Meditations on the Christ by Romano Guardini

Author:Romano Guardini [Guardini, Romano]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sophia Institute Press
Published: 2014-09-22T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

The Nearness of Our Heavenly Father

The Father is with me.

John 16:32

We have reflected on the solitude of Jesus: how He stood alone against the responsible leaders of His people, who did not understand Him, and even turned Him away, and took action against Him; how He stood alone among His people, who, it is true, cheered for Him for a short time, but afterward abandoned Him; how He stood alone even among His disciples, the closest to Him of all, who lived with Him, for these neither understood Him nor kept faith with Him, except for John.

And when we asked ourselves what He had to hold on to through all this, we ran across the profoundly interior sentence from the message of farewell: “And yet I am not alone, because the Father is with me.”101 Jesus’ solitude becomes something frightful and incomprehensible if we do not understand it in connection with the presence of His Father.

When Jesus speaks of the heavenly Father, our attention is drawn to a particular detail which discloses a great deal: in His relationship to the Father, He never includes Himself together with those He summons. He teaches us to say the Our Father; therein are we to be bound to one another and united. But He never mentions this word in connection with Himself and us together; He always says, “My Father,” “your Father.”102 This alone indicates that His relation to the Father was a special one.

Often the Gospel story tells that He left the circle of the disciples and the people around Him to go into solitude, on a mountain or to some quiet place. At such times, He was with His Father, and received the message of His will, and received Him into His heart.

We may look into one of these colloquies, the one that took place on Gethsemane, where He learned the final will of His Father and surrendered Himself to it.

John is the one who illuminates for us the interior life of Jesus, the most private of His feelings and that depth of nature which placed Him so far above all created things. In the words of farewell spoken by Jesus to His disciples the evening before His death, this profundity is especially evident. He spoke at this time of the will of His Father, and of His commandment: “I have bestowed my love upon you, just as my Father has bestowed His love upon me; live on, then, in my love. You will live on in my love if you keep my commandments, just as it is by keeping my Father’s commandments that I live on in His love.”103 We feel the presence in those words. The commandment, the will of the Father is no impersonal rule taken from somewhere. The Father Himself is His will; and that means His commandment is love. And when Jesus receives the Father’s will, He is “in the Father’s love,” the Father is with Him, and there is a unity there whence springs peace, His peace.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.