The Richness of a Living Presence

Julián Carrón - "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt. This event had so impressed the people of Israel that they were "glued" to their God. Even God was impressed, as he remembers putting these words into Jeremiah's mouth: "I remember you, the affection of your youth, the love of your betrothal, when you followed me into the wilderness, into an unseeded land" (Jer. 2:2). But this love of the people has not withstood the vicissitudes of history, and the Lord asks them: "What injustice did your fathers find in me, to turn away from me and run after nothingness, becoming nothingness themselves? (Jer. 2:5). They did not remember the LORD who brought them out of the land of Egypt; they "did not ask, 'Where is the LORD who brought us out of Egypt and led us into the desert? (Jer. 2:6). Even those who should have helped them did not:

"Even the priests did not ask, 'Where is the Lord? The scribes did not know me, the shepherds rebelled against me, the prophets prophesied in the name of Baal and followed idols that do not help" (Jer. 2:8). With this path taken by the people of Israel, we can understand the Book of Chronicles: "The leaders of Judah, the priests and the people multiplied their unfaithfulness, imitating in everything the abominations of the other nations and defiling the temple that the Lord had consecrated in Jerusalem. But despite their unfaithfulness - "The Lord, the God of their fathers, sent His messengers, prudently and unceasingly, to warn them, because He had compassion on His people and His dwelling place.

This is our God, who moves thoughtfully and unceasingly out of compassion for us. This unique, unceasing compassion would await an equally compassionate response from Israel. It was God's final act of mercy toward them. Still, instead of listening to him, the text continues, "they mocked God's messengers, despised his words, and ridiculed his prophets," even the last messenger, the prophet Jeremiah, who spoke to them in the name of the Lord, but they did not listen to him. What more could the Lord do that had not already been done? The text says, "The wrath of the LORD against his people reached its climax without any further remedy" (2Ch 36:12-13). But the wrath of the Lord is not to be understood as God's punishment of His people, as the prophet Hosea reminds us: "I will no longer act according to my fiery anger; I will no longer destroy Ephraim, for I am God and not man" (Hos 11:9).

So what does God do? What does this wrath mean? When God has exhausted his initiatives, and all that remains is the stubbornness of his people, what can he do? "I am still the God who brought you out of the land of Egypt. But my people have not listened to my voice; Israel has not obeyed me. Therefore, I must give them up to their hearts' hardness and follow their desires. It is like the father of the prodigal Son, faced with his Son's stubbornness; he does not punish him; he lets him go. But what else could he do but let him go to the hardness of his heart so that he might face the trial of his choice? This stubbornness has consequences. When Israel, instead of relying on the God who had shown so much concern for them, relies more on chariots and horses than on the Lord, the Babylonians come and, as the text continues, "set fire to the temple of the Lord, and broke down the walls of Jerusalem, and set fire to all its palaces, and destroyed all its precious things," leading the people into exile in Babylon. In exile, they will have the opportunity, like the prodigal Son, to become aware of who the God who has thoughtfully provided for them is. It is like God's last resort with us when our stubbornness prevails.

This dynamic we have described has not stopped, as we see in the Gospel, God never tires of starting all over again to show us all the Passion he has for us; this reaches its climax when he says: "For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. [For God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through Him." "God is not interested in judging people. He is pure love who, out of love, goes so far as to give his Son to the world" (Balthasar). The second St. Paul reiterates: "God, who is rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, made us alive again with Christ from the dead that we were through our trespasses: by grace, you have been saved. He also raised us with him and seated us in heaven in Christ, to show the incomparable riches of his grace through his goodness toward us in Christ Jesus." God can go so far as to give His Son for us, even though we are sinners, but He cannot do what only we can do in our place: freely accept His love.

A Living Presence

"When they came down from the mountain [after the transfiguration], [Jesus] commanded the disciples not to tell anyone what they had seen until the Son of Man had risen from the dead. And they kept it among themselves, wondering what it meant to rise from the dead" (Mark 9:9-10). They did not know what it meant to "rise from the dead. Not that they had not seen with their own eyes the resurrections Jesus had performed, Son of the widow of Nain, or the daughter of Jairus, or Lazarus-but after these events, they still did not understand.

