The most divine Author says,
«Many amongst the Christians and also amongst those who, if someone were to say to them that they are affected by quietism would rebel as if in the presence of a calumny, fall into a heresy of believing that, given that there is the One who has expiated for all and has given Grace with infinite abundance, that it is useless to restrain oneself from sinning by committing violence to one's own I. Rather, they push their heresy as far as saying to themselves and saying that by doing so, they increase the glory and power of God, demonstrating that only through the infinite merits of the Man-God and without the co-operation of human good will, men save themselves.
No. It is not so. Infinite is the abundance of Grace. But almost boundless is the enormity of this heresy which is the contempt of the divine Blood and of the divine Sacrifice of Christ.
He has died for all, is merciful to all, a medicine to all, salvation to all, and Life to all. However, these must have the will for justice. That, if later, their weaknesses make them fall, if the devil traitorously knocks them down and drags them, Jesus, according to His Name, saves, rescues, raises, heals, forgives and purifies. He is the eternal Repairer.
Every source can cease to groan, every aqueous basin can dry itself up. In the centuries and centuries of the Earth, whole seas and lakes have dried up giving way to sandy deserts or to desolate and rocky lowlands surrounded by mountains that once mirrored themselves in a lake. However, one source will never dry itself up until the end of the centuries. Generous and most holy, It will always effuse its flow for the mercy of men. It is the outpouring Source from the Body of the immolated Lamb.
But do you ever think, you Christians, which continuous wave of divine Blood bathes and nourishes you continuously?
If a king were so wealthy and munificent by linking the houses of his subjects with a marvellous well of his, flowing with gold, the subjects of this king would adore him like a god. And yet, that gold would not be eternally theirs. At their death, they would have to leave it behind. However, the Blood of Christ, this Blood more precious than any most precious metal or jewel, this Blood of the King of kings, is it not freely given, poured out upon you with abundance, without limit in power or in time? This Blood conquers Death, conquers Sin, overcomes time and endures, in its richest fruits, for eternity. Rather, it is exactly in virtue of It that you rise in a purple garment, of a king, to the Kingdom; and in eternity, in Heaven, more than in time and on Earth, you will enjoy the infinite Treasure.
He, the Living One, has consumed the horror of death so that you could die to sin and would rise again in Grace. It is, therefore, not lawful for you to return to sin and death with a prior will of returning to it.
He says, "You cannot serve both God and mammon." I say, "You cannot have both Life and Death."
When Jesus rose, He testified to three things:
I. that He was God, and therefore, only by Himself could He rise;
II. that He really died crucified. For this reason, He preserved in the glorious Body, the stigmatas of the Passion. From that Body, all the signs of the Passion had disappeared, the aging, the filths, and the heavy balms of the embalming. However, to demonstrate that the real Christ, human and not an incorporeal figuration of Him had been affixed to the cross, there remained in the true Flesh, the true holes of the nails and the cut of the lance.
III. that He had forever conquered death and had risen as God, in Body and Soul, forever and ever. Just as the pious women saw Him at the sepulchre, the apostles on the night of the Resurrection and the disciples in the successive apparitions, so they saw Him and they see Him and will see Him in the instant of the judgement particular to the spirit of every deceased man from earthly life to that of the afterlife; and this is how all men will see Him at the final Judgement, as they had already seen Him appear in Limbo opening the doors to the just who had risen with Him to Heaven re-opened to the saints of God.
However, a fourth thing did Christ testify to by rising, and He testified to it with the symbol of His rising after the sacrifice. And it is this: that the Christian, submerged in the salutary waves of His Blood, buried in this saving bath as in a tomb that from its depths expresses life and not death, incorruptibility and not corruption, re-emerges to a new life, to a glorious life. Just as it was for Him, laid down in the bowels of the sepulchre "similar to a leper with dislocated and uncovered bones and pierced members", having come out of those bowels, however, in a garment of such glorious beauty that only the angels and the Purest One [Mother] could admire it in its complete splendour.
Christ, after the Resurrection, reached the completeness of the perfection of His mystery. Before the Passion, He was already perfection: the perfection of Man. Perfection of the Man-God. Perfection of God. However, in the Passion, the prior perfection of the Man-God perfected itself into that of God-Redeemer. And after the Resurrection, it completed itself in that one, mysterious until the end of the centuries, contained and explained "in the name known only to Him" which John speaks of in his Apocalypse.
Even man, living in Christ (the struggle of man, the sufferings, the passion diurnally struggled, endured, consumed in justice) and rising again through Christ and in Christ, will reach the perfection that gives access to the Heavens and will receive "the new name written on the little white stone, the name which no one knows of if not he who receives it."
He said, "I am the true Vine... If the vine branch cannot remain joined to the vine, it does not bear fruit. So if you do not remain grafted in Me, you will not bear fruit... and you will be cast away like a dried branch."
It is the truth. He "has borne all your infirmities" because He has carried and consumed all "your iniquities". He has "dried Himself out like an potsherd" because in order to make you live, He has given His Blood to you, the vital lymph of the true fruiting Vine.
He: the fruiting Vine. You: the wild branches incapable of bearing fruit. And His Father and yours, cultivator of the eternal Vine, has taken you, sterile and wild branches, and has grafted you in Him. And He has accepted to absorb and consume all your homicidal juices, all your fevers of concupiscence, as far as dying in the victim flesh without your corruptions disturbing or poisoning His holy spirit as the eternal Innocent, so that you could be, at the end of the centuries, like Him, glorious in soul and body, having re-clothed your holy spirits with an incorruptible flesh. And already blessed were you even before the first judgement and the last one through the friendship of God, the inhabitation of the Holy Spirit in you, the fusion with Christ Friend and Bread of Heaven on Earth, and the peace in God after death in expectation of the resurrection of the flesh in order to be participants together in the joy and glory of the soul.
The divine Thought and Will have performed a mystery by wanting that, even before you existed, your sins be expiated by Christ. "He has borne the sins of many," says Isaiah. And these many are those who during life, or at least before their death, through their good will, will not leave the infinite merits of Christ inert for themselves.
On the scale of the Cross, on that scaffold of Justice in which dwelt all the Sanctity and all the Iniquity, and the first consumed the second, every sin of yours was infixed like an arrow in the Body of the Martyr. Most numerous were the beatings of the flagellations, numerous the punctures of the thorns upon the tortured Head, atrocious the spasms of the nails. However, not one of the many who have compassion on the suffering Christ, of the tortures given by a human and cruel justice, strikes their chest saying, "Here: this, this, and this, these thousands and tens of thousands of stings, I have infixed these in Your flesh and into Your heart with my thousand and tens of thousands of sins. You have known me, oh my Redeemer, with all my thousands of sins. Not one was unknown to You. I have been for You the torture of tortures."
Who numbers the millions and millions of sins that the Purest One felt infixed into His expiating Body? Who, by meditating on this, should not feel perfect hate towards sin, flee from it, the obligation and duty of no longer serving sin given that the Sacrifice of a God has freed you from it?
You are dead to this sin. A dead man no longer performs the works which he did while he was alive. How then, if in you is a sure faith that the death of Christ and the Grace that this death has merited you and has freed you from the death of sin and given you the means to remain free, how then, similarly to Christ, do you not rise forever from this death and live forever in God, just as Jesus - the Son of God, the Son of Man who died like Man in order to expiate the Sin and the sins of men - lives "through God", that is, as God?
However, not only He, God. Everyone who lives in Christ and through Christ, remember, divinizes himself by becoming a child of the Most High.»