OMELIE / Omelie EN

01 ott 2023

01/10/2023 - 26th Sunday in O. T. - year A

01/10/2023 - 26^th Sunday in O. T. - year A

Reading 1 EZ 18,25-28 Psalm 23 Reading 2 PHIL 2,1-11 Gospel MT 21,28-32

Last Sunday we were told that our thoughts are different from God’s, and way poorer. Despite this, the prophet Ezekiel says, we insist on acting based on our reasoning and therefore we deviate from justice to do evil. This is the road to death, whereas the path of life needs conversion, which can happen after listening to the Word of God and reflecting wisely on the way the Lord “thinks”.

Jesus’s brief parable helps focus on the value of reflecting. The two sons called by their father to work in the vineyard are different really in the fact that one of them is capable of reflecting guided by love, while the other makes up reasons based on himself and his convenience. Both answer right away and instinctively their father. One of them is just about instinct, then he follows his own wims: he says ‘yes’ right away, but he does not do anything to act upon that, so he is even voiding the word he has given. The other says a decisive ‘no’, disobeying, but then he thinks about it, he is sorry about having refused and with his actions he shows he loves his father more than himself.

The people listening certainly understood what Jesus wanted to tell them, and He Himself has also given the explanation. When John the Baptist had shown God’s will, the people eager to adore and serve the temple had let him speak without doing anything, so they had not believed him. They had not tried hard to convert, changing the way they were thinking. Instead the people who were far from God because they had refused to obey His commandments, and they truly were sinners, they had been able to believe him and change their life, going on listening to the person John had called the «Lamb of God».

This revelation of our Lord’s should help us pay attention to the Word of God and give more weight to the Father’s will than to what we like, our wims. When we do what God wants, our life aquires value, becoming useful to the kingdom of the Father.

Many people have understood and some have been able to show this using simple images, like Saint Theresa of Calcutta. She used to say: I am like a wooden pencil in God’s hands; He is the one using me to write Hos love. A wooden pencil, if it is in God’s hands, is infinitely more valuable and more useful than a golden pen in the hands of a writer of novels of sport articles. It does not matter then who I am, what skills I have, what other man value me for, the only thing that matters is for me to be abandoned in the hands of the Father, so He can use me thanks to my obedience to Him.

Even the apostle Paul is telling us the same thing but using other words. He is advising us to live in the Holy Spirit, a Spirit of communion, in order to be always available for God. Sadly, it is quite easy to let ourselves to be subdued by selfishness which brings rivalry and division: these are not allowing us to bear witness to Jesus.

We will imitate the way the Lord is, so His humility. He has lived His love for us and for the Father humbling Himself to the point of dying and dying on the cross. Hoe can we even forget this?

A Christian forgetting this would not be a Christian; and a Christian who does not know what this means, because he has never accepted humiliations and has never tried to live in humility in order to be in communion with all the brothers and sisters, could ever call himself a Christian? The path of life is hard, but it is worth it. We will obey the Father, also by living the Son’s humility!