Fr Marco Lazzaron
rom the beginning of his public mission, Jesus was building a community around himself. He calls men to follow him and to share their destiny with him. It is not just a simple companionship as an antidote to loneliness.
This is why the exchanges of glances by the first two disciples, following the example of John the Baptist, and the ‘rabbi’ of Galilee who passes by after his Baptism in the Jordan, are particularly moving. Eyes meet, a desire emerges. Man’s search meets the search for God.
This is the mystery of vocation: every human life is in itself a vocation. In a vocation, every man and woman discovers that God’s coming into the world is not a question that interests humanity in general and that it remains imprinted in the pages of a history detached from itself. God’s coming into the world, is the most important event for everyone’s personal life. Each of us is involved in the miracle of the incarnation. Jesus enters into our unique existence.
Only God knows how to hold together the universal and the particular so well. Only God knows how to turn his gaze with the same tenderness to each of his children, giving each one the unspeakable experience of feeling unique and privileged in the presence of God. God looks at me, and asks me to look at Him!
In the discovery of our life as a vocation, we are given the secret of the journey, the keystone. Why am I in the world? What is the meaning of my existence? Where do I come from and where am I going? In these questions that cry out to heaven in a thousand tones and in a thousand harmonies, sometimes loud, sometimes silenced by pain, all the thirst for the infinite that dwells in the human heart is expressed. It is the dream of happiness; it is the yearning for freedom imprinted in our innermost being.
Here is the answer: happiness and freedom are relationships; they are a bond with the Trinity made flesh in Jesus. God has allied Himself with my joy, and my life is beautiful with Him! Only with Him! To live my life as a vocation means to respond to his call, to build intimacy, to dwell in his house.
There is nothing to be done: when we enter Jesus’ house, when we stay even for a moment with him in his dwelling, we can never forget him. The mark remains indelible. For this reason, there is no other way to the fulfilment of our lives than to follow the path of the One who, when he looks at us, pierces us with love.
The joy of the encounter and connection with Jesus cannot be held back: it becomes a vital necessity, a need for truth, to build community, to seek others with whom to share God’s love and to forge new intimate bonds of communion. They change our existence, they are translated into visible and concrete changes: our name now, like our whole person, returns to be His, all His, as it was for Simon (who was transformed after meeting with Christ, even in his name).