OMELIE / Omelie EN

01 dic 2024

01/12/2024 - 1st Sunday of Advent - year C

01/12/2024 - 1^st Sunday of Advent - year C

Reading 1 Jer 33,14-16 Psalm 24/25 Reading 2 1THES 3,12.13-4,2 Gospel LK 21,25-28.34-36

We are starting a new liturgical year: we are remembering again in it the whole life and the mystery of the coming and presence of Jesus, Son of God, and the offer He made of Himself to the Father for us, sinners.

God’s Word is accompanying us and is of help to us in this remembering, so our path of conversion may progress, to go back to the Father with all our heart, with all our intelligence and all our strength. This journey is never over, on the contrary, the more we advance, the more we become aware of the distance that is still between us and Him. But, and here lays our consolation, we are not the ones who need to reach God, because it is Him who makes himself the protagonist, He is the one who wants to come towards us, and He comes in the person of the Son, Jesus.

This is truly what the prophet Jeremiah is reminding us of today. God has promised and He keeps His promises. He has promised to save us and He sends a “righteous Branch” who is spreading on earth for us a goodness men have never seen nor experienced. This branch we know already how to name it, so we stand again in the wait of His coming. He has already sprouted, but He does it all over again, because we continue to fall back into old ways of living life, filling it with sinful selfishness, which is keeping us far from the love and the joy of our Father.

We have become used to appreciate that selfish way of living that makes us suffer. In it, we feel like we can find fulfillment, and we do not want to let go of it. It is exactly this way of life, bent on ourselves, that closes us to one another and blocks that communion which would give joy and enthusiasm to our social life.

To welcome the person promised by God, the «righteous Branch», we will have to leave, abandon, reject the way of being and living we are used to. This is frightening for us, and the first feeling downing on us is the world falling down on us, the sun and the moon stopping being as they were, so like the world as we knew it was disappearing.

Jesus, in the talk he gave to His disciples, has described clearly and decisively this situation, and He strongly advises us: “Be vigilant at all times and pray”. Do we want joy or not? Do we want or not a new life of peace for us and the people around us? It will come not because of our actions, but because «they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory»: He is the source of joy and all true peace. So, we will cultivate the desire for the “salvation” which has been promised to us, in a way to wait every day for and to ask in prayer constantly for the coming of the Savior, of Jesus, «God’s salvation».

Saint Paul asks the Lord with his insistent prayer, and, at the same time, recommends us to be attentive towards the brethren, so we may “increase and abound in love for one another and for all”, the love Jesus Himself has commanded when He said: “Love one another”. We shall be careful to «strengthen [our] hearts, to be blameless in holiness». These are the ways to be vigilant, the ways in which we will await and welcome fully the «righteous Branch» which comes to change the face of the earth.

We will then begin these weeks of Advent with the ardent desire for Jesus’ presence and with renewed attention to our brothers and sisters who we share the journey and the holiness with.