Prayer, celebration and imitation of Jesus helps us enter into His mystery

May 16, 2014 - According to Pope Francis, it is just not enough to study Jesus and have ideas about him. In order to enter truly into His mystery one needs to pray to him with the heart together with celebrating and imitating Him. The Pope offered Christians this exhortation ‎during Mass, Friday morning, at the Casa Santa Marta residence in the Vatican, reflecting on the day’s ‎Gospel reading where Jesus says, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father ‎except through me.” The Pope noted that it is important to study Jesus, such as in catechism, but ‎that’s not enough. For some, like in the early Christian community, only ideas can lead us to the ‎knowledge of Jesus. But mere ideas don’t give life, and those going this way end up in an endless ‎labyrinth, like the heresies in the early Church era. They tried to understand Jesus only with the ‎human mind and light. But to truly understand the Lord, one needs to enter through three doors: namely praying to ‎Jesus and celebrating and imitating Him.
‎
The Pope said that without prayer the study of Jesus is useless. ‎One needs to pray to Jesus in order to know Him, and great theologians do their studies on their knees. But ‎prayer alone is not enough. One needs the joy of celebration in the sacraments, because therein we ‎have life, strength, food, comfort, friendship and mission. And finally one needs to imitate Jesus, ‎by finding out from the Gospel about His life, what he did, said and taught, and imitate Him,” the Pope ‎said. The Pope pointed out that many don’t know how to imitate him because they have never opened the Gospel. Hence these three doors help us enter into the mystery of Jesus, were we shall ‎find the way to the truth and the life.