OMELIE / Omelie EN

03 dic 2023

03/12/2023 - 1st Sunday of Advent - year B

03/12/2023 - 1^st Sunday of Advent - year B

Reading 1 IS 63,16-17.19; 64,1-7 Psalm 79 Reading 2 1COR 1,3-9 Gospel MK 13,33-37

The prophet Isaiah is repeating the prayer of the entire people of Israel: “Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down!”. This is an odd prayer: can God come down to earth? Can He come and touch our humanity so sadly smeared by crimes, lies, darkness, sin? Is He not already present everywhere where a man is, everywhere where one of His creature is, whom He looks at lovingly?

With this prayer are we asking Him a different presence? A different way to be with us and to love us with a new type of attention?

If God was not able to answer this prayer, it would still be the deep desire of all men, at least since the man understands or imagines He is able to love.

If God loved us and if He came here with us, our life would start hoping, seeing the light, rising. If God does not come, says the prophet, it is not because He does not want to get closer, but because we need to realise that without Him we cannot do anything. In this way, we are almost obliged to turn to Him, to recognise ourselves His children and so change our life by doing works of justice to be prepared for the fulfillment of our desire.

Jesus too, in the short passage from the Gospel we read today, is advising us to stand guard keeping the attention focussed always on the Lord, night and day. If we were to lose His sight, we would easily and certainly fall in sin, so in the arrogance, in selfishness, in making ourselves masters of others, in being subservient to what we like even if it was causing suffering for our brothers. Jesus tells us what needs to be our usual behaviour: the behaviour of someone who is waiting for their master to come back from far away after a long time. A servant, so attentive, joyfully is trying to be ready for the arrival of his master, because he loves him and he would like that he was satisfied. So he too will be judged faithful, so he will be certain to receive the reward for his faithfulness.

Saint Paul, beginning to write to the Corinthians, exactly about this is praising those Christians, about the fact that they are waiting for “the revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ”. Waiting for it is like a prayer that the Lord Himself will surely reward with the steadfastness of the faith and the richness of His gifts.

There are all the spiritual gifts in the community which is waiting faithfully and lovingly the Lord, in particular the gifts of the “discourse and all knowledge”, which are useful for giving Jesus testimony.

The gift of discourse is the ability to communicate the mysteries of God’s love in a way to make them clear to the listeners. And the gift of all knowledge is the gift to understand and see the Father’s love in all His plans, in the events into the lives of Jesus and His disciples, in their teachings and also in the sacramental gestures done by the Church to make men holy, freeing them from the devil’s power. These spiritual gifts, which are called charisma, ate given to whom lives with perseverance in Jesus.

By starting the new liturgical yer with the four weeks of Advent, we will practice the spiritual disposition of waiting for the Lord. He is coming: those who are waiting lovingly will realise He has come, will be ready to welcome Him those who try to serve only Him.

We will use our discourse and our knowledge to bear witness to His love, goodness and mercy. The prayer “that you would rend the heavens” has become a certainty: God opens the heavens and becomes one of us, so we can see Him, listen to Him a love Him. All our life will change, and we will find the words to spread the good news for all men unsatisfied of life and still unfulfilled. They too will rise when they will meet Jesus!