OMELIE / Omelie EN

25 feb 2024

25/02/2024 - 2nd Sunday of Lent - B

25/02/2024 - 2^nd Sunday of Lent - B

Reading 1 GEN 22,1-2.9.10-13.15-18 Psalm 115 Reading 2 RM 8,31-34 Gospel MK 9,1-9

Let us continue to prepare ourselves to renew the promises of our Baptism in the Mass of Easter Vigil. While some that night will be baptised, we too will renew the rejecting of Satan and the union with Jesus Christ, Lord and Master. We are a single Body with them, we share a single Spirit.

Today Saint Paul, writing to the Christians in Rome, is reassuring us of God’s love, a love which cannot falter, because He has pledged His love by handing Jesus over “for us all”. God has done so to justify us, redeem and save us. We do not have to fear anyone, there are no enemies left able to defeat the love God has built towards us.

The apostle’s words are guiding us in listening to the other two readings: Abraham is about to sacrifice his son to God, and Jesus talks to Moses and Elijah about the plans of salvation the Father has shown them and that He wants to fulfil through Him.

Abraham’s trip with his only Son Isaacs towards the mountain is the prophetic trip which ends with Jesus, but that certainly repeats also in our proceeding towards the end, towards the Father’s hug. Abraham receives everything from God: he recognises it by giving back everything to Him. In that «everything» there is not only his own life, but also the life, even more precious to him, of his only son, desired and awaited for many years.

At first we might think that God’s request is cruel, but after seeing how the story pays out, we understand how His love is great and foreseeing. Thanks to that request, Abraham’s fatherly love for the son is freed from any shape of selfishness, it becomes a spiritual love, so the son can still be God’s gift for every day of his life.

Jesus has climbed the mountain with the disciples able to listen and to see. There, on the mountain, He talks to Moses and Elijah, the best people to represent God in front of the people and the people in front of God. They have suffered unimaginably to fulfill their mission of guides and prophets, they have suffered to the point they wanted to die to stop that suffering. Jesus is talking to them, and He is talking about His own sacrifice He is about to offer the Father. He is the only Son, God’s beloved Son, who is embodying Abraham’s only prophetic gesture: He is the Lamb of God who is sacrificed instead of any child of men.

The voice the three disciples hear coming from the sky, is proof that the Father has welcomed the offering of the Son, of Jesus, and thanks to it He can complete the plan only dreamt and desired by the two people appeared next to Him. The words coming from the sky remind of the experience lived by Abraham: the beloved son, who is completing fully the love is not Isaacs, but Jesus. He discloses it in the talk He has with His people while climbing down the mountain, the mountain of prayer and of meeting with God the Father.

In a month we will renew the promises of the Baptism: what does this mean? This means we want to be part of Jesus’s life, of His whole life, which is an offer presented to the Father for the men. Let us take part in Jesus’s life by offering ourselves to God: this can happen every day through our small and big choices coming from faith and love, the love which comes from the faith.

We will not be afraid if we will need to suffer, because He too, Jesus, has suffered, and we will not be afraid because, when we are united to Him, God Himself is on our side, as Saint Paul is assuring us.