OMELIE / Omelie EN

17 nov 2024

17/11/2024 - 33rd Sunday of the T.O. - B

17/11/2024 - 33rd Sunday of the T.O. - B

1st reading Dn 12,1-3 from Psalm 15 2nd reading Heb 10,11-14.18 Gospel Mk 13,24-32

We have become accustomed to believing that we can and must know everything about everyone. Those who operate the instruments of communication let us believe that this is how it is and put themselves forward as the connoisseurs of the most secret truths, of the most hidden knowledge, of the most difficult solutions. In this way we delude ourselves that we know, that we can judge, that we are in control of our own lives and those of others.

Our every certainty is then matched by a disappointment, with the effect of great insecurity and distrust. Today Jesus tells us with great clarity: ‘Nobody knows’, and among the ‘ignorant’ he places the angels and even himself, as a man called to a mission on earth. It is as if he were saying: acknowledge your ignorance, there are things that you cannot handle as you like, you must depend on others and therefore remain in waiting.

Waiting! We are waiting for the ultimate things, the most important and final things. They are in God's hands, so we too are in his hands. This we must know: we will act and behave accordingly, trying to please him because it is by him that we will be sifted!

Jesus then speaks to us of tribulation and of the end of those realities on which we rely every day and every hour: the sun and the moon and the powers of the heavens will fail. We will no longer have any of the certainties upon which we rest our choices and our certainties. Angels will come to gather us, and so not even the most qualified people, the ones we admire and idealise, the ones we choose as role models for our lives and whose posters we have hung in the room, will count for anything.

Only one reality will remain stable: ‘My words will not pass away’. The words of Jesus, and the love with which he chose and spoke them, have already proved their validity to us: every one of the twenty centuries that has received and transmitted them testifies that they are alive and transmit life and have not yet finished bearing fruit.

We are then certain that the Word of God, the only one, is Jesus himself. When we pray to the Father in the words suggested to us by Jesus, we say: ‘Thy Will be done on earth as it is in heaven. How is God's Will of love done ‘in heaven’? Certainly by obeying his Word and not in any other way. So we, who are ‘onearth’, will base our every choice and every action on the Word we have heard from Jesus. Our conversion, always to be completed, will therefore take place by placing the Word at the basis of our living, at the foundation of every activity. Let us not be as foolish as he who builds his house on sand!

We too in this 21st century can trust the teachings of Jesus: we will not be deceived, we will not be harmed by living them, on the contrary. These words nourish in us an eternal hope: by living them, our lives gain solidity beyond time, they guide and accompany our lives into eternity.

The prophet Daniel calls ‘wise men’ those who take the Word of God as the rule of their lives, wise men because they will ‘shine like stars in the sky’, that is, they will be put in the place of those realities that we think are secure and are not.

The Word that God has sent us and that will never pass away is Jesus himself, called by the evangelist John ‘the Word ’ of God, who came in human flesh. He ‘offered one sacrifice for the sins’ of mankind, and ‘sat down for ever at the right hand of God’: we are therefore grateful to him and resolutely listen to him, ready to obey his every command, especially his command to love one another and to bless all, even those who curse us. We trust him for all that we do not know and could never know, and we therefore defer to him all judgement on ourselves and the people around us, even those who make us suffer!