LET JESUS COME INTO OUR HOME
Before anything else, we need to care for and develop a healthy, dignified and happy project of family that can touch the concrete life of each home. Jesus, welcomed with faith and conviction in our family, can help us to correct and better our way of living and can discover for us a new and more dignified path for the followers of his Gospel.
Letting Jesus enter into our home means strengthening the family with more truth, more passion and more excitement in his person, his message and his project of God’s reign. There are many things to do in the coming years to revive our families, but nothing is more decisive that to place Jesus in the center of the home, trusting in his promise: «Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I» (Matt 18,20). You won’t be alone. In the center of your home is Jesus. He gathers us, encourages us, and sustains us. With Jesus all is possible.
Welcoming Jesus in the home is the task of our whole life. First learn to live in the home with a new heart and a renewing spirit. This means beginning to live a new relationship with Jesus, a more alive adherence. A family made up of Christians who scarcely know Jesus, who only confess him from time to time and abstractly, who never read the Gospel, who are related to a silent Jesus of whom they hear nothing special, nothing of interest for today’s man and woman, a worn out Jesus who doesn’t attract or seduce, who doesn’t touch our hearts… this is a family that will have difficulty to be able to feel his renewing power.
If we don’t know Jesus and don’t recognize his message, we won’t be able to direct our family life from his Gospel. If we don’t know how to look at the world, life, people, our children, problems… with the eyes with which Jesus looked, we will say that we count on the privileged light of revelation, but we’ll be a blind family that doesn’t know how to see life as Jesus saw it. And if we don’t hear the suffering of the people with the attention, the sensibility and the compassion with which Jesus heard those whom he encountered suffering on his path, we will be deaf families. And if we aren’t in harmony with the style of Jesus’ living, with his passion to make a more just world, with his kindness toward children, with his forgiveness of the rejected… we won’t know how to transmit the best that Jesus transmitted, what’s most important, what’s most attractive: his Good News.
It’s all about living this experience in our families: walking these next years toward a new level of family living, more inspired and motivated by Jesus, and toward a dynamic and a way of life better oriented to open up paths to God’s reign, that is, to that new and more human and happy world that the Father wants for all, beginning with the least. After 20 centuries of Christianity, Christian families need a «new heart» in order to live and communicate the Good News of God revealed in Jesus in the midst of today’s society. What’s decisive is to not resign ourselves to live today in our family without Jesus.
José Antonio Pagola
Translator: Fr. Jay VonHandorf
