Dear brothers and sisters, Fiat!
Anyone who has had the opportunity to talk to a vine grower. knows how much the vineyard is one of the agricultural activities that require more care, dedication and passion. The farmer has to work all year round; there are a thousand tricks on which the quality of the harvest depends and despite all the care the result is never guaranteed. The vineyard is one of the most ‘capricious’ cultivations: a late frost, a hailstorm can compromise the harvest even at the last moment.
The image of the vineyard recurs very frequently in the Old Testament to express the relationship of the Lord with his people. Every time it is mentioned it is to emphasize the contrast between the Lord's love for his people and the continuous infidelity of the latter: " he looked for a crop of good grapes, but it yielded only bad fruit".
The fruit that the Lord expects from this vineyard, that is, from us, are certainly good works. Even more important in His eyes, however, is the fruit represented by the action of thanksgiving. We should respond to love only with love, a love that is also expressed through the good we do, but first of all in the form of adoration, of thanksgiving to the Lord: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind”.
In the New Testament, in addition to today's passage, the image of the vineyard returns in John's Gospel when Jesus proclaims: I am the true vineyard. Why is He the vineyard? Humanity was the vineyard that the Lord had planted, but it did not correspond to this care, so it was not true because unfaithful, Jesus is the true vineyard because He alone is faithful, He alone responds with love to the love of the Father, of Him only the Father can say: Here is my beloved son, here is the one in whom I can put all my love. That is why Jesus tells us that no one can bear fruit if he is not in Him, if he is not grafted into this true vine that is Him. Only united to Christ can we therefore become a faithful vineyard, bear fruit, become capable of responding to love with love.
The story of the Lord's relationship with His vineyard does not end with our infidelity, as is described in today's first reading. Christ has modified its narrative. We were lost, but He came to the desert where we wandered aimlessly to overcome temptation and lead us to a land where milk and honey flow, where we can finally live in friendship with the Father. So let us never let ourselves be overwhelmed by the constatation of our infidelity and our inability to respond to the Lord's love with love, to all His gifts with a good life. The fact that we are incapable of it is a reality that we must accept and that must lead us to have recourse to the Lord's mercy, asking Him for forgiveness. Let us unite ourselves to Christ, let us allow ourselves to be grafted into this one true vineyard that is Christ and let us never separate ourselves from Him, let us never turn away from Him.
On October 30, 1924, Jesus asked Luisa to enter into His love, and never to go out of it, to run after it, or to stop in His love to understand how much Jesus loves the creature. Everything in Him is love toward her. In creating this creature, the Divinity intended to love her always; so, in everything, inside and outside of her, It was to run toward her with a continuous and incessant new act of love. In each thought, gaze, word, breath, heartbeat, and in all the rest of the creature, an act of eternal love runs. But if the Divinity intended to love this creature always and in everything, it was because It wanted to receive, in everything, the requital of the new and incessant love of the creature; It wanted to give love in order to receive love - It wanted to love to be loved in return. But it was not so! Not only did the creature not want to keep the rhythm of love and respond to the echo of the love of her Creator, but she rejected this love, she denied it, and offended it. At this affront, the Divinity did not stop, but continued Its new and incessant love toward the creature; and since the creature would not receive it, Heaven and earth remained filled with it, waiting for one who would take this love, so as to receive the requital of it.
In fact, when God decides, when He proposes, all adverse events do not change Him, but He remains immutable in His immutability. And this is why, moving on to another excess of love, Jesus, Word of the Father, came upon earth; and taking on a Humanity, He gathered within Himself all this love which filled Heaven and earth, in order to requite the Divinity with as much love for as much as It had given and was to give to creatures; and He constituted Himself love of each thought, of each gaze, of each word, heartbeat, movement and step of each creature. Jesus’ Humanity, even in Its littlest fiber, was worked by the hands of the eternal love of the Celestial Father, in order to give Jesus the capacity to be able enclose all the love that the Divinity wanted to give to creatures, so as to give to It the love of all, and constitute Himself love of each act of creature. So, each one of our thoughts is encircled by Jesus’ incessant acts of love; there is nothing, inside and outside of us, which is not surrounded by His repeated acts of love.
This is why, Jesus’ Humanity moans, pants, agonizes, feels crushed under the weight of so much love – because Jesus loves and he is not loved in return. The pains of love are the most bitter, the most cruel; they are pains without pity, more painful than Jesus’ very Passion! If we loved Jesus, the weight of so much love would become light, because when love is loved in return, it remains quenched and satisfied in the very love of the beloved. But when it is not loved in return, it goes mad, it raves, and it feels the love which it had issued being repaid with an act of death.
How much more bitter and painful was the Passion of Jesus’ love; because if in His Passion they gave Jesus only one death, in the Passion of love they made Him suffer as many deaths for as many acts of love as came out of Him, for which He was not requited.
Therefore Jesus is waiting for us to requite Him for so much love. In the Divine Will we will find all this love as though in act; Let us make it our own and, together with Jesus, constitute ourselves love of each act of creature, to give Him the requital of the love of all.