A Heart Fit for the Infinite
Simone Riva - God became flesh: it is God's initiative, not ours. It means that communion with God is possible, and it is something that changes us forever.
This Sunday's Gospel reveals that all it took was one sentence, certainly a disruptive one, for the Jews to start murmuring against Jesus: "I am the bread that came down from heaven." The Trinity's decision to have the Son "descend from heaven" was always, deep down, a punch in the stomach for men, accustomed as they were to imagine their gods.
From that moment on, in fact, one has always been forced to come to terms, as Benedict XVI said, with the "great mystery of God who came down from his Heaven to enter into our flesh" and with the fact that "in Jesus, God became incarnate, became a man like us, and thus opened for us the way to his Heaven, to full communion with him" (General Audience, Jan. 9, 2013).
Face-to-face with Christ puts man in a position to discover himself as never before and experience a lifelong communion with Him, even to the point of being able to eat His Body. Yet they murmured. They thought they already knew Him and that it was impossible for one of them to have even Heaven as their origin.
One can sense, however, that the real astonishment- bordering on disbelief- is actually about man himself, even before God. It seems impossible that a man could descend from God, be willed by Him, thought of by Him, preferred by Him. If he is here with us, if he is one of us, if we know his history and relatives, how can he have any other origin than the earth, the world of visible things, that which is available to our possession?
Murmuring denounces a lack of faith that man can come from the heart of God, from Heaven. All murmuring, after all, has this root: it takes out the other by taking out its origin. Jesus took our flesh, on the other hand, so that in us would vibrate a longing for the Heaven from which we came down, laying the foundation so that to win would not be to settle for a little "earthly heaven" made by us, our power, our circles, our entanglements.
The Son of God, coming to earth, decided that He had no place "where to lay His head." He did not choose an earthly homeland, and He broke precisely the dynamics of the already known and the usual "cunning" human supports. And for his own, he reserved the same fate: men without a homeland, this is what Christians are. Inassimilable to the world's mentality, in everything and everyone, they look for the signs of His presence and surprise in themselves the symptom of that origin they share with their Lord: a heart made for infinity.
Giacomo Leopardi described it well in one of his texts: "not being able to be satisfied by any earthly thing, nor, as it were, by the whole earth; considering the inestimable breadth of space, the marvelous number and bulk of worlds, and finding that everything is little and petty to the capacity of one's own soul; to imagine the number of worlds infinite, and the universe infinite, and to feel that our soul and desire would be even greater than so made a universe; and always to accuse things of insufficiency and nullity, and to suffer lack and vexation, and nevertheless boredom, seems to me the greatest sign of greatness and nobility, that is seen of human nature" (Zibaldone, LXVIII).
A human nature is embraced by a Heaven that intercepts our desires even in murmurings, does not stop, is not appeased, and becomes food, road, and life. Download.
The translation is not revised by the author. The article is published on ilsussidiario.net
