“Give and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over, will be put into your lap.” (Lk 6:38).
"Seeing the
multitudes, Jesus was moved with pity"
(Mt 9:36); this expresses all the love of Jesus for men groping in
the dark. Love that He received from the Father: “But God shows his
love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us”
(Rm 5:8).
And in calling and
sending his apostles, Jesus makes them share the same passionate and
free love for men: "Freely you have
received, freely give” (Mt 10:8).
Evangelical love has
as its primary characteristic gratuity, to
take the initiative, to not wait for the other to take the first
step, to not let ourselves to be polluted by calculations and
interest.
Gratuity is also the
condition for proclaiming the Gospel
effectively.
If the gratuity is
the first quality of love, poverty is its
robe and the riverbed where it can flow. Gratuity and poverty were
married on the Cross, the greatest manifestation of Jesus and of his
Gospel. The Church is called to tread the same path.
Teresa of Calcutta
declared that in her extreme poverty there
was never lacking a bed and a crib to accommodate the poorest people.
While, when gratuity and poverty diminish, one experiences sterility.
Chiara Lubich wrote: "If a group of men were true servants of
Christ in ones neighbor, soon the world would be of Christ."
Gratuitous love is efficacious and has a force of irresistible
attraction, because it reveals the omnipotence of God.
God never lets himself be
outdone in generosity!
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An Experience of Life:
One evening my
husband came home with the news that we
would receive a sum of money as an inheritance from our relative.
While celebrating the unexpected small
fortune, one of us said, "We can not keep it just for ourselves,
it would be nice to share it with someone in need."
The next night we
learned that a family which came to Italy
from Rwanda needed help. So we immediately
found to whom to
donate half of the sum received. Our
gesture then provoked in other families the desire to do something.
Soon we organized together a raffle with
the proceeds of which were donated for the same purpose.
F.G.,
Italy
