The Commandments and Decalogue taught by the Church

Jesus begins to walk again and His attention is drawn by two eyes staring at Him, the eyes of a tall strong young man who has stopped to let the train of followers pass, as he seems to be going in a different direction. Jesus says to him: «Follow Me.»

The young man starts, changes colour, blinks as if he were dazzled by light, then opens his mouth to speak but cannot find an immediate reply. At last he says: «I will follow You. But my father died at Korazim and I must bury him. Let me do that and then I will come.»

«Follow Me. Leave the dead to bury their dead. You have already been attracted by Life. On the other hand, you aspired that. Do not weep over the gap Life opened around you to make you a disciple. The maiming of affection is the root of the wings which are born of a man who has become a servant of the Truth. Leave corruption to its own fate. Rise towards the Kingdon of the incorrupt. You will also find the incorruptible pearl of your father there. God calls and passes by. Tomorrow you would no longer find your heart of today or God’s invitation. Come. Go and announce the Kingdom of God.»

The man is leaning against a low wall with his arms hanging by his sides: he is holding two bags, full of perfumes and bandages, his head is lowered in thought, wavering between two loves: for God and for his father.

Jesus waits and looks at him, he then gets hold of a little child clasps him to His heart saying: «Say with Me: “I bless You, o Father, and I invoke Your light for those who weep in the haze of life. I bless You, o Father, and I invoke Your strength for those who are like a child in need of support. I bless You, o Father, and I invoke Your love that it may cause men to forget everything which is not Yourself, as they can find all good in You, both here and in Heaven, although they cannot believe it”.» And the child, an innocent boy about four years old, repeats in his thin voice the holy words with his hands held in prayer by the right hand of Jesus, Who holds them by their plump, wrists as if they were two flower stems.

The man makes up his mind. He hands the two bundles to a companion and comes towards Jesus, Who puts down the child after blessing him, and embraces the young man, proceeding thus with him, to comfort him and support him in his effort.

(...) They reach the shore. Jesus goes on board Peter’s boat and whispers a few words to him. I see Jesus smile while Peter makes a gesture expressing amazement. But He does not say anything. Also the man who did not go to bury his father in order to follow Jesus, gets into the boat.

• Death and loss of a loved one - Bereavement
• Deceased
• Discipleship - Following Jesus Christ
• Elie de Corozaïn (Elie de Chorazeïn)
• Family
• Family martyrdom
• Jesus Christ and children
• Let the dead bury their dead
• Moral martyrdom
• Parents and children

Another man questions Him: «I would like to come with You, too. But before following You I would like to take leave of my relatives, Will You allow me?»

Jesus stares at him and replies: «There are too many roots in your human being. Uproot them and if you cannot, cut them off. One must come to God’s service with spiritual freedom. He who gives himself, must have no ties.»

«Flesh and blood are always flesh and blood. I will slowly reach the freedom You refer to…»

«No, you would never reach it. God is as exacting as He is infinitely generous in rewarding. If you wish to be a disciple you must embrace your cross and follow Me. Otherwise one remains a simple believer. The way of the servant of God is not strewn with petals of roses. And it is absolute in its demands. No one who has put his hand to the plough to furrow the fields of hearts and spread there the seed of God’s doctrine, can look back to see what he left, what he lost and what he could have had if he had followed another common way. He who does that is not fit for the Kingdom of God. Work upon yourself. Make a man of yourself and then come. Not now.»

• Bible - Gospel of Luke
• Carrying the Cross
• Chair
• Discipleship - Following Jesus Christ
• Family
• Family martyrdom
• Humanity of men
• If your hand is an occasion for falling, cut it off; if your eye is an occasion for falling, pluck it out.
• Parents and children
• Renunciation - Renunciation
• Virility
• Whoever puts his hand to the plough and looks back...

Peter then confesses his great grief: «The trouble is that I am a blockhead and my mind wanders easily. When You speak in a square, on a mountain, amongst a large crowd, I understand everything, but I do not know why, I remember nothing. I told also my companions and they say that I am right. Other people, I mean the people who listen to You, understand You and remember what You say. How often have we heard someone say: “I have no longer done that because You told us”, or: “I came because once I heard You say so and so I was impressed by it”. We instead… hum! it’s like a water course which passes by and does not stop. The river bank no longer has the water that has passed by. It is true that other water comes, a great deal of it, but it passes by, it passes by… And I am terrified at the thought that, if what You say will come true, the moment will come when You will no longer be there to play the part of the river and… and I… What will I give to those who are thirsty if I cannot save even one drop of the great lot You give me?»

