the 12th February 1981
"It's gathered together around the resurrected Christ that we accompany Marthe this evening. Her Earthly life is completed. Following Jesus Christ, she has just passed through death into real life.
Every day is an Easter.
"If the grain of wheat which has fallen into the earth doesn't die, it bears no fruit".
With Father Finet and the Foyer Fathers we remembered this text a few hours after Marthe's death.
"If the grain of wheat which has fallen into the earth dies" : in speaking these words Jesus sees in His Passion the gift of love which replies to that of His Father. It's the hour of God in Jesus Christ.
The hour of true vision. The hour of the grain of wheat. The hour of the fruit which germinates in the seed buried in the heart of the earth. "Jesus, the Redeemer of mankind" is this seed which, having fallen into the earth has been making abundant fruit germinate for two thousand years. It's the mystery of Christ the Redeemer which is repeated to us in this text. It's the announcement of the Passion of the Lord.
And Jesus goes on : "If the grain of wheat which has fallen into the earth dies, it bears fruit in abundance". "He who loves his life loses it"... "If someone wants to serve me, let him follow me". Jesus invites us to follow Him. Following Him, He asks us in our turn to be a grain of wheat. Each disciple of Christ is the grain of wheat which must germinate into fruit.
Marthe is also this grain of wheat, and her life of offering was this burial in suffering, as it is now in her death. But this burial was also the joy of giving and the joy of meeting.
In living in this way, discreetly, in the Passion of Christ, she was this grain of wheat. The fruit she bears is, like all fruit which comes from God, for the glory of the Father. The Foyers, of which she had the intuition, try, each of them wherever they exist across the world, to bear fruit which is also for the glory of the Father and the service of their brothers.
But to bear fruit, to bear the fruit of which Jesus speaks, it is necessary to enter into contemplation of the Father. Marthe was a girl of prayer and contemplation. This meeting with God in Jesus Christ permitted her to help how many visitors to put themselves back into the dynamism of Easter, that is to say into this dynamism of death and resurrection, of burial and fruit, of contemplation and action. It's in this great current that each Christian is called to situate himself. Each one in his place. Each one with what he is and what God asks of him.
"There is a diversity of gifts, but it's always the same Spirit" Saint Paul reminds us... "All have been given to drink by the same Spirit",he adds in his Letter to the Corinthians which we heard read to us just now. Each one must hold his place in the Church ; each one with his gifts, his qualities, his thirst for God. Marthe held hers, and she held it well. We can give thanks for her sense and her love of the Church : the diocesan Church and the universal Church. Consecrating her life to God, witness of the Absolute of God, she always wanted to be a daughter of the Church.
But she wanted to live that in discretion and humility, knowing very well in her great good sense, that faith is of another order than the sensational. It is for that also that we respect what she lived, but whilst recalling the strength of her adherence to the Lord.
Martha Robin,
may Mary, Mother of God and Mother of the Church, Mary, through
whom you have so often prayed, lead you to her resurrected Son,
the "Redeemer of mankind". Amen.