Today's readings are so beautiful and so profound that I'm afraid I won't do them justice. We could meditate on each one of them for hours and hours.
I believe that today we should look at the infinite love of the Father and the Son for us - a love that led them to the madness of the Cross. Saint Paul told us that the Father gave up his Son for us. When did the Father give us his Son Jesus? Hearing these words, surely many of us thought of the Passion and death of Jesus. However, in his commentary on the Letter to the Romans, Saint Thomas Aquinas says something very beautiful. He speaks not only of the Passion, but also of the Incarnation. He points out that the Father gave his Son when he placed into his human heart the love that the Father had and has for men, in such a way that Jesus accepted the suffering of his Passion moved by love for us. This is so beautiful from so many different perspectives.
The love that the Father places in the Heart of his Son is the Holy Spirit, so the work of Redemption is a work of the three divine Persons. The gift of the Father does not consist in abandoning his Son Jesus to the sufferings of the Passion. The way to surrender Christ consists in placing in his human Heart the infinite love that He, the Father, feels for us. When the Heart of Jesus receives that love, which is the love of the Father, He is inflamed with the same love and the same desires to save the world. Christ loves in his human will and heart with the love of his Father and in that love he loves us, and by loving us in this way, he feels compelled by love to give his life for our salvation. Christ is not forcibly handed over to death. The Father's infinite love for us fills his Heart, and he offers himself to suffering, freely wanting to suffer for love of us.
For this reason, today we are invited to see Jesus as the beloved Son of the Father. "This is my beloved Son." He says of Jesus in the account of the Transfiguration. In that love of the Father for Jesus Christ, He also includes us and says to us: “You are my beloved child. I love you so much that I give you my only Son, Jesus. He and I, with and in the same love, want your redemption. We accept the mystery of the Cross for love of you.”
I believe that today we must pay special attention to the sacrifice of God the Father. We tend to focus on the sacrifice of the Son, of Jesus Christ, and do not think about what God the Father offers for us. In the first reading we heard the account of the sacrifice of Isaac. Father Mendizábal used to say that actually we should call it Abraham's sacrifice! What God is really asking for is not the death of the son, but the willingness of the father to offer what he loves most. If Isaac is the image of Christ, whose image is Abraham? God the Father!
In the giving of Christ the Father gave us what He loved the most. To give us life he offered his Son to death. In this drama of our redemption, the Son also gives himself to the Father, and both do so out of love.
Today, we can go to the Heart of Jesus, filled to overflowing with the love of the Father - who is the Holy Spirit - and drink from him in this Holy Mass. We can also ask for the grace to receive, like Jesus, the love of God in our hearts, to find there the strength and generosity to empty ourselves for God and for our brothers and sisters. We can accept his mercy, listen to Jesus when he tells us that he has not come to seek the just but the sinners and run joyfully into his embrace. We, too, strengthened by the love of God that we gather from the Heart of Jesus in the Eucharist, can embrace the mystery of pain and accept it with the joy of knowing that we, too, must pass from the Cross to light. As we will hear in the preface of this Mass "the Passion leads to the glory of the Resurrection.”
May the Father grant us the grace to listen and then to live in the love and word of his Son Jesus.
