Wis 2,1a.12-22; Ps 33; Jn 7,1-2.10.25-30
5 APRIL
No one can do the works of God, if God is not with Him. God is only with the one he called and sent. If God does not call and does not send, He is not with the man who says he was sent by Him. One notices it because the works are from the flesh. There is no fruit of the Holy Spirit in Him. Now it is precisely the fruits of the Holy Spirit that a person produces that testify that the Lord is with Him and that He was the one who called and sent him. Moses attests that God sent him not at the beginning of the mission, but after the passage of the Red Sea. He also attests it when God’s people are led to Trans-Jordan. Joshua attests that God chose and constituted him the guide of his people with the conquest of the Promised Land. Jesus reveals that He comes from the Father and that the Father sent him through all the works He is doing. Nicodemus also confesses this truth: “Teacher, we know that you came from God, because no one can make the signs that you make, if God is not with him”.
God is only with the one whom he has chosen, called and sent and that lives in the highest obedience to his Word. Since the Father sent and constituted Jesus Lord, Christ, Saviour, Redeemer, only Mediator in grace, in truth, in light, in eternal life and in the resurrection, if we do not believe that only He has been called and sent by God, we cannot have salvation. God does not save except through Christ. Christ does not save except through the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church. The Church does not save except according to the exercise of the personal sacrament of every one of her own children. Christ is from the Father. The Church is from Christ. Christians are from the Church. Without this supernatural origin, one is not a saviour. Whoever unties and separates himself from this origin does not give true salvation. Origin is the essence of true redemption. Everyone is obliged to manifest his origin. Today, unfortunately we want to be believers, but without any origin, any bond and any spiritual “generation”. Everyone pretends to make himself alone. With God this thought is not valid. With Him, origin is everything.
After this, Jesus moved about within Galilee; but he did not wish to travel in Judea, because the Jews were trying to kill him. But the Jewish feast of Tabernacles was near. But when his brothers had gone up to the feast, he himself also went up, not openly but (as it were) in secret. So some of the inhabitants of Jerusalem said, “Is he not the one they are trying to kill? And look, he is speaking openly and they say nothing to him. Could the authorities have realized that he is the Messiah? But we know where he is from. When the Messiah comes, no one will know where he is from.” So Jesus cried out in the temple area as he was teaching and said, “You know me and also know where I am from. Yet I did not come on my own, but the one who sent me, whom you do not know, is true. I know him, because I am from him, and he sent me.” So they tried to arrest him, but no one laid a hand upon him, because his hour had not yet come. But many of the crowd began to believe in him, and said, “When the Messiah comes, will he perform more signs than this man has done?”
As Jesus is obliged, so that we believe in Him, not only to do the works that only the Father can do with his omnipotence, but also to witness his origin – we know that for having declared his truth, of the true Son of a man that would have come on the clouds of heaven, he was accused of blasphemy and condemned to death – so it will have to be said of every one of his disciples. Every Christian is obliged to reveal his origin: from Christ, from the Apostles of Jesus and from their successors, the Bishops and live in communion with his origin, just as Christ lived in full communion of obedience with the Father and to this he must always add the works that are the fruit of both the Gospel lived by him and the gifts and charismas of the Spirit, manifested in their power of salvation, redemption, conversion, charity, love and mercy. This obligation is forever. It never fails. But today every communion with the origins has been cut off. Christ has been separated from the Father and declared to be no longer necessary and not even useful for going to God. Even every communion with the apostolic origin is being cut off. There still remains in someone some very small thread, nothing more, but ready to be broken.
Mother of God, Angels and Saints, make us Christians from the Church, from the Apostles and from Christ.