God never forgets us; he thinks about us and wants us to be joyful. These were the words of Pope Francis during his morning homily at Santa Marta today.
According to Vatican Radio, the Holy Father reflected on the first reading from the prophet Isaiah. In it, God says that he “will rejoice in Jerusalem and exult in my people. No longer shall the sound of weeping be heard there, or the sound of crying.”
The Pope said that God speaks with enthusiasm in saying what he will do, as if it were a “dream of the Lord.”
“The Lord dreams, He has His dreams. His dreams about us,” the Pope said. “To give an example that will help us [understand]: it’s like a woman with her fiancé or what a man with a fiancé would think: ‘But when will we be together, when will we be married…’ It is God’s ‘dream’.
The Holy Father went on to say that “we are in the mind and in the heart of God” and that he “dreams of the joy with which He will enjoy with us.”
God, he continued, wishes to recreate the hearts of the faithful in order for joy to triumph.
“It is here that the Lord shows that he is in love with his people. And when he says to his people: ‘But I have not chosen because you are the strongest, the most powerful. I have chosen you because you are smallest of all,” he noted.
“The love that God has for us cannot be explained by any theologian.”
Commenting on the Gospel, which recalled Jesus healing of a royal official’s son, the Pope emphasized the importance of believing that God can change the hearts of the faithful in order to accept God’s love.
Faith, Pope Francis concluded, “is to make space for this love of God, to make space for strength, the power of God but not in the strength of one that is very powerful, but in the power of one who loves me, who is in love with me and that wants to rejoice with me. This is faith. This is believing: to make space for the Lord so that he can come and change me.”
