“THOSE who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.’ For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners” (Mt 9:12-13). With these words from today’s Gospel, our Lord reveals that God’s most characteristic attitude, through which his love shines forth in a special way, is mercy.
Being merciful is not merely feeling sorry for others. Above all, it is the desire to uproot the evil that lies at the root of suffering. God is supremely merciful because He is omnipotent and can overcome evil from within. But faced with all the suffering in the world, a difficult question often arises: if God is good and all-powerful, why does He allow evil? This is the scandal that, throughout history, has tested people’s faith in a merciful and omnipotent God.
Faced with this false dilemma, Pope Benedict XVI said: “An authentically religious attitude prevents us from presuming to judge God, accusing him of allowing poverty and disease and failing to have compassion for his creatures . . . Often we cannot understand why God refrains from intervening. Yet he does not prevent us from crying out, like Jesus on the Cross: ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ (Mt 27:46). We should continue asking this question in prayerful dialogue before his face: ‘Lord, holy and true, how long will it be?’ (Rev 6:10).”[1]
In Christ, true God and true man, omnipotence and mercy are intimately united. God takes evil upon himself through his death on the cross and conquers it through his resurrection. Like a good physician, He heals not only the symptoms, but the root of all evil: pride. Therefore the true battlefield where the struggle between good and evil is waged is not simply the external world, but in the human heart. So many wounds are born there; but it is there that our Lord also wants to enter to heal us. The heart is like the affective wellspring of the soul, which gives direction to the intellect and the will, and which needs to be purified in order to see God.
JESUS’ words addressed to the scribes and Pharisees recount the call of the tax collector Matthew to be an apostle. “He saw a man sitting at the tax collector’s booth, whose name was Matthew, and he said to him, ‘Follow me.’ And he got up and followed him” (Mt 9:9). Divine mercy is at the origin of Matthew’s call, for our Lord has not come to call the righteous, but sinners. And He calls them not only to receive forgiveness, but also to collaborate with Him in proclaiming salvation, extending his mercy to all men and women.
Every vocation is a manifestation of God’s mercy towards each of us. After faith, it is the “greatest grace that God could bestow upon a creature.”[2] He has granted us the joy of being close to Him and of being sent to others. Far from being a burden, a divine vocation enables us to attain the highest goal imaginable in this life: holiness. So many people are filled with enthusiasm about noble human undertakings; we too can be filled with enthusiasm for this supernatural and human undertaking that God places in our hands. Why not aspire to the highest? Why not set ourselves the most ambitious goals? A Christian who has discovered the call to holiness feels like shouting: “Fools! Leave behind those worldly things that shackle the heart and very often degrade it.... Leave all that and come with us in search of Love!”[3]
GOD has addressed his words filled with mercy to us too, as he did to Matthew. This is not merely the intellectual communication of concepts, but the self-communication of God himself, the transmission of eternal life. God has chosen each of us and called us from all eternity, before we came into existence. Before the greatness of this choice, a proof of God’s love and mercy, we are filled with gratitude and humility, convinced that “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong” (1 Cor 1:27-28).
Each person discovers God’s voice in the intimacy of his or her heart at a specific moment in life. But a vocation doesn’t belong only to the past, as though the present were a continuation of an initial impulse that gradually fades as one becomes accustomed to it. A person’s vocation remains ever-present. If we look at the lives of the apostles, we see that Jesus called them in different circumstances with the same words. He called Simon and Andrew with the invitation “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men” (Mk 1:17). And He addressed Matthew in the same way: “Follow me” (Mt 9:9). After the Passion and Peter’s threefold confession of his love in reparation for his betrayal, Peter heard again from our Lord’s lips, after so much time and so many experiences, the same words “Follow me!” (Jn 21:19). At the first steps of Peter’s mission and after the Passion, in such diverse circumstances, the same word, the same call, resounds.
Our Lady can help us to listen to her Son’s voice today with gratitude and trust. Mary, who welcomed the word of God with a humble heart, teaches us to recognize our vocation as a gift of mercy and to respond to it each day with renewed fidelity.
[1] Benedict XVI, Deus caritas est, nos. 37-38.
[2] Saint Josemaría, Notes from a meditation, 6 January 1956.
[3] Saint Josemaría, The Way, no. 790.