Also the others support Peter’s moaning, complaining that they are left with nothing of what they hear, whilst they would like to remember everything to reply to those who ask them questions.

Jesus smiles and replies: «I do not think so. People are very satisfied with you as well…»

«Certainly… of course! For all we do! Make room for You, by elbowing our way through the crowds, carrying sick people, collecting alms and saying: “Yes, that is the Master!”. Wonderful, isn’t it?»

«Do not defame yourself too much, Simon.»

«I am not defaming myself. I know myself.»

«That is the most difficult wisdom. But I wish to relieve you of your great fear. When I speak and you cannot understand and remember everything, ask Me without any fear of boring or discouraging Me. We always have some hours of privacy, when you can open your hearts to Me. I give so much to so many. And what would I not give you whom I love so much that God could not love you more? You spoke of waves that pass by and nothing is left on the bank. The day will come when you will realise that every wave has deposited a seed and that a plant has grown from every seed. You will find in front of you flowers and plants for all occasions and you will be amazed at yourself saying: “What has the Lord done to me?” because you will then be redeemed from the slavery of sin and your present virtues will have reached a great height of perfection.»

«You say so, my Lord, and I rest upon Your word.»

• Apostolate - Evangelism
• Doctrine
• Effects of reading the Work
• Effects of the Word of God
• Good News
• Jesus' omniscience
• Prayer
• Prophecies of Jesus Christ
• Word of God - Law of God

«Our senses need a term to catch an idea. Each of us, I am referring to us believers, believes, by the virtue of faith, in the Most High Lord and Creator, Eternal God, Who is in Heaven. But every being needs more than such bare, pure, incorporeal faith, which is fit and sufficient for the angels who see and love God spiritually, as they share with Him a spiritual nature and can see God. We have to create a “picture” of God for ourselves, which picture is made with the essential features that we ascribe to God, to give a name to His infinite absolute perfection. The more a soul concentrates, the more it succeeds in achieving an exact knowledge of God. That is what I say: the immanent God. I am not a philosopher. Perhaps I have applied the word wrongly. In short, I think that the immanent God is to feel, to perceive God in our spirits, to feel and perceive Him no longer as an abstract idea, but as a real presence, bestowing strength and a new peace upon us.»

«All right. But, to sum up, how did you feel Him? What is the difference between feeling by faith and feeling by immanence?» asks the Iscariot somewhat ironically.

«God is safety, boy. When you perceive Him, as Simon says, by means of that word, which I do not understand literally, but I understand its spirit — and believe me, the trouble is that we understand only literally and we do not understand the spirit of God’s words — it means that you are able to grasp the idea of the terrible majesty, but also of the most sweet paternity of God. It means that, should all the world judge and condemn you unjustly, you would feel that One only, He, the Eternal One, Who is your Father, does not judge you, but absolves and comforts you. It means that if all the world should hate you, you would feel over you a love greater than any this world can offer. It means that if you were isolated in jail or in a desert you would always hear One speak to you and say: “Be holy, that you may be like your Father”. It means that for the true love for this Father and God, Whom at last you perceive as such, you accept, work, take and leave without any human consideration, as you are concerned only to return love for love and to copy God as much as possible in your actions» says Peter.

«You are proud! To copy God! You are not entitled to» declares the Iscariot.

«It is not pride. Love leads to obedience. To copy God seems to me a form of obedience because God said that He made us in His own image and likeness» replies Peter.

«He made us. We must not go higher up.»

«You are a poor wretch, my boy, if that is what you think! You are forgetting that we fell and that God wants to take us back to what we were.»

180.4

Jesus begins to speak: «Even more, Peter, Judas and you all. Even more than that. Adam’s perfection was still susceptible of improvement through love, which would have made him a more precise image of his Creator. Adam without the stain of sin would have been a most shining mirror of God. That is why I say: “Be perfect as your Father Who is in Heaven is perfect”. Like your Father. Therefore like God. Peter is quite right. And so is Simon. I ask you to remember their words and apply them to your souls.»

• Bible - Book of Genesis
• God the Father
• God's love
• God's omnipresence
• Knowing God
• Let's make man in our image
• Love
• Loving God
• Memories of God
• Obedience
• Original sin
• Pride
• Redemption
• Representation and image of God

Now listen to the spirit of the parable.

We have four kinds of fields: the fertile ones, the thorny ones, the stony ones and the ones full of paths. We also have four types of spirits.

