OMELIE / Omelie EN

12 ago 2018

12/08/2018  19th Sunday of O. T. - B 

12/08/2018  19^th Sunday of O. T. - B 

Reading 1, First Kings 19,4-8 * Psalm 33 * Reading 2, Ephesians 4,30 - 5,2 * Gospel, John 6,41-51

The reading from the gospel according to Mark is now interrupted for five Sundays, in which we will read the sixth chapter of John instead, particularly meaningful, rich, a revelation of Jesus’ person and His thoughts. In this chapter the Evangelist collects the teaching on the great gifts of the Eucharist. The Jews show their difficulty to welcome this gift, a difficulty that is very similar to ours.

Jesus is Joseph’s son, how on earth can He say that He is coming from Heaven?

This is the first difficulty: the rest of them we will hear of in the next Sundays. Jesus answers without being surprised. In fact, to be able to recognize Jesus of Nazareth as the Son of God is a gift of the Father’s. To go to Him like to the One who can guide my life, to welcome Him as my daily food, as rule and light of my every step, this is a gift of God’s. Those who, with humility, are ready to obey God, they reach Jesus and enjoy His presence. Jesus’ affirmations are important: whoever reaches Him, it is a sign that he listened to the Father, He is the bread of life for men: these, if they want to live, have to eat the bread of life. The man cannot be satisfied with the normal bread, the one that fills the stomach and gives energy to its muscles. The material bread, useful and necessary, gives strength and energy to the men’s bad intentions too, to the sin that rules him too. It is necessary another bread, to feed the eternal life, that is to say the divine life, full and holy, the life of true and selfless love, the life that the living God’s Spirit can give. This bread is given to us: it is Jesus Himself, His body given to us. He is bread coming from Heaven, offered to us by the Father, bread that feeds a superior dimension than the material one. It is a kind of bread, then, necessary to whom is not satisfied by an animal life, to whom want to be in harmony with God, to whom is searching for the beauty of the Truth and the justice of peace among men.

We are helped to understand the value and the meaning of this bread by the prophecy lived by Elijah during his painful experience. He was running because Jezebel, the pagan queen wife of Ahab’s, king of Israel, had someone running after him in order to put him to death. Elijah, in fact, had been defending the faith in the single God of Abraham against the idolatries that she had spread among the people, making it break the covenant. While on the run, Elijah needs to cross the desert, where he suffers the heat, starvation and thirst. He is so desperate of being able to pull it off to ask God for death. In this very moment, an angel lets him find bread and water and twice he invites him to eat. So, nourished in this way both in his body and in his spirit, he continues his journey “until he reached Horeb, God's mountain”. The bread from Heaven is unexpected help, undeserved, that is given to us by the Father’s love, it is the help and the strength that allows us to continue with the effort of our life and reach the resting day and to meet our God on His mountain.

God’s mountain is an image that can have different meanings. It is the finishing line and the starting point. It is the goal of the work that we are doing on ourselves in order to eliminate from our life everything that offends God and that prevents to be recognized as in His likeness; it is the starting point in order to blend with men bringing them the richness of God’s love. Saint Paul, writing to the Ephesians, gives us instructions for this interior work. “Any bitterness or bad temper or anger or shouting or abuse must be far removed from you -- as must every kind of malice. Be generous to one another, sympathetic, forgiving each other”: the example it that coming from God, who has forgiven us in Christ, that God we need to imitate after the example of Jesus. He has given Himself us to our advantage. This sacrifice, we know it very well, it is the same that happen when we feed on it eating the bread of the blessing, that is broken in our gatherings. In order to reach God’s mountain, in order to meet the Father in purity, renewed, ready to carry on us his image and ready to make Him known to the world, then we will have to eat too the bread that He Himself is giving us: the living bread from Heaven, Jesus!

Taste and see that Yahweh is good!