“Can you make the wedding guests fast while the bridegroom
is with them?” Christ asked. “But the days will come, and when the
bridegroom is taken away from them, then they will fast in those
days.”
The secret, of course, is to become truly like Christ. He is
the master of adaptation, flexibility, versality and consistency. This
was shown, first of all, by the fact that out of sheer love for us, in
spite of our stupidities, he became man to recover us from our state
of alienation from God. Yes, out of this unwavering love, he did
everything, including offering his own life, to redeem us.
This truth of our faith should sink deep in our
consciousness and should somehow impel us to undertake a process of
becoming Christ-like, obviously with the help of God’s grace that is
actually also provided to us in abundance.
Let’s remember that not only did the Son of God become man,
he also assumed the sinfulness of man without committing any sin, and
as consequence, took on the human condition of being weakened and
wounded by sin, including being subjected to temptation and finally
death.
In his preaching, he used parables to make his lessons more
accessible to the people. He was always compassionate, quick to
forgive, slow to anger. He was always thinking of his Father and of
the people. Remember him saying, “The one who sent me is true and what
I heard from him I tell the world.” (Jn 8,26)
He gave preferential treatment to the children, the weak,
the handicapped, the sick, the sinners. He was only allergic to the
proud and self-righteous whose sense of right and wrong did not come
from God, but rather from their own selves in their great variety of
human consensus and other subtle forms of self-assertion. But on the
cross, he asked forgiveness for everyone.
He was always adapting himself to the people, being flexible
to everyone, and yet managed to accomplish his mission, whatever the
situation was. He was not only passively adapting himself to the
environment. He was also actively pursuing his goal in different ways.
That’s versatility for you.
Eventually, he rounded off all these expressions of
adaptability, flexibility and versatility by offering his life on the
cross. There he made as his own all the sins of men, died to them and
rose from the dead. He turned the cross from being a tree of sin and
death into a tree of life. His death conquered sin and death, and
opened the door to eternal life.
To become Christ-like would indeed require a lifetime
effort, but we can always start and develop it anytime. Let us not
wait for some so-called opportune moment to be so. Any time, any
situation can and should be an occasion to be like Christ. Obviously,
we have to know Christ more and more. Thus, we need to be familiar
with his life, his teachings and his example.
Let us put our mind and heart into this most important
responsibility of ours.
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