Chiara Lubich: the relevance of the Gospel

Encountering the Gospel today means finding the living Word of God. Chiara Lubich, through her experience with the first community of the Movement in Trent, makes us appreciate the effects of putting the Gospel into practice.

If God speaks to us, how can we not welcome his Word? In the Bible there are 1,153 instances when God repeats the invitation to listen to him. It is the same invitation that the Father extended to the disciples when the Word, his Son, came to live among us. He said: “Listen to him.”^[1]

The listening that the Bible speaks about, however, is done more with our hearts than with our ears. It means adhering completely to what God tells us, making it our own, obeying him with the same trust as children who abandon themselves into their mother’s arms, letting her carry them. …

In this, we hear an echo of Jesus’ teaching when he calls blessed those who hear the Word of God and obey it, ^[2] and also when he acknowledges as his mother, his brothers and sisters, all those who hear his Word and put it into practice.^[3]

Jesus said that a person who listens well to the Word is the one who puts it into practice, thus giving a firm foundation to their life, like building a house on rock.^[4]

In every one of his Words, Jesus expresses all his love for us. Let’s incarnate his Word in our lives and make it our own. If we put it into practice, we will experience the enormous potential for life it brings forth both within in and around us. Let’s fall in love with the Gospel to the point of allowing it to transform us and overflow onto others. This is our way to love Jesus in return.

It will no longer be we who live, but Christ will be formed in us.

We will experience first-hand what it means to be freed from ourselves, from our limitations and all the things that tie us down. Moreover, we will see the revolution of love that Jesus, now free to live within us, will bring about in society around us.

This was our experience at the beginning of the Movement in Trent, during World War II, when we often had to run to the air-raid shelters, taking with us only a small copy of the Gospels.

We opened it and read it and, due to a particular grace of God, I believe, those words, which we had heard so many times before, shone out for us with a totally new light. These were Words of life, words that could be transformed into life. …

We witnessed the growth of a living community around us, which after only a few months numbered some five hundred people.

All this was the fruit of our living contact with the Word, which was constant, dynamic, moment by moment. We were “inebriated” with the Word; we could say that the Word lived us. We would ask one another: “Are you living the Word?” “Are you a living Word?” And that would be enough to increase our swiftness in living it.

We should go back to living as we did then. The Gospel is always relevant. It’s up to us to believe in it and experience it.

Chiara Lubich

(Chiara Lubich, in Parole di Vita, [Words of Life] Città Nuova, 2017, pp. 789-791)

[1]     Mt 17:5.
[2]     See Lk 11:28.
[3]     See Lk 8:20-21.
[4]     See Mt 7:24.