301st Meditation
“The world does not acknowledge us, because it did not acknowledge Him” (1 Jn 3:1b).
We can hope that, through a trustworthy witness on our part, people will find access to the love of our Heavenly Father. However, the words we have heard from the Apostle John exhort us always to be realistic. In the Prologue of his Gospel, St. John writes: “Light shines in darkness, and darkness did not comprehend it” (Jn 1:5).
As witnesses to the mercy that the Father has revealed to us in Christ, we find ourselves in that tension of recognising, on the one hand, the Father’s love; and, on the other hand, perceiving the world’s remaining closed-mindedness towards the truth.
But what we suffer here is only what God Himself suffers, and from Him we must learn how to deal with it. In our Heavenly Father, we find that long-suffering which waits patiently for human beings to turn to Him. God does not turn His back on them in disappointment, leaving them to their evil ways without offering them His help. On the contrary, He calls out to them day and night and stands by mankind, even when they want nothing to do with Him and do not recognise Him or His own.
So we too must not allow ourselves to be confused or discouraged if we experience rejection of our person or our witness. However far from the truth they may be, we can strive to win souls through our prayer and sacrifice. The alienation from God in the world must become a challenge to us to penetrate even more deeply into the love of our Father, so that our witness may shine even more brightly in the supernatural radiance of His love.
In this way, we become much like the Lord, who responded to so much rejection, persecution and hatred with the greatest manifestation of love on the Cross. Certainly for us humans this is difficult, just as it is difficult to make real the words of the Lord in the Sermon on the Mount exhorting us to love our enemies (Mt 5:44). But this is an invitation from our Father not to dwell on the limitations of our own capacity to love; but to open our hearts so that divine love can bring about in our lives what we, human beings, would not be able to do on our own.