What Does It Mean To Live?
Simone Riva - Faced with the challenges that daily reality holds for us, the question often arises: what does it mean to live? Often, in fact, we are displaced by the very thing we think we already know. The course of these Sundays' Gospels documents for us Christ's concern in bringing out exactly this question. Jesus has no intention of sparing his own, and the Jews who listen to him, all the walking they must do to name the meaning of living, and he forces everyone to test a hypothesis: “I am the living bread, which came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever, and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.”
He proposes himself as the substance of everything. Even before what he says and what he does, Jesus shows himself for who he is. So much so that the question immediately arises in the Jews, “How can he give us his flesh to eat?” It is a dialogue that has all the characteristics of a challenge, for Jesus knows well that if one does not come to terms with the truth of Himself, sooner or later, a memory will remain of Him, easily replaced with something else. That is why he does not let up: “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life in you.”
Just thinking about the revolutionary scope of that proposal, to which we are all too accustomed, sends shivers down our spines. He who came down from Heaven wanted to make himself real and concrete nourishment for every man, thus placing us in the bed of his own origin: “Just as the Father, who has life, sent me and I live for the Father, so also he who eats me will live for me.”In a 1968 lecture, Fr. Luigi Giussani precisely outlined the heart of Christ's impact on man: “ Christianity is an event.”
Christianity is a socio-historical groove, but Christianity is an event. Christianity are articulated forms, but Christianity is an event. Let us say then: how did they begin to believe? In what did that event consist that aroused such interest, determined such an impression that people for the first time took a risk with what was in front of them, that people for the first time had faith kindled within, that the Christian began to be in the world? What was that event, what kind was that event? They did not believe because Christ spoke saying those things; they did not believe because Christ did those miracles; they did not believe because Christ quoted the prophets; they did not believe because Christ raised the dead. How many people, the vast majority, heard Him speak like that, heard Him say those words, saw Him do those miracles, and the event did not happen for them. The event was something of which the miracle or the speech were articles, were segments, were factors, but it was something else, something more, something so different that the speech and the miracle gave their meaning. They believed because of what Christ appeared. They believed because of that presence, not because of this or that which he did and said. They believed in a presence” (Luigi Giussani, A Revolution of Self, Rizzoli, 2024).
The symptom of adherence to what Christ is is summarized in this sentence: “People for the first time took a risk with what was in front of them.” There is no other way, in order not to miss the meaning of living, in order to discover what life is, than the astonished discovery of His presence, which inflames our human to such an extent that we desire risk with everything before us. Only from such men and women can a people of free people be born, all caught up in the Essential.
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