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You are here:Home / Family News / NEF 2014 / Family News - 2014 December 14th / A word from the Superior General
Dec 13, 2014

A word from the Superior General

Jesus, the favourite Son, beloved of the Father

A word from the Superior General

When Saint Michel speaks of Jesus, it is always about a person who is lively, dynamic and driven by a “generous impulse” that always goes forward. Always “outwards” to paraphrase Pope Francis. This figure of Jesus, constantly moving is not a naive image on the part of Father Garicoits. It is the fruit of much prayer and reflection on the person of Jesus in the Gospels. It is also one of the features of the Incarnation. This involves becoming flesh, moving from one state “... his divine state…the form of God” to another, that of the “form of a servant, counted as one of us.”

Upon entering the world, he began his journey ... Here I am! I come to do your will, O my God! ... (Manifesto) The child-God shows us the way, he leaps, he runs, always going forward ... (DS. 107). Jesus Christ, rising like the sun from his tent, rejoices like a champion to run his course (Ps 18;. DS. 42). What a leap! From the Father’s heart to the heart of Mary and from her to a manger! (DS. 43). This is the generous impulse of the Heart of Jesus, the Word (RV 2).

The Jesus that St. Michael Garicoits entrusts to us is almost always in motion. Missionary, he leaves behind the security of the glorious Trinity to become man; he comes close to all those who are wounded in life, especially in their human relations; he himself becomes a victim. This is the extraordinary “spectacle” of the incarnation.

In John’s Gospel, Jesus presents himself as the Beloved Son and the one who is sent (a missionary) from the Father. “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us; and we saw his glory; the glory of the Father’s only Son, full of grace and truth (John 1: 14).

No one has ever seen God, but God-the-Only-Son made him known: the one who is in and with the Father.  (Jn. 1: 17). Yes, God so loved the world that he gave his only Son that whoever believes in him may not be lost, but may have eternal life. God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world; instead, through him the world is to be saved. (Jn. 3, 16,17). In the verbal confrontation between Christ and the Jews in Chapters 5, 6, 7, 9, 11, Jesus constantly uses the phrase “the one who sent me”, demonstrating how he is radically united (to the Father) accompanied by him and never deserted in the mission he wants to achieve.

In the Synoptics, its striking to find the same dynamic on the part of Christ before his birth He is carried in Mary’s  womb, to visit Elizabeth causing John the Baptist to rejoice within the womb of his mother. He is  a missionary from the womb of his mother. This is true again for the journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem. He  is brought as an infant to the Temple, to Egypt and to Nazareth. Then again he comes to Jerusalem this time as a pilgrim where he will freely reveal himself  to accomplish the mission received from the Father.

The Synoptics also present him as the itinerant Preacher who goes from village to village announcing the Gospel of the Kingdom. He is a rabbi who leads from the front, and his disciples, men and women follow. “Get behind me!” (Mk 8: 33.). To follow Jesus is to walk in his footsteps on the road he will trace for us. John says that Jesus is the way. While Luke insists that, “when the time came for him to be lifted up to heaven, Jesus “set his face” to go up to Jerusalem (Lk. 9, 31). And he went up on a high mountain to be transfigured; he got into the boat so as to address the crowds or to cross to the other side of the lake ...

This continual moving and travelling can also be seen in parables: the sower went out to sow .... The owner of the vineyard goes out at different times of the day to hire ... The Good Samaritan passes and approaches the half-dead man who went down from Jerusalem to Jericho ... the shepherd will seek the lost sheep to find the ... woman who loses one drachma, searches the entire house, carefully trying to find it. The good father runs to meet his son, the prodigal, and kisses him; he even leaves the banqueting hall to invite the elder son to come in... the man who discovers a pearl of great price, goes and sells all that he has to buy it.

John speaks of Jesus as sitting on the edge of Jacob’s well in the middle of the day, tired of the journey. He sits at the Last Supper as he did at the supper offered him by Simon the Pharisee, among the sinners and publicans. He sits in the home of Martha and Mary at Bethany, and when he gives the Sermon on the Mount.

The agony in the Garden is the first step on the Way of the Cross: he leaves the Upper Room to go to Gethsemane. There, he was arrested and taken to the house of Caiaphas, and then to that of Pilate, then to Herod’s palace and finally again to Pilate. From there he is led to Golgotha carrying his cross, on which he will be nailed and lifted up. The itinerant missionary Jesus is also the “humble and obedient” one, whom no one can stop until all is fulfilled: the lifting up on the cross and the crucifixion.

But we also see him as missionary in his resurrection where he goes out to meet his own: Mary of Magdala, the women, the apostles in the upper room, or apostles by the Sea of Galilee where they were fishing. He walked beside his disciples on the road to Emmaus. Until finally he ascends to Heaven.

And contemplating Christ in his itinerant and missionary movement, I admire his calmness, his obedience, his inner and outer freedom to focus on the “one thing necessary”: to please in all things the Father, who loves us so much and who is concerned about the happiness of all men. This is the secret spring that inspires his way forward: the loving will of the Father.

To resist this would be to surrender to the temptation to stay turned in on himself instead of living for the joy of the Father and the service of man.
The temptations are precisely the proposal for a quick solution that give an apparent gratification, but take away that ease, that freedom, that joy, that mobility, that roaming, that sense of mission that allows you to find the loving will of the Father in situations always new and sometimes surprising.

“In the morning, before sunrise, Jesus got up, left and went to a deserted place; Simon went to look for him, and when he had found him, he said: “Everyone is looking for you” And he replied, “Let us go and proclaim in the neighbouring villages because this is why I was sent. “. And he preached in their synagogues and in all Galilee, and expelled demons. “(Mk. 1: 35-39)..

Gaspar Fernández Pérez, scj
Superior General

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