OMELIE / Omelie EN

03 ott 2021

03/10/2021 – 27th Sunday in O. T. - year B

03/10/2021 – 27^th Sunday in O. T. - year B

Reading 1 EX 2,18-24 Psalm 127/128 Reading 2 HEB 2,9-11 Gospel MK 10,2-16

While introducing Jesus to us, the letter to the Hebrews is focussing on His sufferings. It stresses the fact that He has obtained glory going through the experience of death, suffering which has “made Him perfect” and has made Him the “leader” for us until the salvation. We are his brethren, because we need not only to be made perfect, but also purified from a long list of sins. Notwithstanding this, He is not ashamed of us, and He continues to call us brothers. He, who has reached glory going through death, shows us too a way on which we will find ourselves carrying the cross. The latter for us has always two sides: it is a consequence of sin, ours and others’, but it is also a tool for redemption and holiness, thanks to our relationship with Jesus.

A possible way to the cross for men is their marriage situation: we can understand this from the conversation between Jesus and the Pharisees which today’s gospel is telling us about. Man and woman are very soon aware of their incompleteness. Following an instinct that God Himself has put in people’s life, everyone is looking for him or her, who can make their life complete, who can be close to them and give them love. So men and women become a family, a new condition which is blessed by God Himself. God’s intention, Jesus is repeating, is not for men to try marriage out, in order to see if the woman is able to satisfy them. God’s way is not a selfish one, but a loving one. The husband takes care of the wife, and vice versa, until the end, because the love coming from God is giving themselves permanently, continuously, faithfully. The faithfulness is understood both in good and bad times: bad times is the possibility for one of them to give way to temptation and fall into sin, and change the family into a hotel or hell. There it is, the cross is showing itself in all its complexity, but also in all its potential for redemption.

Jesus’ disciples are asking for an explanation and they look surprised. The married life lived by the Christians is different from the others', because it does not reject the cross, but it carries it, with the knowledge that it makes people’s life become a testimony and a prophecy of God. The faithfulness of a spouse to the unfaithful spouse is really a cross, but it is also an offer for salvation.

It is not random that, after these words on the possibility for marriage to become cross, Jesus welcomes the children. The children are the fruit of the marriage, of love. They are an extension of the ability to love of the spouses, they are their prize and an extra reason for them to continue with their love and faithfulness. The children of spouses who stop loving each other are burdened with a cross which ruins their lives, because they are not equipped to carry it.

Jesus blesses the children, and in this way He notifies the parents that they cannot decide about their life only according to their feelings, but also taking into account the faithfulness towards their children, taking into account their need to enjoy the unity of their parents. When two spouses celebrate their wedding, they are dreaming of the joy of a stable and permanent harmony: therefore, they declare themselves open to offer sufferings too, and their joy will become even more brilliant.

The joy the spouses enjoy when their love is pure and faithful, is the joy God since the beginning had in mind, when He said: : «It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a suitable partner for him». It is a good thing that the man can love in communion, even if this might cost him. For a man not being alone means that he will not be his own master, and not even other people’s master, not even the wife’s, and vice versa. The spouses will have to help each other live in freedom, but not independently. If any one of them was doing whatever they wanted, they would be alone again, terribly lonely. The man is not alone when he accepts to be obedient, to listen, to get used to use the pronoun we. And, above all, the man does not feel alone with the wife because between them the Lord is present, who has mixed His love with their human love. And if in the shared life of the spouses were to appear suffering, they would remember that this is a redemptive suffering, as Jesus', the Son of the living God. They will carry it as a precious and blessed cross, a tool of salvation for themselves and the world.