Gideon no longer knew what to think or what to do. Whenever the fields of Israel stood ready for harvest, the Midianites would descend and strip them bare. "They came up, overwhelming the land like a swarm of locusts, with all their livestock and their tents, for the men and camels who came to lay the country waste were beyond counting" (Jg 6:5). It is in this precarious situation that the Bible first shows us Gideon: threshing wheat in secret, to keep out of the watchful sight of his enemies. For the moment, his whole horizon has narrowed down to survival.
And it is here that an angel sent by God finds him — or rather, seeks him out. "The Lord is with you, mighty warrior," the angel greets him (Jg 6:12). Gideon seems quite unmoved by either the compliment or the dignity of his visitor, for he answers as he would a friend or a neighbour, speaking plainly, without weighing his words too carefully: "Please, sir, if the Lord is with us, why has all this happened to us? Where are all the wonders our fathers told us of, when they said the Lord brought us up out of Egypt? But now the Lord has abandoned us and put us into the hands of Midian" (Jg 6:13).
Exposing the wound
There are moments in life when it is easy to recognise ourselves in these words of Gideon. We have read and heard stories of the Work's early days, of our Father, of the first members, of the expansion that followed... but those accounts can sometimes sit awkwardly beside our own immediate surroundings, where visible fruit or apostolic momentum may seem thin on the ground. We realise, of course, that the Work is a blessing for the world and for the Church: we see what God has done through Opus Dei in the past, what He is doing in the present, and what He will do in the future; and if scarcity is felt in some places, in others the apostolic work goes on growing. We also know that St. Josemaría understood, with a clarity that came from God, that the Work will serve the Church until the end of time.
And yet, even from that broad view across space and time, it could happen that, faced with the reality of our own life, our own centre, our own region, we are sometimes overcome by discouragement. Perhaps we have put effort and enthusiasm into some apostolic undertaking, only to find ourselves soon overwhelmed by every kind of difficulty. We pray for vocations, but they are slow to come, or arrive only a trickle at a time. We know that the mystery of God is inexhaustible, and yet at times we may feel we have already heard it all. We do sense a renewal stirring in the life of the Church, but we may also have the impression of being left rather on the margins of it…
Faced with difficulties of this kind, we might simply tell ourselves that we need to look at things with a supernatural outlook, perhaps without being entirely sure what exactly we mean by that. Perhaps only that we should keep walking, trusting that things will get better whenever God wills it? That is certainly not a bad response, but it could prove an insufficient one, like placing a plain bandage over a festering wound. In Gideon's reply to the angel, we see just how open that wound really is. Gideon has not fallen into despair, nor into rebellion against God, but he is bewildered and disappointed. And he has the candour to expose the wound, to show the Lord the doubt which has thrown him off balance.
The supernatural, grace, does not simply come to "cover" wounded nature: it comes to heal it, to redeem it from the very depths of its abyss. Grace needs to be poured out into our nature; the joy and strength of God must coexist with human discouragement and frailty. We need that conversatio: togetherness, conversation. Gideon's reply falls precisely within this frame: "Look, none of this makes sense to me; you say you are with me, yet everything I see seems to say quite the opposite…" And that candour before God, together with abandonment into his hands, is the true supernatural response, the same one we see in the book of Job, in which a man in anguish questions the Lord's designs but never stops praying, and ends by accepting his own smallness.[1] His wound has to fester, and then heal in the light of God's sun.
A leap of trust
The Lord is not troubled by Gideon's reply; if anything, He seems almost amused by his frankness and his honesty. And He answers: "Go with the strength you have, and save Israel from the hand of Midian. I am sending you" (Jg 6:14). The whole mystery of Gideon's vocation lies hidden in these words: "With the strength you have, with the strength that is within you." It is as though the Lord were telling him: "Gideon, you don't know it yet, but I have placed in you an energy capable of overcoming these enemies who are crushing you even now."
