Lest You Remain

converted since, although he followed Jesus, his following was a treacherous one, since he was full of hypocrisy and he thought only about his moneybag. As you can expect, the behavior of St. Matthew was different. He was a true follower of Christ because he got up and followed him. What did he get up from? From sin. Where did he follow Christ? To practicing virtues. Here is a good rule for yourself to become like Christ: to get up and follow Him. If you don’t get up you will not man- age to follow Him, even though it may appear to you that you follow in His foot- steps. If in the nooks and corners of your will you still hide the bags of self-love and other similar things, you are not following Christ, you are not truly imitating Christ, although you wear a cassock, although you took vows of obedience, chasti- ty and poverty which you are so proud of. Get up and follow Him because if you do not get up, you will never go in His steps. “Many tax collectors and those known as sinners came to join Jesus at dinner” (Mt 9:10). Contemplate that even now, many tax collectors and sinners come to Jesus, when they come to the sacrament of reconciliation. When they sit together with Jesus at the Table and participate in the celestial feast, they become justified, they cease to be tax collectors and sinners. Will you then wonder to the point of sin, about people’s trespasses? Will you feel officiously anxious when those who are sinners today, may become saints tomorrow; they who have just been worse than the evil spirits, will become more righteous than the Angels? They do not even have to toil too much: only come to Jesus and sit with Him at dinner, and right away they get purified of their sins and adorned with graces. Magdalene also came to Jesus as a sinner and left justified. Oh, what a blessed access to Jesus! Through it, we receive the ability to abandon our sins! Oh, what a Holy Sacrament this is, which turns a sin- ner into a loving person, a servant of the world, into a servant of God, a son of dark- ness into a son of light, a slave of the devil, into a freedman in Christ! Topic II : RELIGIOUS CONSECRATION The Word of the Lord (Rm 6:1-14) What then shall we say? Shall we persist in sin that grace may abound? Of course not! How can we who died to sin yet live in it? Or are you unaware that we who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were indeed buried with him through baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might live in newness of life. For if we have grown into union with him through a death like his, we shall also be united with him in the resurrection. We know that our old self was cruci- fied with him, so that our sinful body might be done away with, that we might no longer be in slavery to sin. For a dead person has been absolved from sin. If, the, Program of Vigils 31