Everything flows from love
Saint John says: God is love. He does not say: God loves or God is merciful; he goes further, he says God is Love, therefore God is mercy. Everything flows from the mercy that is God, where God is, there is love: Ubi caritas et amor Deus ibi est. We can praise the goodness of God in creation, this wonderful unity that connects everything. And at the apex of creation, the most beautiful part, are man and woman. Each with a heart, an intelligence, desirous of going beyond the boundaries of the body, toward something greater, something wonderful, I would say infinite. This heart, this intelligence of the human being were made to live the very life of God, to be in relationship with Him and to become His friends. Mercy is recognized in living the happiness and creativity of God. Yet this love, this friendship with God must be reciprocal. The happiness and love of God are not imposed. Love implies a freedom, a choice. God who is Love, out of goodness, offers us the gift of life, He offers it to us, He invites us to live this friendship.
God so loved the world that He sent His beloved Son to be His face and show us the path toward welcome and love. Jesus is the gift of the Father's mercy, He comes to reveal this love. To draw us toward Him, toward His Father, and to live true happiness. The face of the human being has been disfigured by the violence of men and women, by their selfishness, by their desire for power and by their desire to be God. The human being sometimes lacks the humility to accept that everything comes from God, everything comes from mercy. People have, little by little, shut God out, but Jesus is always there with His heart full of love and out of love He calls us, draws friends to Himself, gives them the Holy Spirit so that they may become ever more like Him, so that they in turn may reveal that God is love, is goodness, compassion, mercy.
But today we reject Jesus, many people seek happiness in themselves, in power and in possession, they have closed their hearts to love.
Becoming like children
Man and woman, at the apex of creation, are invited by God to live the very blessedness of God, to live with God and in God. Accepting this blessedness implies a choice for the human being: to accept the gift of God like a child or, on the contrary, to show one's own strength, one's own capacity to fulfill oneself alone. It is a true struggle, a true temptation. But in spite of this adult desire, God has wished to leave His own image in the heart of humanity, in the face of children of all religions and all cultures. Through their gaze, their laughter, their purity and innocence, every child is like a sign of the presence of God. Alongside the evil that incites man to prove his superiority, there is the gaze of the child, the tenderness of the child, depicted in the relationship of tenderness that unites him to his mother, a relationship made of joy and love. This relationship is like a song: I love you just as you are.
There is always, even in the heart of man contaminated by evil, a thread of goodness toward the weak that can lead toward a path of healing when he tries to do good to the hungry, to the poor, to prisoners, to people with handicaps. Yes, there is something good hidden in the heart of man. If he follows this inclination to try to help, according to his means, the poor and the weak, to lift up an elderly woman who has fallen in the street or to welcome refugees, it is the beginning of a path toward God. God invites us all to go further, to encounter those who are in difficulty or in suffering, to look upon them with tenderness and to enter into relationship with them.
The spontaneous goodness at the bottom of the human heart, so fragile, becomes progressively, by grace, a gesture of mercy and compassion inspired by God. "Whatever you did for the least of my brothers, you did for me," said Jesus. (Mt. 25)
Mercy, an encounter
Jesus came to give us life by freeing us from sin which causes us to fold in upon ourselves. He intends to gather together all the scattered children of God. Love your enemies, do good to all those who hate you. He wants to make us discover that every person in his difference is a brother or a sister in the great human family. Each one is a child of God.
In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus responds to a question on this matter, who is my neighbor?, by telling a moving parable. A Samaritan, along the road between Jerusalem and Jericho, comes upon a Jew lying on the ground bleeding, beaten by bandits who had robbed him of all his possessions. The Samaritan stops, tends to him with care and tenderness and then accompanies him to an inn. Leaving the next morning, he leaves money with the innkeeper to cover other expenses necessary for the Jew.
Jesus shows us that the neighbor is not simply someone who belongs to my group or my next-door neighbors, but is a brother or a sister in humanity, whatever the differences of culture, religion, or one's own abilities or inabilities.
The Jews despised the Samaritans, descendants of a people far removed from the Jews, they had a different religion. In this story, Jesus shows that the Samaritan sees in the Jew a true brother. The wall of contempt falls, and one discovers how the Samaritan is a good man. Now he accepts and appreciates the Samaritans. They are human beings, but loving an enemy is not easy.
Mercy toward the one who lies on the ground is not initially to give him something nor even to heal him. It is to reveal to him that he is a precious person, a child of God, a brother, a sister in the human family. It is an encounter, a moment of communion in which the heart of each of the two is transformed. Mercy implies a risk on the human level. Where will this encounter lead me? It will be the Holy Spirit who shows the way. He who receives mercy also gives something divine and human to him who shows mercy. He opens the heart toward a new dimension, opens it to God.
Jean Vanier, 2016
Excerpt from O&L n.210-211-212/2016