Saturday, January 29 : Saint Alphonsus Maria de Liguori

A God who serves, who sweeps the house and gives himself to the most onerous work – a single one of these reflections should be enough to fill us with love! When our Savior began preaching his Gospel he made himself “the servant of all”, himself asserting that “he had not come to be served, but to serve”. It was as though he had said he wanted to be servant to everyone. And Saint Bernard says that, at the end of his life, he was not satisfied “with having taken the condition of a servant that he might place himself at our service but he wanted to take on the appearance of an unworthy slave and be struck and undergo the punishment due to us by reason of our sins.” See how our Lord, as an obedient servant to all, undergoes the sentence of Pilate, unjust as it is, and yields to his executioners… In this way has this God so loved us that, out of love for us, he wanted to obey like a slave even to death and die a death that was both painful and humiliating: the torture of the cross (Phil 2,8). Yet in all this he obeyed, not as God but as man, as the slave whose condition he had assumed. There are holy men who have surrendered themselves as slaves in order to redeem a poor man and have won the world’s admiration by this heroic act of charity. But what sort of charity is this compared with that of the Redeemer? Being God; desiring to redeem us from the slavery due to us to the devil and death, he made himself as slave, allowing himself to be bound and nailed to the cross. “That the servant might become lord,” Saint Augustine says, “God willed to make himself a servant.”

maronite readings – rosary,team