Amare Gesù Cristo …o niente. - XIII Domenica del T.O.

"To love Jesus more than one's father, mother, sons, and daughters." This is the most disturbing thing one can say. How can love be quantified, compared? How can love for Christ be reduced to this? In the phrase "love more," the problem isn't in "more," but in loving. Let's start with ourselves and what we think we know. Jesus is not a newcomer, whom we must integrate by rewarding Him with a little space, an emotional supplement. Let's take another approach: if you think you truly love, it's enough to understand that the source of love is not oneself. Love is not a personal secretion whose production you can increase at will according to how much you desire to love. Love is a mysterious reality whose origin is elsewhere. Where and who is this source? It is the Father. He who welcomes Jesus Christ welcomes the Father. He who welcomes Jesus Christ as Christ recognizes that it is the Father who pours life into Him. There is a logic: recognizing that love and life come from the Father and that they are recognized in His Son Jesus. Love is not primarily my business, a reality that can be desired, requested, awaited; it is to be received, as Jesus receives it with Him and from Him. Allowing ourselves to be overwhelmed by this love of the Father, Through Him, to have this embrace of the Son who first receives everything from the Father: this is what the Gospel says: "Love Christ more." It's not a question of risking the depths of our humanity to find more love. On the contrary, let us emerge from this limited economy to live in Christ and receive unlimited goods from the Father. How can we recognize that love comes from the Father? What does it bring that is new? Like Jesus: by overturning the pews in the temple, welcoming the sinful woman, loving while rebuking the Pharisees, and, at certain moments, visiting our parents. The love that comes from the Father allows us to enter into the unknown, into what I would never have foreseen. A love that does not begin with a kind gesture received, a love of gratitude. Jesus insists on the father and mother and on the relationships that are forged with the risk of confusing their source. "My parents gave me everything," "I am everything to my children." Absolute errors. The Father is the source of life. What we are comes from God. This is truly loving: giving God the place in our lives. Those who love each other. The Cross is where true life is. Taking up the Cross and following Jesus. What is the true Cross? The place where all the usual human resources for living are extinguished. Jesus on the Cross demonstrates that no one in the world is capable of giving life. Taking up the Cross is following Jesus; like Him, it is renouncing usual solutions to keep myself standing on only one source: the Father. There alone, true love manifests itself, when it no longer holds the lives of others and when it no longer considers others the holders of its own life. Evangelically, it would be said when it no longer holds its own life nor the lives of others. The world appears in a new geography. We step beyond appearances to see the truth. As in a divine "scanner," we recognize those who truly welcome life from the Father and those who remain closed. Thus, we welcome the prophets, the righteous, and the disciples as those who welcome true life. These people refer explicitly to God; they are not clinging to their lives, which they must manage, but receive them as a gift that bears fruit forever.