If you were to find a gold coin, would you ask yourself ‘Why has no one else found it?’ Of course not. You would not hesitate to take it as your own. Likewise, whenever you find a brother in need, realize that you have found something more valuable than any treasure - the opportunity to care for another (St John Chrysostom, Contra ludeos, 8).
Certainly, Jesus is far from being insensitive to the frailty of the feelings that distort the meaning of love, particularly the fact of adultery, of infidelity, of jealousy and lying. But he never approves sin or consents to it. When he gets to a person’s heart, Jesus descends with him into the depths of the truth, he renews the person and reorients him along the lines of the evangelical demands of love, and he saves the person. Spouses, therefore, need to understand and to receive this Divine Mercy, which renews their bonds of fidelity in the sacrament of marriage.
We must learn to pass over even the obvious and undeniable defects of the people we are with each day, so that we do not keep our distance from them or lose our respect for them because of their mistakes or bad manners. Let us learn from Our Lord, who could not entirely excuse the sin of those who crucified him, but extenuated its malice by pleading their ignorance. When we cannot excuse a sin, let us at least make it worthy of compassion by attributing the most favourable cause we can to it, such as ignorance or weakness - St Francis de Sales
Comments