Twenty-Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time
To live for the Lord
None of us lives for oneself, and no one dies for oneself. For if we live, we live for the Lord, and if we die, we die for the Lord; so then, whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s. For this is why Christ died and came to life, that he might be Lord of both the dead and the living. Rom 14,7-9
When I walk in the streets of the cities I am surprised to think that each person walking there has a dream and he spends his life to implement it. Someone devotes his existence to pile money, someone to follow his ideals, someone to put in practice his personal projects, someone to raise in the carrier, someone to have the right welfare for the family and the sons and someone to reach other targets, also not so much noble. Nobody lives for the freedom, but all of them are shooting for it, as the condition to bring their dreams to the practice. The questions which today are silently addressed to us by Paul are upstream to our projects: why we are in the world? who gave origin to our life? where we will go after the death? If we believe to the fact that we come from God, who has given us the life, and that eventually we will go back to him, he surely has a project for us, which we have to search and on which we will have to report. Then, the question to which I have to answer is not “what projects I want to implement” but “what is the God project on me?” If we address to us this question and we put our life in his hands, he will not fail to communicate to us his will: even if he does not do it in an explicit way, he will do it in a way to have us experiencing it, perhaps closing in front of us the wrong ways and doors.
This is what happened to me when I entered in the politics or when I founded “engineers ahead”, an Onlus-Ong association to implement projects in emerging countries. These were nice dreams, but only mine, the Lord had for me a different project. Paul, in the today passage, goes to the roots of the problem: “None of us lives for himself, and no one dies for himself. For if we live, we live for the Lord, and if we die, we die for the Lord.” The only one Absolute is God! Moreover, after the death and the resurrection of Christ, he is the owner of our life because of divine right, not only because we have been “created”, but because we have been “redeemed”.