God says the same to each one of us. Though, as happened to Gideon himself, we may not quite believe it: "Please, Lord, how am I to save Israel? My clan is the weakest in Manasseh, and I am the least in my family" (Jg 6:15). Perhaps we too wonder: What kind of strength is in me? I already tried such-and-such, and it came to little… I've spent years struggling with this or that, or trying to make myself understood in some particular setting… Lord, I'll go on trying, but sometimes the weariness weighs heavy, and in the end I'm not sure I really have that strength…
It is neither strange nor wrong for our prayer to sometimes run along those lines: it is part of the leap of faith — of trust — that God needs in order to transform our fragile humanity, our humanity that sometimes feels like a failure, with the full strength of his divinity. But let us forget about ourselves for a moment. "The strength that is in you": let us hear how the Lord addresses these words to everyone in the Work. With the strength that is in you, with the strength of the spirit I have placed in you, go and save Israel… We certainly have no pretension of "saving the world," as though the Holy Spirit were not guiding history, and as though there were not many other Christians doing wonderful work beside us… And yet we know that God has a mission for the Work; that is why He inspired St Josemaría to found it. Our vocation — each man's, each woman's — is "a grace that embraces our whole life and that shows itself as light and as strength: light, so that we can see the way, see what God wants of us; and strength, so as to be able to respond to the call, to say yes and to go forward on the path."[2]
Filiation and fraternity
What, then, is this light and this strength? How are we to keep from losing them? How are we to "rekindle the gift of God"?[3] "How can we embody today, with a living fidelity, the spirit St. Josemaría received from God to serve the Church?"[4] Perhaps a first answer is already to be found simply by turning around some lines he wrote in 1939 about what might weaken the Work: "Obstacles? External obstacles do not worry me: we shall overcome them easily. I see only one formidable obstacle: your lack of filiation and your lack of fraternity, should these ever arise in our family."[5]
One thing immediately stands out in these words: everything speaks of family. St. Josemaría calls the Work a "family" in just this way, and points to the two axes that constitute every family reality — filiation and fraternity — as its vital nerve-centres. So what makes the Work strong or weak turns on these two poles. The more the Work lives as a family, the more brightly its spirit shines; the less it lives as a family, the less light it gives. And the Lord has not lit it "to put it under a bushel, but on a stand, that it may give light to all in the house" (Mt 5:15).
Filiation naturally brings to mind our bond and affection for the Father, the Prelate of Opus Dei. It is right and fitting that this should be so, though this affection in turn is rooted in our filiation towards God. The key question, then, might be framed like this: is divine filiation, for me, an idea, a principle I ought to bear in mind frequently, but which ultimately remains rather abstract? Or is it a living experience, something deeply rooted in me? The "sense of divine filiation"[6] is a grace we need to keep asking for. It is the grace of living as Jesus lived, as He continues to live… as He wants to live in us (cf. Gal 4:6). Jesus lives on the Father's love: that is his whole "secret." That constant, trusting dialogue with his Father is the eternal life of the Word of God. And it is meant to be our lives, as children of God, too.
The life of Christ within us has its own atmosphere, and we call it "the glorious freedom of the children of God" (Rom 8:21) — utterly removed from the calculating mentality of the servant or the hired hand, which might sometimes tempt anyone who has felt the call to give himself to God. Jesus sketches a portrait of that mentality in the figure of the elder brother in the parable (cf. Lk 15:25-32): an outwardly blameless man who had always stayed in his father's house; who had committed no great sins or great follies, but had settled into a cold, dutiful compliance. A man whose heart was not a son's heart, who felt neither the father's love nor concern for his estranged brother — who even grows indignant with the father on seeing that love in action! This man, who at no point calls either of his relatives "father" or "brother," had a grave problem with filiation… and with fraternity.
Whoever truly knows himself to be a son discovers that he is also a brother. Even while aware of his own and others' limitations, which can sometimes prove irksome, he loves with a tender love, with a heart that will not let itself grow hard. Feeling the Father welcome him and carry him in his arms, feeling that warm embrace of God, he is able in turn to offer others a fatherly and brotherly embrace. "Yes, my son: you in God, to illuminate, to give flavour, to increase, to be leaven."[7]
People said of the first Christians: "See how they love one another!"[8] The popularity this phrase has gathered down the centuries should not reduce it to a mere platitude. It was that extraordinary love that made the Christian message credible and gave it its irresistible force. See how they love one another: because they knew themselves to be loved by God their Father. And there lies the root of the strength God has placed within the spirit of the Work.
[1] Cf. Job 13:24–27; 30:20–23; 42:2–6.
[2] F. Ocáriz, Pastoral Letter, 28 October 2020.
[3] F. Ocáriz, Pastoral Message, 19 March 2026.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Circular letter of St Josemaría Escrivá to the faithful of Opus Dei, Burgos, 9 January 1939, cited in The Way, critical-historical edition, commentary on no. 955.
[6] St. Josemaría, The Forge, no. 987.
[7] St. Josemaría, In Dialogue with the Lord, no. 11.
[8] Cf. Tertullian, Apologeticum, 39 (PL I, 471).