Pope Francis reflects on the Gospel of the day during the Sunday Angelus, inviting believers to accept God’s call, responding to it only with love.
By Vatican News staff writer
Marking the second Sunday of Ordinary Time, Pope Francis reflected on the Gospel of the day, which presents the meeting between Jesus and His first disciples.
Speaking from the Vatican’s Apostolic Library on Angelus Sunday, Pope Francis recounted the scene, which takes place along the Jordan River the day after Jesus’ baptism. John the Baptist himself, he explains, “who shows the Messiah to the two, with these words:“ Behold, the Lamb of God! The two, trusting in the testimony of the Baptist, follow Jesus. He realizes this and asks the disciples what they are looking for. When asked where Jesus is, He answers by saying, “Come and see.”
Pope Francis went on to describe this response not as a business card, “but as an invitation to a meeting.” The two followed Him and stayed with Him that afternoon. “It is not difficult to imagine them sitting asking questions and, above all, listening to Him, feeling their hearts burning more and more as the Master spoke,” the Pope said. He explained that, although it is evening, “he suddenly discovers that the light which only God can give explodes within them.” When they leave and return to their brothers, that joy, that light flows from their hearts like a raging river. One of the two, Andrew, tells his brother Simon – whom Jesus will call Peter – “I have found the Messiah.”
“Let us pause for a moment in this experience of meeting Christ, who calls us to abide with Him,” the Pope said. He explained that “every call of God is an initiative of His love.”
“God is calling to life, He calls faith, and He calls to special condition in life. God’s first call is to life, through which He makes us persons; it is an individual calling because God does not do things in series. Then God calls us to faith and become part of His family as children of God. Finally, God calls us to special condition in life: to give ourselves over to marriage, or to the priesthood or to the consecrated life ”.
These, the Pope continued, are “different ways of accomplishing the plan that God has for each of us, which is always a plan of love.” He stressed that “the great joy of every believer” is to respond to that call “to offer the whole being in the service of God and of the brethren and sisters.”
In concluding his reflection, Pope Francis remarked that before the call of the Lord, “which reaches us in a thousand ways,” our attitude could sometimes be “rejection,” and sometimes “fear.” “But God’s call is love, and it must be answered only with love,” the pope said. “In the beginning there is an encounter, or rather, there is the encounter with Jesus who tells us about His Father, He makes His love known to us. And then the spontaneous desire will appear even in us to communicate it to the people we love: “I have met Love”, “I have found the meaning of my life”. In a word, “I have found God.”
Finally, before reciting the Angelus prayer, Pope Francis prayed that the Virgin Mary “help us to make our lives a hymn of praise to God in response to His call and to the humble and joyful fulfillment of His will.”