"Christ Is Passing By"

St. Josemaría Escrivá

Christ Is Passing By collects 18 homilies given by St. Josemaría between 1951 and 1971, on various liturgical feasts. The guiding thread is divine filiation and the universal call to holiness. Other major themes: sanctification of ordinary work, contemplation in the world, unity of life.

The title captures a Gospel scene: Christ passing through a town, people running to meet Him. The question is simple — will you recognize Him when He passes by in your daily life?

"There is something holy, something divine, hidden in the most ordinary situations, and it is up to each of you to discover it."


I. You Are a Son of God

"Our Lord, who during this Lent is asking us to change, is not a tyrannical master or a rigid and implacable judge: he is our Father. He speaks to us about our lack of generosity, our sins, our mistakes; but he does so in order to free us from them, to promise us his friendship and his love."

"Awareness that God is our Father brings joy to our conversion: it tells us that we are returning to our Father's house."

This changes everything. You're not a slave trying to appease an angry master. You're a son coming home.

"Divine filiation is a joyful truth, a consoling mystery. It fills all our spiritual life. And it makes our interior struggle overflow with hope and gives us the trusting simplicity of little children."

Discussion: Do you relate to God as a son to a father — or as a slave to a master? How would your prayer change if you believed you were His beloved son?


II. Sanctify Your Work

"God waits for us every day, in the laboratory, in the operating theatre, in the army barracks, in the university chair, in the factory, in the workshop, in the fields, in the home and in all the immense panorama of work."

"Work is not a penalty or a curse or a punishment: those who speak of it that way have not understood sacred Scripture properly. It is time for us Christians to shout from the rooftops that work is a gift from God."

Your Monday is as holy as your Sunday — if you offer it.

"The 'miracle' which God asks of you is to persevere in your Christian and divine vocation, sanctifying each day's work: the miracle of turning the prose of each day into heroic verse by the love which you put into your ordinary work."

Discussion: Do you see your job as a path to holiness or as an obstacle to it? What would change if you treated your work as something sacred?


III. One Life, Not Two

"Christians working in the world should not live a kind of double life. On the one hand, an interior life, a life of union with God; and on the other, a separate and distinct professional, social and family life. On the contrary: there is just one life, made of flesh and spirit. And it is this life which has to become, in both soul and body, holy and filled with God."

St. Josemaría rejected compartmentalized faith — Sunday Catholic, Monday pagan. There's only one you.

"I cannot see the integrity of a person who does not strive to attain professional skills and to carry out properly the task entrusted to his care. It's not enough to want to do good; we must know how to do it."

"What use is it telling me that so and so is a good son of mine — a good Christian — but a bad shoemaker? If he doesn't try to learn his trade well, or doesn't give his full attention to it, he won't be able to sanctify it or offer it to Our Lord."

Discussion: Where do you live a "double life" — faith in one compartment, work or family in another? What would unity of life look like for you?


Closing Challenge

"We cannot stay still. We must keep going ahead toward the goal St. Paul marks out: 'It is not I who live, it is Christ that lives in me.' This is a high and very noble ambition, this identification with Christ, this holiness. But there is no other way if we are to be consistent with the divine life God has sown in our souls in baptism."

"If you say 'enough,' you are lost. Go further, keep going. Don't stay in the same place, don't go back, don't go off the road." — St. Augustine

Christ is passing by — right now, in your ordinary life. Will you recognize Him?

This Week: