God Has Called Me By Name
Fr. Francis Nguyen, O.P.
Dear Sisters
and Brothers in Christ,
The Liturgy
of the Word in this Second Sunday in the Ordinary Time provides us with a rich
impression of how the Lord God loves and cares for us.
God crated
us in His own image, by giving us the breath of His life which animates our
understanding of His greatness, our gratitude for His love, and our freedom to
do His Holy Will.
The
All-loving Father in heaven goes further in calling us to Him in order that we
may know how much He loves and cares for us.
His love has
overcome our unfaithfulness. After having
fallen into sin, we lost the grace of union with God, the very source of our
life. God did not abandon us sinners in
the hand of the forces of evil, but He made the first move to rescue us from
the slavery of sin and death. God’s plan
of salvation for us has claimed the life of His Only Son, Jesus Christ.
God wants
His saving power to reach as many sinners as possible. This is why He continues to call us, as He
did in the past, to carry on the proclamation of the message of Divine Mercy to
all peoples.
This mission
of announcing the Good News of God’s saving love Christ wants to entrust to
each one of us, His disciples, personally and confidentially.
Christ calls
the brothers Andrew and Peter by their names, the way the Lord God called the
boy Samuel. Christ gives Peter a new
name to mean that he is now a new person, empowered with God’s blessing to
share His saving love with others.
Today,
Christ’s calling of new disciples goes on in this Sunday gathering in His name
when we listen to Him speak through the reading of Sacred Scripture. Christ still invites each and one of us,
personally and confidentially, “Come and you will see.”
Whether we
hear His call or not remains a personal and confidential question.
How would we
react to the mission of introducing God’s saving message to the world remains
an open question.
Only one
thing we are sure of that the Lord God, through His Beloved Son, Jesus Christ,
is calling us by names.