How did they learn what resurrection was? Only the experience of the risen Christ revealed to the disciples what the resurrection really is. Even the fact that it had been announced in the Old Testament Scriptures, or the announcement of the resurrection made by Jesus himself, had not been enough for them to understand. Only the experience of encountering the living presence of the risen Jesus introduced them to the true, real knowledge of the resurrection. Think of how much disappointment there had been in those two on the road to Emmaus. Only when they saw Him alive were their eyes opened enough to realize how much their hearts were burning on the way, so they returned to Jerusalem, where they found the Eleven also saying, "Truly, the Lord is risen and has appeared to Simon! (Luke 24:34). Or Mary Magdalene, who mistook him for the gardener and recognized him only when she heard him called:

"Mary!" What an intensity that woman must have felt, experiencing in a new way what it means to have "one who lives" before her. The Gospel surprises us with Jesus greeting his disciples, who had betrayed her: "Peace be with you. "There is no other reconciliation scene with the disciples who had shamefully denied him and fled; everything is submerged in the great peace that Jesus offers them" (Balthasar). What was Jesus' experience of not being defined by their betrayal? It was a different life, all new, all different, all overflowing with peace that shone in Him and spread to His own and then to all. "Receive the Holy Spirit. If your sins are forgiven, they will be forgiven you; if your sins are not forgiven, they will not be forgiven you" (Jn 20:22).

This identification with the Easter stories will make his living presence more and more familiar, even to the point of introducing us to the experience of his resurrection today. It is not difficult to imagine how Easter week must have passed for the disciples: all of them filled with awe at the fact that the One whom they had accompanied for days, weeks, and years, whom they had seen suffer the Passion, die on the Cross, whom they had laid in the tomb, they saw alive! Risen before them! How they must have woken up every day amazed that he was alive. It is hard to imagine that He did not return to their minds again and again, that living presence! Even when they were engaged in their daily affairs, they must have been surprised that He came back to their minds as an event that determined everything, that invested everything! He surprised them while they were eating, fishing, and walking.

His constant surprising them made it impossible for it to become something of the past. He was there, present, alive, determining who they were. Their whole lives must have been filled with His presence: no imaginative effort, no attempt at self-conviction, just an immediate recognition that He was happening again! It is true, it is really true, He has risen. "None of the disciples," says Saint John, "dared to ask him, 'Who are you?' because they knew that he was the Lord" (Jn 21:12). This is the same as when the Eleven said to Thomas, "We have seen the Lord!" And with them, the whole Church rejoices: "This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad.

Each person can compare the way they experienced this Easter week. Did His living presence also burden us, or did we take it for granted, so much so that we went back to ordinary things as if nothing extraordinary had happened or had really happened? We know very well that everything else that happens to us has a greater density of reality than His living presence. I do not say this as an accusation, but because of what we are in danger of missing every day, every moment, like someone who would be surprised if he did not miss his loved one a few days after meeting him.

Perhaps it has happened to us as it did to Thomas: "Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger in the nail marks and put my hand in his side, I will not believe. The peace that overflows from Jesus is so unique that it even bows to the desire of Thomas: "Jesus came with the doors closed, stood in the middle and said, "Peace be with you!" [again]. Then he said to Thomas: "Put your finger here and look at my hands; stretch out your hand and put it in my side; and do not be unbelieving, but believing! Only those who surrender to this elementary recognition will experience that newness to which Thomas finally surrenders: "My Lord and my God! What must have penetrated him to provoke this confession? In Thomas, we see fulfilled what St. John says: "He who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God; and he who loves the one he has begotten loves the one he has begotten" (1 Jn 5:1). This is what we really need, to let God beget us through faith in Jesus. Let us let Him come into our lives, as Thomas did, to surprise us with His newness so that we, too, can understand from our own experience what the resurrection of the dead means. This is what will convince us of His resurrection.

How different life, our daily routine, and the usual everyday things would be if each moment were invested with His presence, if we were surprised to recognize Him alive, that He is there! Like a child who realizes that his mother is there, his whole life, his time, and even his simple activities lived before the presence of his mother. It is not a thought but a presence; this is the mother for the child. This is the living Christ for the disciples: a presence in life. For an adult, it is the presence of a loved one who has just entered their life.

How do we know that we are begotten? "Everything that is born of God," St. John continues, "overcomes the world, and this is the victory that has overcome the world: our faith. And who overcomes the world but he who believes that Jesus is the Son of God" (1 Jn 5:4-5). Only a present experience of faith, in which we see the victory, in which we see his living presence prevail in our lives, will be able to win in the historical situation in which we all live; it will then be "a faith able to endure in a world where everything, everything says the opposite" (Giussani).

When this fullness happens, the victory is seen in the Acts of the Apostles: "The multitude of those who had come to believe were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed what belonged to him as his own, but all things were familiar to them. With great power, the apostles testified to the resurrection of the Lord, and all of them had great sympathy. Those who saw Him, those who saw the Christian communities, however small, could feel with their hands that He was risen because that was the only adequate explanation of what they saw.

This text collects some of the homilies delivered by Julián Carrón during the Easter season of 2024, published by paginasdigital.es

The different sections do not correspond to the liturgy's chronology but to thematic groupings.
The author has not revised the text and its translation. Download.