Your Grace Is Enough For Me
Pierluigi Banna - From a gathering with leaders of the movement of Communion and Liberation. June21, 2025 - La Thuile (IT)
In the long story of his life (cf. 2 Cor 11-12), which is also a kind of testimony and defense, Paul never ceases to recount the work of God's grace in him. He cannot speak of himself without also speaking of the work of Christ in him.
It is this new self-awareness that dominates Paul's entire life. Some scholars have recognized that the most present subject in Paul's epistles—contrary to what one might expect—is not Jesus Christ, but Paul's own self.
This is not a kind of egocentrism or individualistic narcissism; it is that Paul cannot talk about himself without including the entire work of Christ within that self. In a way, it is like the final violin solo in Beethoven's Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, which we heard last night. The violin carried within itself all the impetus and power of the orchestra that had both gathered and regenerated it.
Could we not say the same of each of us? We are not the fruit of our own thoughts, imaginations, or limitations, but the fruit of Christ's work in us. Paul describes these moments of regeneration as “moments of glory,” as he calls them in this letter.
They are moments in which Christ has continually taken us up and regenerated us: moments of community, made up of faces and embraces, like yesterday's walk; moments in which we experience that God has come to prefer us. What else is glory if not God's preference for the misery of our own selves?
Yet, even in the face of these extreme moments of glory (which we have all experienced in our lives, otherwise we would not be here today) and which we always remember too little, Paul experiences a wound like a scratch; he feels a sting in his humanity that does not sit well with him: a thorn in his flesh.
Scholars have racked their brains to understand what this thorn in the flesh was: perhaps an emotional fragility, a problem with his eyesight, a persistent misunderstanding within the community, or someone within it who opposed him personally. Perhaps it is precisely this indecision for scholars that allows us to recognize in Paul's thorn the same thorn that each of us sometimes finds in the morning or in the evening, just after experiencing those moments of glory when the company of Christ has made us feel reborn. Why does this wound return? Why does this sin return?
In response to these questions, Christ challenges Paul as he did on the day of his conversion, provoking him to a judgment. He says to him, “My grace is sufficient for you.” We can sense the depth of this judgment in the words of the Gospel. It is as if Christ were pushing Paul to continually compare his own image of perfection with what Christ has done in his life.
It is as if Christ were asking him, “Compared to my grace, what is your image of perfection?” Compared to the Father's grace, Jesus says to his disciples, what is destiny, what is wealth, what is health, what is the possession of love? His grace is incomparable to all our imaginings of a perfect life.
Thus, Christ's judgment on Paul becomes Paul's judgment on himself: “Your grace is enough for me.” From the communion between Christ and Paul, this judgment was born, which once again—this time precisely through this thorn—has regenerated him. Even in the face of this sin that returns and causes me suffering, this thorn in my flesh that is not removed, I repeat: “Your grace is enough for me.”
Everything is grace. This is not because grace is a kind of abdication of responsibility, but because that grace is the truth of ourselves, the source of every good in our lives and in the life of the Church, as Pope Leo said to the leaders of the movements. When we start again from this judgment—“Your grace is enough for me”—it begins to make things known, to make them seen in a new way. Thus, in my recurring and persistent cross, the cross of every day, I recognize that it is an opportunity for Your glory, to the point of saying with Paul: “I glory in my weakness. For when I am weak, it is clearly Your grace that is at work.”
Even the wound of division, of the fragility of this company, if I believe “your grace is enough for me,” makes me recognize in this company Your body that has come to embrace me.
And in adversity and persecution, in the misunderstandings of a world far from You, if I believe “your grace is enough for me,” I recognize in this world a unique opportunity to bear witness—that is, to offer my life to the point of self-giving.
Your grace is enough for me because nothing generates my freedom, my new self, like Your grace, Lord.
The author has not revised the notes and its translation.
