PASSION FOR LIFE
Wherever Jesus is, there is life. This is what one joyfully discovers who turns to the dear pages of the Gospel writer Mark and finds oneself with that Jesus who cures the sick, welcomes the needy, heals the alienated and forgives sinners.
Where Jesus is, there is love for life, interest in those who suffer, passion for the liberation of every evil. We should never forget that the first image that the Gospel stories offer us is that of a healing Jesus. A man who spreads life and restores what is infirm.
That’s why we always find around him the suffering of humanity: the possessed, the sick, the paralyzed, the lepers, the blind, the deaf. People who lack life; «those who are in the shadows», as Bertolt Brecht said.
Jesus’ healings have resolved almost nothing in the sad history of people. His saving presence hasn’t resolved their problems. They need to keep fighting against evil. But we have discovered something decisive and hope-giving. God is a friend of life, and passionately loves happiness, health, joy and fulness for God’s sons and daughters.
It’s concerning to see how easily we ‘ve gotten accustomed to death: the death of nature, the destruction by industrial pollution, the death on our roads, the death through violence, the death of those who don’t make it to birth, the death of our souls.
It’s unbearable to observe how indifferently we hear the horrible statistics that tell us of the death of millions of hungry in the world, and how passively we contemplate the silent but efficient and constant violence of unjust structures that drown the weak in their marginalization.
The pains and sufferings of others concern us little. Each one seems interested only in their own problems, their welfare, or their personal security. Apathy overtakes many. More and more each day we run the risk of making ourselves incapable of loving life and of sympathizing with those who can’t live happily.
We believers mustn’t forget that Christian love is always interested in life, in the passionate seeking of happiness for our brother and sister. Christian love is the attitude that is born in whoever has discovered that God so passionately loves our life that God has been capable of suffering our death, in order to open for us the gates of an eternal life where we forever share in God’s love.
José Antonio Pagola
Translator: Fr. Jay VonHandorf
