{"id":327980,"date":"2016-02-13T14:25:43","date_gmt":"2016-02-13T13:25:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/giordani-the-gospel-is-not-a-collection-of-words\/"},"modified":"2024-05-16T15:03:00","modified_gmt":"2024-05-16T13:03:00","slug":"giordani-the-gospel-is-not-a-collection-of-words","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/giordani-the-gospel-is-not-a-collection-of-words\/","title":{"rendered":"Giordani: The Gospel is not a collection of words"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"\u201cThe Gospel isn\u2019t just a collection of words.<\/strong> It\u2019s also a list of facts. It\u2019s life. Jesus not only preached, he healed the sick, comforted the afflicted, raised the dead and fed the hungry. He performed the Works of Mercy because He loved. \u201cI have compassion for these people,\u201d He exclaimed upon seeing the hungry throngs, and He multiplied bread to satisfy their hunger. Bread takes on a sacred value in the Redemption. Jesus inserts the greatest mystery into bread, and He made the Eucharistic Banquet the core of the life of the Church community, forever uniting body and spirit, just as He had united humanity and divinity in Himself. Therefore, you love God, the Father, when you feed the hungry.<\/strong> All those who can offer nourishment to the undernourished and hungry and don\u2019t do so, are murderers according to the Fathers of the Church; indeed, they\u2019re god-killers. They cause Christ to die. From the perspective of the Gospel all those who, during the war years, forced condemned prisoners to starve to death, repeated the crucifixion. It was like murdering God. The hordes of the deported \u2013 in snow or under blazing sun, in armored cars, or in isolated ships whose monotony was only interrupted by the falling of the hungry \u2013 crossed the line of practical atheism even when it was perpetrated in the name of God. That is why Saint Vincent de Paul went aboard the galleys of very Christian kings, where the galley slaves were dropping dead from exhaustion. A Work of Mercy is not the mere distribution of food or money.<\/strong> It reconstitutes justice. \u201cThe Works of Mercy accomplish nothing without love,\u201d Saint Augustine says. \u201cIf I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don’t love, I’ve gotten nowhere\u201d (1 Cor 13:3), Saint Paul says to those Christians who shared the Bread of Angels but not that of men. The cold and reserved woman who gives Christmas to the poor but never opens her soul to them, performs nothing more than a bureaucratic duty: Christ is not pleased. Social welfare does little or nothing at all to produce the effects of a religious life, if those who carry it out don\u2019t bring that divine nourishment of the Holy Spirit, which is love. \"20160213-06\"<\/a><\/strong>No one is moved by or grateful to the faucet for the water it provides, or by the light bulb for the light it provides, Ozanam<\/strong> remarks. \u201cMan does not live on bread alone,\u201d because he is soul as well as stomach. A Work of Mercy is a moral and material duty<\/strong>. By feeding the hungry, I feed me because his hunger is both mine and that of the whole social body of which I am an organic part. You can\u2019t dump grain into the ocean when in another part of the world there is someone dying of hunger. \u201cWe, though many, are one body throughout the world:\u201d and you cannot injure one body part to the advantage of another. If you do, you\u2019ll pay for it with revolutions, disorder and all the epidemics that are found on this side of Heaven, and with hell on the other side. It has been said that the earth is dying,<\/strong> that the world\u2019s resources are diminishing and the wars increasing precisely because of hunger. Some would like to solve the problem with war and birth control, doing away with human life. But it\u2019s not resources that are lacking; what\u2019s lacking is love \u2013 and the intelligence \u2013 for making it circulate. Circulation is life. The stagnation brought about by accumulation is a source of hate, revolution and war. It\u2019s death. \u201cIf your enemy is hungry, feed him, if he is thirsty, give him something to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head\u201d (Rm 12:20). The Works of Mercy perform the miracle of making the love circulate by making the bread circulate. It\u2019s a miracle that transforms bread into a sort of social sacrament, in which you begin from love, God, and you nourish the body along with the soul. (From:Igino Giordani<\/a>, Il fratello (Rome: Citt\u00e0 Nuova, 2011) p.63-67.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

During the Jubilee of Mercy Pope Francis invites us to rediscover the Works of Mercy: \u201cThey help us to open ourselves to the mercy of God, to ask for the grace to realise that a person cannot do anything without mercy.\u201d We offer the following words of Igino Giordani.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"give_campaign_id":0,"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-327980","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-non-categorizzato"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327980","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/34"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=327980"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327980\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=327980"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=327980"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=327980"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}