So it was also with Saul of Tarsus, when He encountered the Lord on the road to Damascus, when Jesus changed his heart and gave him the mission to announce salvation to the peoples of the earth (as we see in the first reading for today’s feast). So it is too for each of us who have encountered Jesus in the Church, where He touches the personal depths of each of our hearts while also uniting us with our brothers and sisters and calling us to serve every human person made in God’s image and called to share in God’s Eternal Joy.
We may not feel “impelled” by the love of Christ, as was Mary Magdalen, the Apostles, Saint Paul, or the many great saints of history. But through Baptism into His Body, He has begun to transforms us —even if we usually forget, or fail to live coherently. He calls us, and insofar as we recognize this call we want to share it with others. The Spirit of God lights a flame in our hearts to spread the hope of Christ all around us. Even if we break away from Christ and reject His love, still He calls us to return to Him, and is always ready to rekindle the fire of our hearts.
Christ is King of the Universe, and He seeks out every human person—including the great majority that do not know Him, or fail to recognize the true significance of His name. He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life for every person, the impetus and the goal of every human journey. Still, the “way” He chooses to make Himself known and loved throughout the world is through us, His Church.
If this were merely a human project, it would overwhelm us. But it is the work of the Holy Spirit, and He brings it to fruition in Christ in God’s time, with much that remains hidden and mysterious but which still pertains to the fullness of Christ in His Church. What matters most for our vocation is to stay with Christ and to follow Him. It is to respond, like Saint Mary Magdalen and Saint Paul, when He calls our name with love, and meets us in “places” in our lives where we never expected to find Him. It is to believe in Him and adhere to Him with the strength of faith, hope, and love He gives to us, to allow Him to refashion our hearts and move our hearts by the “new things,” by the miracle of His presence with us as the Life of our lives, the One who reveals the Father’s love for us and for the world, the One who shines light on everything, who is the meaning and fulfillment of all things.
We are weak, we fall short, we make a mess of so many things; we repent, return, and begin anew, we learn and grow in Jesus Christ in the communion of His Church. He is here, the New Adam, the beginning of the new creation. He is God-with-us and He is with us all through this life, sustaining all things, drawing all things and all people to Himself. The more we grow in awareness of His enduring victory, the more we will share it with gladness and joy and thanksgiving, and the more it will illuminate even our most unbearable sorrows.
As Saint Mary Magdalen learned, He turns our sorrows into joy. And Saint Paul says in the reading in today’s liturgy:
“The love of Christ impels us, once we have come to the conviction that one died for all; therefore, all have died. He indeed died for all, so that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised.
“Consequently, from now on we regard no one according to the flesh; even if we once knew Christ according to the flesh, yet now we know him so no longer. So whoever is in Christ is a new creation: the old things have passed away; behold, new things have come” (2 Corinthians 5:14-17).
“Consequently, from now on we regard no one according to the flesh; even if we once knew Christ according to the flesh, yet now we know him so no longer. So whoever is in Christ is a new creation: the old things have passed away; behold, new things have come” (2 Corinthians 5:14-17).