To live, not to live What we have just heard is the last stanza of the Gospel of Matthew before the Passion: before Jesus gave us his love on the cross, he gives us his will. He tells us that the good we do to one of his most minor brothers – hungry, thirsty, strangers, needy, sick, imprisoned – is done to him (cf. Mt 25:37-40). This is how the Lord gives us the list of gifts He desires for the eternal wedding feast with us in heaven. It is acts of mercy that make our life eternal. Each of us can ask: do I apply them in practice? Am I doing something for those in need? Or do I do good only for my loved ones and friends? Am I helping someone who can’t repay me? Am I some poor person’s friend? And so on, so many questions we can ask ourselves. “I’m there,” Jesus tells you, “I’m waiting for you where you don’t imagine it and where you might not even want to look, there in the poor.” I am where the interest of the prevailing mentality does not reach, according to which life is exemplary if it suits me. I am there, Jesus says to you, too, a young person trying to fulfill his life dreams. I am there, Jesus said centuries ago to a young soldier. He was eighteen and not yet baptized. One day he saw a poor man who begged people for help, but he didn’t get any because “everyone moved on.” And the young man, “when he saw that the others were not moved by compassion, he understood that the poor thing was reserved for him.” But he had nothing on him but his service uniform. So he cut his cloak and gave half to the poor man, enduring the ridicule of some around him. The next night, he had a dream: he saw Jesus dressed in that part of the cloak with which he covered the poor man. And he heard him say: «Martin covered me with this garment» (cf. Sulpicius Severus, Vita Martini, III). Saint Martin was a young man who had this dream because, although he did not know it, he experienced what the righteous in today’s Gospel. Dear young people, dear brothers and sisters, let’s not give up on big dreams. Let’s not settle for the obligatory. The Lord does not want us to narrow our horizons; He does not want us to be parked sideways from life, but joyfully and boldly in the run for high goals. We are not made to dream of vacations or weekends but to make God’s dreams come true. God gave us the ability to dream to embrace the beauty of life. And acts of mercy are the most beautiful acts of life. Acts of mercy go straight to the center of our big dreams. If you have dreams of natural glory, not the glory of the world that comes and goes, but the glory of God, this is the way. Read today’s passage from the Gospel, and think about it. Because acts of mercy glorify God more than anything else. Listen well: works of mercy glorify God more than anything else. Acts of mercy will ultimately judge us. But where to start with making big dreams come true? From making big decisions. Today’s Gospel also tells us about this. That is, the Lord will rely on what we have chosen at the moment of the last judgment. He doesn’t even seem to judge: he separates the sheep from the goats, but whether we are good or bad depends on us. He only draws the consequences of our decisions, brings them to light, and respects them. So, life is a time of making robust, fundamental, and eternal decisions. Banal decisions lead to dull life; big decisions make life big. We become what we choose, for better or for worse. If we decide to steal, we become thieves; if we choose to think about ourselves, we become selfish; if we choose to hate, we become angry; if we choose to spend hours on our cell phones, we become addicted. But if we choose God, we become more loved every day, and if we choose to love, we become happy. It is so because the beauty of choice depends on love: do not forget this.
Jesus knows that if we live closed and indifferent, we remain paralyzed, but if we commit ourselves to others, we become free. The Lord of life wants us to be full of life and gives us the secret of life: we possess it only by sharing it. And this is the rule of life: we own life, now and forever, only if we offer it.
Some obstacles make a choice difficult: fear, uncertainty, unanswered “why” questions, and many such “whys.” Love, however, asks to go further, not to hang on to these lives “whys”, waiting for an answer to fall from the sky. The answer has already arrived: it is the look of the Father who loves us and sends his Son to us. No, love forces us to go from “why” to “for whom,” from the question “why do I live” to the question “for whom do I live,” from “why did this happen to me” to “for whom can I do good.” For who? Not only for ourselves: life is already full of decisions we make for ourselves, to have a degree, friends, home, to satisfy our own interests, our own hobbies. But we run the risk that years will pass, and we will think of ourselves without starting to love. [Writer Alessandro] Manzoni gave good advice: «We should think more about how to do good than how to be good: and in the end, we would be better off» (Betrothed, ch. XXXVIII).
However, not only do doubts and “why” questions threaten significant noble decisions, but there are also many other obstacles every day. There is a consumerism that numbs the heart with excess. There is an obsession with entertainment, which seems to be the only way to escape problems but only puts them off for later. There is also a fixation on enforcing one’s own rights, forgetting the duty to help. And then there is the grand illusion of love, which seems to be experiencing a sequence of emotions, whereas love is primarily a gift, a choice, and a sacrifice. Above all nowadays, making a choice means avoiding the collar of mass uniformity, not letting yourself be numbed by consumerist mechanisms that dampen originality, and being able to renounce clinging to appearance and image.
Choosing life means fighting against the mentality of “use and throw away” and “everything and now” to direct existence to the heavenly goal, to God’s dreams. To decide life is to live; we are born to live, not live. A young person like you [Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati] said this: “I want to live, not live.” Every day, the heart faces many choices. I would like to give you one last piece of advice on how to practice making good decisions. If we look inside ourselves, we will find that two different questions often arise in us. One of them is: “What would I like to do”? It is a question that typically lies because it implies that it is essential to think about yourself and to satisfy all the tastes and impulses that come. But the question that the Holy Spirit prompts in the heart is different: not “What do I like?” but “What will be good for me?” This is the daily choice: what do I like to do, or what will be good for me? Banal choices or vital choices can be born from this inner search, it depends on us.
Let us look to Jesus and ask him for the courage to choose what is for our good and follow him on the path of love. And they found joy. To live, not live.
