Monday, April 7, 2014

LET US BE “CRUCIFIED AND RESURRECTED”

This is a confusing and intriguing title.  It calls our attention to something greater which we need to achieve. How can we be crucified and resurrected in Capuchin Franciscan vocation. Let us turn to our Father and founder St. Francis. We all know a story is told about St. Francis that one day a Friar Masseo came to him and asked, "Why after you? Why is the whole world coming after you, wanting to see you, to hear you, to follow you?"  Francis' own response to Masseo's question indicates that he is chosen by God because of his smallness and insufficiency, so that the Creator and not the creature will receive the credit. Francis is an ordinary person who takes the gospel and the Life of Jesus seriously. His identification with Jesus attracts men and women of all times and ages to his Order to be his followers. The following of Jesus and conformation to Jesus leads him to reveal that the question "Why after you?" is transformed into "Why after Him?"
Francis never wrote a meditation on the passion of Jesus but what he did was to identify with Christ thus bringing the whole message of Jesus to his life and made it look real in his dealing with all creatures. The desire to conform totally to Christ was put directly into deeds, into action, by Francis. Rather than explain what it meant to become one with God through conformation to Christ, he demonstrated it, with an intensity and simplicity. The Cross was seen in every fiber of his being and Resurrection was demonstrated in his relationships, words and deeds. For Francis, the way of Jesus was above all the way of the cross. His life was ruled by "compassion for the passion of Christ" (2C 127). The whole course of his life from the very beginning was marked with the glorious mysteries of Christ's cross (Minor Life 6:9; pp. 825-26). From the early days of his conversion, when he heard Christ speaking to him from the crucifix in the ruined church of San Damiano , it was above all conformity to the Passion of Christ. The motivation for all this is nothing but fervent love and he longed to be totally transformed into him by the fire of ecstatic love" (LM 9:2; p. 263). This conformity to Christ in his Passion culminates, of course, in the events of September, 1224, on Mt. Alverna , when the body of Francis is marked with the wounds of Christ: Thus it is the love of Francis for Christ which draws him into a participation in the Paschal mystery.
For Francis, the cross was never a sign merely of suffering but of redemption, and his vision of a redeemed world complements his devotion to the cross and accounts for his emphasis on joy as a sign of genuine discipleship. From his experience of the risen Lord he composed the beautiful canticle of Brother Sun and Sister Moon is in some sense a resurrection hymn, a hymn of the new creation. Francis was constantly conscious of the resurrection of Jesus and he witnessed to it through his life in the Order. With St. Paul he could say, "All I want is to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and to share his sufferings by reproducing the pattern of his death. That is the way I can hope to take my place in the resurrection of the dead" (Phil. 3:10-11).
this Easter we are all invited by Father and founder St. Francis to devote to the Life and passion of Christ. Let us cultivate a profound conviction that the life of Christ is the only road by which we can reach to the Father. Our Father Francis proposes to us that we only need to follow Jesus in all things and spread and deepen this devotion in our personal lives. Let the spirituality of conformation to the way of the cross be our daily bread so that we experience the Resurrection in our daily lives. St. Francis’s intimately identified with ordinary humanity and with Christ and wants us to continue to serve in our own time, as he did in his, as a sign of God's gracious presence  among His people. Let us unite ourselves completely with our poor, broken, sinful humanity in order experience the resurrected Christ. Let us bring the Resurrected Christ to others by being the resurrected Christ for others. This Easter challenges all friars to see and experience the resurrected Lord in the poor, the alienated, the "lepers" who continue to live in our midst. 

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