Offered for the Life of the World

 The Spiritual Program

This year’s Fourth World Prayer Congress for Life wants, through prayer, reflection, and in fact, to penetrate deeper into the mystery that Jesus, our Lord, has given Himself up for us. The Apostle Paul expresses it in the Letter to the Galatians 2:20, with the words:  

“I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me.

And I live, now not I; but Christ lives in me. And that I live now in the flesh: I live in the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and delivered himself for me.”

And John the Evangelist writes in his First Letter:

“The way we came to know love was that he laid down his life for us; so we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers.”

Theology has brought Jesus’ Self-offering to the concept of Pro-Existence. This means that Jesus lived His life completely out of this for (pro): for the Father, for the people, for each one of us. Jesus lived for us not only in the past, but still. Even now, today, Jesus gives His life for us: In the Eucharist, He humbles himself, makes Himself small, and gives Himself away to us - every day, throughout the world.

And we?

We want to follow. We want to adoringly contemplate Jesus' life; we want to be immersed into His love; we want to let ourselves be embraced and captured by His love, so that we can ourselves then be witnesses of this love in the world. We want to be His disciples. His friends.

Friendship goes "to the end" (Jn. 13.1). That is exactly what Jesus did. But this means, that in our willingness to follow Jesus, there are no boundaries. We want to follow Him in good as well as in difficult days. Also, pain and suffering are part of this following. John Paul II spoke of the "Gospel of suffering", that "Suffering, more than anything else makes present in the history of humanity the powers of the Redemption."  And he also said: "It is suffering, more than anything else, which clears the way for the grace which transforms human souls. In that "cosmic" struggle between the spiritual powers of good and evil, spoken of in the Letter to the Ephesians(89), human sufferings, united to the redemptive suffering of Christ, constitute a special support for the powers of good, and open the way to the victory of these salvific powers." (Salivifici Doloris, n. 27).

The cosmic battle, of which John Paul II speaks, is nowhere more clearly evident than in abortion, which the Second Vatican Council called a "heinous crime" (Gaudium et Spes, no. 51).  In this fight we are not to be bystanders.  Like Christ, who is THE LIFE, we should be advocates for life. How?  When we unite ourselves with Him and allow Him to incorporate us in his self-offering, thereby becoming ourselves bread for the world. in us by His devotion can take it, so even bread for the world. With St. Paul, we will recognize:

 “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I do my share on behalf of His body, which is the church, in filling up what is lacking in Christ's afflictions.”

Our prayers and our sacrifice "with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your strength", should be our response to Jesus’ self-offering. Our response is at the same time the fulfillment of the request, which the Virgin Mary made to us in Fatima and Lourdes: To pray and to sacrifice so that no soul would perish.

At the core of our response is joy. The joy, the countless Saints shine with and the joy refer to when we honor Mary, Queen of all the Saints, in the Litany of Loretto, with the title "Cause of  Our  Joy".  We rejoice that Christ has called us to participate in His work. We are thankful and we live in that gratitude . . . in the Eucharist, which is exactly this: an Offering of Thanksgiving.