There are the honest spirits, the spirits of goodwill, prepared by their own will and by the work of an apostle, of a “true” apostle; because there are apostles who have the name but not the spirit of an apostle and they are more lethal for the will in formation, than birds, thorns and stones, They upset in such a way, through their intolerance, their haste, their reproaches and their threats, as to drive people away from God forever. There are others who, on the contrary, through an excess of benignity, utterly out of place, cause the seed to rot in too soft a soil. Because of their lack of vigour, they kill the vigour of the souls they cure. But let us consider true apostles, that is, the shining mirrors of God. They are paternal, merciful, patient, and at the same time they are strong, as their Lord is strong. Now: the souls prepared by them and by their own will can be compared to the fertile fields, free from stones and brambles, from couch-grass and darnel, in which the word of God thrives and every word, that is every seed, bears a bundle of ears, yielding in some places one hundred, in others sixty per cent. Are there any like that among those who follow Me? There certainly are. And they will be holy. They come from all castes and countries. And there are Gentiles among them and they will yield one hundred per cent because of their goodwill, only because of that, or because of their goodwill and that of an apostle or disciple who prepares them for Me.

• Discipleship - Following Jesus Christ
• Force
• Goodwill
• Holiness
• Homicide - Murder - Assassination
• Honesty
• Kindness
• Mercy and forgiveness
• Paganism and pagans
• Patience
• Reproach
• Severity - Intransigence - Toughness
• Soul
• Virility
• Will
• Work
• haste - haste

And here are the fields full of stones. How many there are in Israel! They are the ones that belong to the “children of the laws” as My cousin Judas quite rightly said. In them there is not the one Stone of Witness, nor the Stone of the Law. There is the quarry poor petty human laws made by men. They are so many that with their weight they have broken also the Stone of the Law into chips. A disaster which does not allow the seed to take root. The root is no longer nourished because there is neither soil nor sap. The water stagnating on the stone pavement causes the seed to rot, the sun makes the stones hot and parches the little plants. Such are the spirits of those who put complicated human doctrines in place of the simple doctrine of God. They even receive My word with joy. At first it shakes and allures them. But later… They would need to be heroes and work hard to clean the field, their souls and minds of all rhetorical stones. The seed would then take root and bear long spikes. As it is… it bears nothing. The fear of human retaliation is enough. It is enough to say: “And after? What will the mighty ones do to me?” and the poor seed languishes without nourishment. It is enough for the whole quarry to stir with the vain sound of the hundreds of precepts, which have been put in place of the Precept, that man perishes with the seed received.. Israel is full of them. That explains why the coming to God is in inverse ratio to human power.

• Anxiety - Fear - Fearfulness
• Cornerstone
• Doctrine
• Heresies and doctrinal errors
• Heroism
• Humanity of men
• Israel's mistake - The Jews' mistake
• Jude of Alphée (apostle)
• Power
• The powerful man
• Word of God - Law of God

Do you know the Law well enough and its ten commandments? And you, too, boy? In that case you know enough. If you faithfully practise what God commanded, you will be holy.

• Commandments
• Holiness
• Loyalty
• Saints and blessed
• Word of God - Law of God
• Words of wisdom

Love one another and love this boy. Each of you must feel as if he were somehow the father of the orphan. The presence of a child amongst you should influence every action of yours through the holy restraint of respect for a child. And let your company make up for what death deprived him of. We must love our neighbour. This boy is the neighbour entrusted to you by God in a special manner. Teach him to be good, a faithful believer, honest and free from vices. He is worth much more than one of these sheep. Now, if you take care of the sheep because they belong to their owner, who would punish you if you should let them perish, how much more care you must take of this soul which God entrusts to you for Himself and for his dead father. His situation as an orphan is a sad one indeed. Do not make it more painful by taking advantage of him and vexing him because he is only a youngster. Remember that God sees the deeds and tears of every man and takes everything into account, in order to reward or punish.

And you, My boy, remember that you are never alone. God sees you and so does the spirit of your father. When something upsets you and induces you to do wrong, say: “No, I do not want to be an orphan forever and ever”. You would be, if you damned your soul by sinning.

• Children - Innocents
• Children of God - Sons of God
• Death
• Love of neighbor
• Man - God's creature
• Orphans

This boy is the neighbour entrusted to you by God in a special manner. Teach him to be good, a faithful believer, honest and free from vices.

• Family
• Parents and children
• Words of wisdom

A loud noise of crying people can be heard from a sumptuous house. It is the voices of women and children. The shrill voice of a woman shouts: «My son! My son!»

