Number 193 - July 1999

The Message of Jesus

Father FINET

The message of Jesus is very simple and can help us to live. It concerns the problems of everyday life. It's not a question of high theology but of extremely concrete problems of life. In the Gospel you will find answers to your everyday life which touch us deeply. In catechizing we must always teach the points which concern everyday life and which help us to live.

This message of Jesus is extremely synthetical. The great truth which wasn't known before Jesus came is that God is Love: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. He is Three because He is Love. But the eternal Family of God must not be compared with the human family, for the Holy Spirit isn't a mother. That would be an error! No! the Holy Spirit is a bond of Love between the Father and the Son, and between the Son and the Father. In a family the mother is a bond of love between the father and the children, and the children between themselves and the father.

The vocation of woman is to be an intermediary of Love. It is a marvellous vocation. If she is not an intermediary she is a seductress, and then she deviates completely. If Woman in the person of the Holy Virgin, were taken away from us in the Church ­ man can not do without woman ­ then the cult of the seductress would be given to us, that is to say the cult of stars. That is the state of our world today. The Intermediary above all is the Holy Virgin, linked with the Holy Spirit in the eternal Family. She is the Intermediary between the Father and all of us, and, at the same time, between all the Father's children. She unites us in the great divine family which we call the Church.

We are the Father's children through an extraordinary gift: the gift of divine life. Our Christianity is not first and foremost an ideal, it is first and foremost a GIFT, the gift of divine life. We must be convinced that we are really sons of God since, through this gift, we are engendered by our Father to divine life.

We are made for happiness

I will now give you a few consequences of this Message of Jesus which could be called the plan of God. All the truths of our everyday existence flow from these three great truths. I could ask you this question:
Why did God create us and why does He want to keep us?
To make of us His children.

And Christian parents participate in this great desire of God. What is their mission? When they look at their children the parents remember that they are even more the children of God than their own. They give birth to children destined to be the sons and daughters of God.

Through the sacrament of marriage, Christian parents remember that these children, by the very gift of the grace infused into them by Baptism, are more the children of the Father than their own; that they are assimilated into Jesus Christ, becoming in this way living tabernacles of the Holy Spirit. This is a magnificent mission for Christian parents who know that, by the sacrament of marriage, they collaborate in the extension of the Church throughout the whole world. That is so beautiful, that they should really feel that they are truly a people acquired by the Redemption of Christ, a chosen people as Saint Peter recalls in his First Letter. That is why it is a particularly moving moment for a mother when she kisses the forehead of her little child, still shining with baptismal water.

And the joys of this family on Earth are made of communion of soul spirit and heart between the members of the family. This communion bears its true fruit: happiness. And so, God has placed us on the Earth in this family which is called the Church, that we might live between us the relations which are those which unite the divine Persons Themselves. So what are these relations? Jesus says it over and over, throughout the Gospel: "I know my Father, and my Father knows me". And again:
"I love my Father, and my Father loves me".

Knowledge ­ Love: the fruit of this Love is devotion, for Love gives itself. So: knowledge ­ Love ­ Devotion. And the fruit of this knowledge, this Love and this Devotion is Happiness. There then are the four terms which I find in the Eternal Family in Heaven, the Holy Trinity: Knowledge ­ Love ­ Devotion ­ Happiness. Jesus devotes Himself to do the work of the Father on Earth. The Holy Spirit devotes Himself to prolong the work of the Father and the Son in our hearts. We are made for Happiness.