“It is because I love you that I come to make you love Me, so that you may all be saved” (Father’s message to Sr. Eugenia Ravasio).
Again and again we are invited to deeply assimilate this message, the declaration of our Heavenly Father’s love for humanity, and to respond to it with all our heart. In fact, this message is at the heart of our existence, because the love of God, which we find here in all its divine purity, is the reason why we live.
It is the great and incomparable message of our Father: that He is a loving God and, as He makes clear in today’s passage, He wants this relationship of love to unfold through our response to Him.
We know why our Father wants a response from us, and that it is not enough just to know His love. In fact, it is only our response, the opening of our whole being to God, that enables the Heavenly Father to give us all that He has in store for us. He does not just want to give us something, but He wants to make us partakers of His fullness and of all that His love has prepared for us. In this way, our response of love also becomes a gift to the Father, because it is a great joy for Him to show His love to His children.
It is also important that we do not lose sight of the fact that the natural and trusting love relationship with our Father was overshadowed by sin. Therefore, the loving relationship He now offers us, renewed by His grace, free access to Him through His Son, is an expression of His saving love that leads us out of the abyss of darkness into the Kingdom of His light (cf. Col 1:13).
With each loving response we give to our divine Father, we can absorb more deeply His redeeming love, so that in this holy love we become more and more what the Father has called us to be.