John 3,31-36 – Thursday of the Second Week of Easter
“For he whom God has sent speaks the words of God and gives the Spirit without measure.” This passage from the Gospel of John, inserted in the dialogue with Nicodemus, may seem complex. Yet there is an expression that deserves to be underlined today: Jesus gives the Spirit without measure. Not in a limited way, not sparingly, but in abundance. This means that God does not enter our lives with calculations or reservations. He gives his Spirit in fullness.
It’s like saying that he pours into us an overabundant love, capable of transforming who we are and what we experience. After all, what is it that really moves life, if not love? But when our life is moved by the love of God, then it changes perspective. We no longer remain prisoners of a reduced vision, but we learn to look at everything from a different height. How many times, however, our thoughts, our choices, our reactions they remain “down to earth”. We move within narrow, repetitive logics, marked by fear or calculation. Yet the encounter with Christ opens a new space. Whoever welcomes the gift of the Spirit realizes that things become bigger, deeper, more true.
Spiritual life, then, is precisely this passage: stop living in a closed, closed, limited way, and learn to live according to a higher standard. It is not escapism from reality, but the truest way of inhabiting it. It is letting ourselves be carried by the Spirit, which takes nothing away from our humanity, but expands it. Which does not make us strangers to life, but more capable of living it to the full. And perhaps this is precisely the greatest gift: discovering that we are made for much more than what we are often content to live in our days and in the mediocrity of certain experiences. The thing we should hate most is not falls. In fact these sometimes depend only on our weakness. The thing we should hate most is the mediocrity to which our life and our vocation are sometimes reduced. To paraphrase a happy expression of a spiritual master of our time, we should say that we are eagles who persist in living like chickens.
