Jesus, the Sacred Meaning of Our Lives
Everything about Jesus, every action flows out of his experience and relationship with God. This is why Jesus repeatedly sought out moments of intimate, silent encounter with his Father. He was motivated, not out of obligation, but by a longing to drink from the well of Divine Presence that nourishes his essence.
In the Gospels we read that Jesus has gone to the Jordan River to hear about God and has joined others to receive John’s baptism. Jesus approaches with an open heart, making himself humbly available (Luke 3:21-22). He enters the water and the heavens open. Immediately, a voice comes from heaven, “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.”
Jesus spent his life to let us know that, as sisters and brothers in our Father’s family, in heaven and on earth, we also are beloved. As in the beginning of creation, and the new beginning through Mary at his baptism, the Spirit of new life hovers over Jesus and fills him with life-giving energies—like the power not to judge, destroy, or condemn, but to cure and draw everyone together into the reign of Abba. Jesus is the word who gives voice to our Father’s name for us, “My Beloved.”
Our belief in the meaning of Jesus as the divine Child, who saves us by becoming one of us, becomes intimately personal. The Savior who was born to us is reborn within us, born in the past of history, and reborn in the present of our flesh and blood. The Savior we hoped for outside of ourself has become our inner reality. This is how our Father saves and heals us.
Each of us is welcomed into the stories of Jesus’ birth, life, death, and resurrection as tales of our own heritage and identity. The wonder of the crib and Incarnation is that our Father saves us by pouring divinity into our humanness. The Word becomes flesh, and the unconquerable God gives divinity into the vulnerability of our humanity.
Allow the icon of Our Mother of Perpetual Help to lead you further into this mystery and continue to reveal itself as you meditate on Jesus as the revelation of the sacred meaning of our lives.
Sit quietly with the icon, taking in the details that provide hints of what Jesus will face and what we ourselves must deal with. The divine Child calmly looks at the angel Gabriel who is holding the cross. He has a deep inner well of peacefulness in our Father and feels it physically in the comfort of Mary’s arms. Notice that Mary is holding Jesus out to us. We also are meant to drink with him from the deep inner well of divine love.
Take a moment to remember that it is by divine love that you are loved into existence. Pay attention to your breath and meditate on the living energy that breath creates in your body as you pray and fill in each line:
At this moment I am…
I feel this living energy in me wanting to…
I am not sure that I am able to…
The peacefulness of the divine Child helps me trust…
Mary and Jesus, I pray, “Please help me…”
Fr. Ken Sedlak, CSsR