Jesus turns around and looks at His apostles. Judas steps forward. «No, not you» orders Jesus. «You, Matthew. Go and find out.»

Matthew goes and comes back: «A brawl, Master. A man is dying. A Jew. The man who wounded him, a Roman, has run away. His wife, mother and children have rushed to help him… But he is dying.»

«Let us go.»

«Master… Master… It happened in the house of a woman… who is not his wife.»

«Let us go.»

183.3 Through the wide open door they enter a large hall which opens onto a lovely garden. The house seems to be divided by this kind of covered peristyle, which is full of pots with green plants, statues and inlaid articles. It is a mixture of a hall and greenhouse. In a room, the door of which opens onto the hall, there are some women weeping. Jesus goes in confidently. But He does not pronounce His usual greeting.

Among the men present there is a merchant who obviously knows Jesus, because as soon as he sees Him, he says: «The Rabbi of Nazareth!» and greets Him respectfully.

«Joseph, what is the matter?»

«Master, a stab wound in his heart… He is dying.»

«Why?»

A grey-haired unkempt woman stands up – she was kneeling near the dying man holding his limp hand – and with distracted face and voice she shouts: «Because of her, because of her… She has turned him into a devil… Mother, wife, children no longer existed for him! Hell will have you, satan!»

Jesus looks up and His eyes follow the trembling accusing hand and in a corner, against the dark red wall, He sees Mary of Magdala, more immodest than ever, wearing, I would say, nothing on half of her body, because she is half naked from the waist upwards, draped in a kind of hexagonal net decorated with little round objects which look like tiny pearls. But as she is in a half-light, I cannot see her well.

Jesus lowers His eyes once again. Mary, lashed by His indifference, stands up, whereas before she seemed somewhat depressed, and strikes a defiant pose.

«Woman» says Jesus to the mother. «Do not curse. Tell Me. Why was your son in this house?»

«I told You. Because she infatuated him. She did.»

«Silence. So, he was in sin, too, because he is an adulterer and an unworthy father of these innocent children. He therefore deserves his punishment. In this life and in the next one there is no mercy for those who do not repent. But I feel sorry for your grief and for these innocent children.

183.4 Is your house far?»

«About one hundred yards.»

«Lift the man and take him there.»

«It is not possible, Master» says Joseph, the merchant. «He is breathing his last breath.»

«Do as I tell you.»

They place a board under the body of the dying man and the procession slowly moves out. They cross the street and go into a shady garden. The women carry on crying loudly.

As soon as they enter the garden, Jesus addresses the mother. «Can you forgive? If you forgive, God will forgive. We must be kind-hearted, to obtain grace. He has sinned and will sin again. It would be better for him to die, because, if he lives, he will fall into sin again and he will also have to answer for his ingratitude to God Who has saved him. But you and these innocent ones (and He points at the wife and children) would give yourselves up to despair. I have come to save, not to lose. Man, I tell you: stand up and be cured.»

The man begins to recover. He opens his eyes, sees his mother, wife and children and lowers his head shamefully.

«Son, son» says the mother. «You were dead, if He had not saved you. Come to your senses. Don’t be infatuated for a…»

Jesus interrupts the old woman. «Be quiet, woman. Have mercy as mercy was granted to you. Your house has been sanctified by a miracle, which is always the evidence of God’s presence. That is why I could not work it where there was sin. You, at least, must endeavour to keep it such, even if he will not. Take care of him now. It is fair that he should suffer a little. Be good, woman. And you. And you little ones. Goodbye.» Jesus has laid His hand on the heads of the two women and of the children.

183.5 He then goes out passing in front of the Magdalene who followed the procession as far as the entrance of the house where she remained leaning against a tree. Jesus slackens His pace as if He were waiting for His disciples, but I think He does so to give Mary a chance of making a gesture. But she does not.

The disciples reach Jesus and Peter cannot help muttering between his teeth an epithet appropriate to Mary, who, wishing to strike an attitude, bursts into a laugh of a weak triumph. But Jesus heard Peter’s word and addresses him severely: «Peter. I do not insult. Do not insult. Pray for sinners. Nothing else.»

Mary stops her trilling laughter, lowers her head and runs away, like a gazelle, towards her house.

• Adultery
• Anonymous characters
• Gospel of Mercy
• Healing and physical miracles
• Joseph of Magdala
• Mary Magdalene (Mary of Magdala or Mary of Bethany)
• Miracles of Jesus Christ