Pope Francis reflects on the gospel of the day during his Sunday Angelus, inviting believers to accept God’s call, responding with only love.
By author of Vatican News staff
Pope Francis marked the Second Sunday in ordinary time and reflected on the Gospel of the day, which presents the meeting between Jesus and his first disciples.
In the Apostolic Library of the Vatican during Sunday Angelus, Pope Francis recounted the scene that took place along the Jordan River a day after Jesus’ baptism. It is John the Baptist himself, he explains, “who shows the Messiah to the two with the following words: ‘Behold, the Lamb of God!’ The two, relying on the testimony of the Baptist, follow Jesus. He realizes this and asks the disciples what they are looking for. To the question where Jesus stayed, He responds by saying to them, “Come and you will see.”
Pope Francis did not describe this answer as a calling card, but an invitation to a ‘meeting’. The two follow Him and stay with Him in the afternoon. “It’s not hard to imagine you asking Him questions and, above all, listening to Him as they feel their hearts flare up as the Master speaks,” the pope said. He explained that although it is evening, “suddenly they discover that the light that only God can give has exploded within them”. When they leave and return to their brothers, that joy, like a raging river, overflows that light. One of the two, Andrew, says to his brother, Simon – who will call Jesus Peter – “We have found the Messiah”.
“Let us pause for a moment at the experience of Christ calling us to abide with Him,” the pope said. He explained that “every one of God’s calls is an initiative of his love”.
God calls to life, He calls faith, and He calls to a certain state in life. God’s first call is to life, by which He makes us persons; it is an individual call because God does not make things in series. Then God calls us to faith and to become part of his family as children of God. Finally, God calls us to a certain state in life: to give of ourselves in the way of marriage, or that of priesthood or consecrated life “.
These, the pope continues, are ‘different ways of realizing the design God has for each of us, which is always a design of love’. The ‘great joy for every believer’, he emphasized, is to respond to the call ‘to offer one’s whole being to the service of God and the brothers and sisters’.
Concluding his reflection, Pope Francis notes that before the call of the Lord, “which reaches us in a thousand ways,” our attitude can sometimes be “rejection” and other “fear.” “But God’s call is love and must be responded to with love,” the pope said. “At the beginning there is an encounter, or rather, there is the encounter with Jesus who speaks to us of his Father, He reveals his love to us. And then the spontaneous desire will arise 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 Pope Francis recited the Angelus Prayer, he prayed that the Virgin Mary ‘could help us to make a song of praise to the glory of God out of our lives in response to his call and in the humble and joyful fulfillment of his will’.