !” Et quel est le roi qui, partant en guerre contre un autre roi, ne commence par s’asseoir pour voir s’il peut, avec dix mille hommes, affronter l’autre qui marche contre lui avec vingt mille ? S’il ne le peut pas, il envoie, pendant que l’autre est encore loin, une délégation pour demander les conditions de paix. Ainsi donc, celui d’entre vous qui ne renonce pas à tout ce qui lui appartient ne peut pas être mon disciple. » Extrait de la Traduction Liturgique de la Bible – © AELF, Paris Commentaire patristique Philoxène de Mabboug (?-v. 523) évêque en Syrie Homélies, n° 9 ; SC 44 (trad. E. Lemoine; Éd. du Cerf 1956; rev.)

Être son disciple

Écoute la voix de Dieu qui te pousse à sortir de toi pour suivre le Christ (…), et tu seras un disciple parfait : « Celui d’entre vous qui ne renonce pas à tout ce qui lui appartient ne peut pas être mon disciple. » Après cela, qu’as-tu à dire ? Que peux-tu répondre ? Toutes tes hésitations et tes questions tombent devant cette seule parole. (…) Et le Christ dit dans un autre endroit : « Celui qui se détache de sa vie en ce monde la garde pour la vie éternelle. (…) Si quelqu’un me sert, mon Père l’honorera » (Jn 12,25s).

Il a dit encore à ses disciples : « Levez-vous, partons d’ici ! » (Jn 14,31) Par cette parole, il a montré que ni sa place ni celle de ses disciples n’est ici. Où irions-nous donc, Seigneur ? « Là où je suis, là aussi sera mon serviteur » (Jn 12,26). Si Jésus nous crie : « Levez-vous, partons d’ici ! », qui sera donc assez sot pour consentir à rester avec les cadavres dans leurs tombeaux et à habiter parmi les morts ? Chaque fois donc que le monde veut te retenir, rappelle-toi la parole du Christ : « Levez-vous, partons d’ici ! » (…) Chaque fois que tu veux t’asseoir, t’installer, te complaire à rester là où tu es, rappelle-toi cette voix pressante et dis-toi : « Lève-toi, allons-nous-en d’ici. »

Car de toute façon, il faudra t’en aller. Mais va-t’en comme Jésus s’en va : va-t’en parce qu’il te l’a dit, non parce que les lois de la nature t’emportent malgré toi. Que tu le veuilles ou non, tu es sur le chemin de ceux qui partent. Pars donc à cause de la parole de ton Maître, et non par la nécessité de la contrainte. « Lève-toi, partons d’ici ! » Cette voix éveille les assoupis : c’est la trompette qui chasse le sommeil de la paresse par sa sonnerie. C’est une force et non une parole : soudain elle revêt celui qui la sent d’une force nouvelle et le pousse d’une chose à une autre en un clin d’œil. (…) « Levez-vous, partons d’ici » : voici que lui aussi s’en va avec toi ; pourquoi t’attardes-tu ? (…) Dieu t’appelle à t’en aller en sa compagnie.

A Pattern We Can Trust; by R.Rohr on Jesus’Resurrection

A Pattern We Can Trust

All will be well, and all will be well, and every kind of thing will be well.
—Julian of Norwich, Showings, chapter 27

Today we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ, which allows faithful Christians to trust that, indeed, all will be well. I like to think of the resurrection as God’s way of telling us that God can take the worst thing in the world—the killing of the God-Human Jesus—and change it into the best thing: the redemption of the world.

To believe that Jesus was raised from the dead is actually not a leap of faith. Resurrection and renewal are, in fact, the universal and observable pattern of everything. We might just as well use non-religious terms like “springtime,” “regeneration,” “healing,” “forgiveness,” “life cycles,” “darkness,” and “light.” If incarnation is real, if material creation is inspirited, then resurrection in multitudinous forms is to be fully expected. Or to paraphrase a statement attributed to Albert Einstein, it is not that one thing is a miracle, but that the whole thing is a miracle!

If divine incarnation has any truth to it, then resurrection is a foregone conclusion, not a one-time anomaly in the body of Jesus, as our Western understanding of the resurrection felt it needed to prove—and then it couldn’t. The Risen Christ is not a one-time miracle but the revelation of a universal pattern that is hard to see in the short run.

Simply put, if death is not possible for the Christ, then it is not possible for anything that “shares in the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4). God is by definition eternal, and God is Love (1 John 4:16), which is also eternal (1 Corinthians 13:8), and this same Love has been planted in our hearts (Romans 5:5; 8:9) by the Spirit dwelling within us. Such fully Implanted Love cannot help but evolve and prove victorious, and our word for that final victory is “resurrection.” Peter states this rather directly: “By raising Jesus Christ from the dead, we have a sure hope and the promise of an inheritance that can never be spoiled or soiled or fade away. It is being kept for you in the heavens . . . and will be fully revealed at the end of time” (1 Peter 1:3–5).

