December 1980

Here's a new word from Jesus for you to live. Do you know when he said it? It was the day when some people sent to him by John the Baptist asked him: "Are you he who is to come, or shall we look for another?"

On that day Jesus reminded his questioners what the Prophet Isaiah had said centuries before in his description of the time when the Messiah would come: "Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then shall the lame man leap like a hart, and the poor have good new preached to them."

These things were now happening. He was curing many people, a sign that the kingdom of God, announced by Isaiah, had arrived.

In this way Jesus proved to those asking him the questions that he was the one who John the Baptist and the whole Jewish people were awaiting. He concluded:

Blessed is he who takes no offence at me.

"Who takes no offence at me." Doesn't this seem strong language? Can you imagine what Jesus meant? How can we be scandalized by Him?

The fact is that in those times it could easily have happened, especially for those who had their own sort of faith in God; and nourished their own sort of hope for the future Messiah, measured according to the scale of their own desires and ways of thinking.

They were expecting a king who would take his seat on the throne of David, a super-man who would drive out the Romans and restore the dominion of Israel, a heavenly being who would shake heaven and earth. Instead they find themselves facing a carpenter.

"But isn't this the carpenter’s son?" they said. "Isn't Mary his mother?" and, the Gospel adds, "they were scandalized on his account."

The world does not understand. The world has no time to analyse in depth Jesus' behaviour; it hasn't got the simplicity to grasp the mystery which has come to visit it, so it condemns, it judges a God like this. Jesus is forced to say:

Blessed is he who takes no offence at me.

"Blessed is he. . ."

What does Jesus mean? He wished to give us an assurance. If we believe he is fulfilling the promises foretold in the Old Testament, perhaps in a way other than we might have thought, if we entrust ourselves wholly to him, even if we don't understand, even if our judgement about God and about all he allows to happen might be different, we will then have an extraordinary experience. We'll discover the truth, God's plan for humanity and for ourselves will be revealed. In our hearts well feel that we’ve met happiness, we’ll experience the depths of the divine life, we’ll know the secrets and gifts of his love, we’ll be able to call ourselves blessed.

And the reason for this? - Because:

Blessed is he who takes no offence at me.

Let's see now how to live this Word of Life.

Above all we must fill our hearts with gratitude because in the one life God has given us, we have had the good fortune of knowing Jesus, and so of knowing the true God.

So we must tell him our joy, our happiness for having led our life into his life. We must then draw all the conclusions from this meeting: we must become his disciples as he desires, putting his words into practice, above all making his heart the centre of our lives, his heart which wants to make each of us another him: full of love for God, full of love for all men.

Let us begin by loving the people we meet during the day, one by one and while loving each and every person, the way he wants us to, let us fill our hearts with the special concerns he had when he walked on this earth like us.

How much suffering there is on this earth: let us open our hearts and hands to heal the wounds, to feed the hungry, to advise, to instruct, to visit the suffering.

This is what makes us like him. He will judge us precisely about love.

Chiara Lubich