LEARN TO LIVE FROM JESUS
The life of a Christian starts to change the day he discovers that Jesus is someone who can teach him to live. The Gospel accounts don’t tire of presenting Jesus as Teacher. Someone who can teach a «unique wisdom». A wisdom that was so surprising to his neighbors in Nazareth.
Indeed, the first ones who met up with him were called «disciples», students, that is, men and women ready to learn from their Teacher Jesus.
Christians today must ask ourselves if we haven’t forgotten that, to be Christian, is simply «to go about learning» from Jesus. To go about discovering from him what is the most human, authentic, and joyful way of confronting life.
How many efforts are being done today to learn to triumph in life: methods to obtain success in professional work, technics to win friends, arts to turn out triumphant in social relationships. But where to learn to simply be human?
There are all too many Christians for whom Jesus is in no way the inspirator of their life. They don’t find how to see that a relationship exists between Jesus and what they live each day. Jesus has been converted into a personality whom they believe they know from childhood, when in reality he continues being for many the «great unknown». A Jesus without real consistency, incapable of animating their daily existence.
And yet that Jesus better known and more faithfully followed could transform their life. Not as the far away teacher who has left a legacy of admirable knowledge to humanity, but as someone alive who from the very depth of our being accompanies us with patience, understanding and kindness.
He can be our teacher of life. He can teach us to live, not to manipulate others, but to serve. He can help us discover that it is best to go about giving rather than grabbing. Listening to his message and following his steps, we can learn to live with more solidarity and less selfishness, to risk ourselves more for all that is good and just, to love people as he loved them, to trust in the Father as he trusted in the Father.
José Antonio Pagola
Translator: Fr. Jay VonHandorf