My book The Universal Christ is about the Eternal Christ, who never dies—and who never dies in you! Resurrection is about the whole of creation, it is about history, it is about every human who has ever been conceived, sinned, suffered, and died, every animal that has lived and died a tortured death, every element that has changed from solid, to liquid, to ether, over great expanses of time. It is about you and it is about me. It is about everything. The “Christ journey” is indeed another name for every thing.

Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope for, and Believe (Convergent: 2021, 2019), 99, 100, 179–180, 186.

Advent

„When he heard that John had been arrested, he withdrew to Galilee. He left Nazareth and went to live in Capernaum by the sea, in the region of Zebulun and Naphtali, that what had been said through Isaiah the prophet might be fulfilled:

Land of Zebulun and land of Naphtali, the way to the sea, beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles, the people who sit in darkness have seen a great light, on those dwelling in a land overshadowed by death light has arisen.

From that time on Jesus began to preach and say, „Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is close at hand.” (Matt. 4:12-17)

    Advent is the liturgical season that celebrates the theme of divine light. This great light, incarnated in Jesus, confronts any kind of darkness, illusion, ignorance.

If you reflect for a moment on the natural cycles of life, our world is always coming to an end. The world of the womb comes to an end at birth; the world of infancy comes to an end at about age three; childhood comes to an end at adolescence; adolescence at young adulthood; young adulthood at the middle-age crisis; then come old age, senility, and death. Life is a process.

The experience of growing up or the decline of physical energy forces us to let go of each period of life as we pass through it. Thus physical life is always giving way to further development. It should be no surprise, therefore, that Jesus invites us to let the privatized worlds of our emotional attachments, preconceived ideas, and prepackaged values come to an end.

    One of the messages of Advent, especially the theme of the end of the world, is not so much about the end of the world nor even about physical death which is the end of the present world for each of us–as about all the worlds that come to an end in the natural and spiritual evolution of life.

Thus, every time we move to a new level of faith, the previous world that we lived in with all its relationships comes to an end. This is what John the Baptist and later Jesus meant when they began their ministries with the word, „Repent.” The message they meant to convey was, „It’s the end of your world!” Naturally, we do not like to hear such news; we don’t like change. We say, „Get rid of this man!”

    The process of conversion begins with genuine openness to change: openness to the possibility that just as natural life evolves, so too the spiritual life evolves. Our psychological world is the result of natural growth, events over which we had no control in early childhood, and grace. Grace is the presence and action of Christ in our lives inviting us to let go of where we are now and to be open to the new values that are born every time we penetrate to a new understanding of the Gospel.

Moreover, Jesus calls us to repent not just once; it is an invitation that keeps recurring. In the liturgy it recurs several times a year, especially during Advent and Lent. It may also come at other times through circumstances: disappointments, personal tragedy, or the bursting into consciousness of some compulsion or secret motive that we were not aware of.

A crisis in our lives is not a reason to run away; it is the voice of Christ inviting us to accept more of the divine light. More of the divine light means more of what the divine light reveals, which is divine life. And the more divine life we receive, the more we perceive that divine life is pure love.

    Whenever we accept the invitation to let go of our present level of relating to Christ for a new one, it may feel scary A comfortable relationship with Christ–our own little world of reading, prayer, devotions, or ministry–is good. But just as the life process moves on day by day, so the grace of Christ relentlessly calls us beyond our limitations and fears into new worlds.

Like Abraham, the classical paradigm of faith, Jesus asks us to leave land, family, culture, peer group, religious education everything that we might cling to in order to establish an identity or to avoid feeling lonely All of this Christ gently but firmly calls us to leave behind saying, „Go forth from your father’s house and country and come into the land that I will show you.”

The call to contemplative prayer is a call into the unknown. It is not a call to nowhere, but it is nowhere that we can imagine. Each time we consent to an enhancement of faith, our world changes and all our relationships have to be adjusted to the new perspective that has been given to us.

Our relationship to ourselves, to Jesus Christ, to our neighbor, to the Church– even to God himself–all change. It is the end of the world we have previously known and lived in. Sometimes the Spirit deliberately shatters those worlds. If we have depended upon them to go to God, it may feel as if we have lost God. We may have doubts about God’s very existence.

It is not the God of faith we are doubting, but only the God of our limited concepts or dependencies; this god never existed anyway Pure faith is the purification of the human props in our relationship to God. As these are relinquished, we relate more directly to the divine presence, even though it may feel like the end of our spiritual life.

    And so the second part of Jesus’ message is important. If you repent and are willing to change, or willing to let God change you, the kingdom of God is close. In fact, you have it; it is within you and you can begin to enjoy it. The kingdom of God belongs to those who have let go of their possessive attitude toward everything including God. God is pure gift; we cannot possess him just for ourselves. We can possess him only by receiving him and sharing him with others.„

This chapter is taken from the book Awakenings by Fr. Thomas Keating

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lk-KWqVNpOw&ab_channel=KennethChandler.