OMELIE / Omelie EN

17 ago 2025

17/08/2025 - 20th Sunday in Ordinary Time - Year C

17/08/2025 - 20th Sunday in Ordinary Time - Year C

First reading Jer 38:4-6, 8-10 from Psalm 39 Second reading Heb 12:1-4 Gospel Lk 12:49-57

‘Keep your eyes fixed on Jesus’! This is the exhortation addressed to us today. We will keep our eyes fixed on Jesus, always, as we continue on our journey, a journey that is tiring because it is weighed down by sin, by our own sin and that of our brothers and sisters and of the whole world.

Every day we are busy with work, with difficult relationships with others, with health issues, with worries of various kinds, and all these things tend to distract and disorient us. We struggle to respond clearly to the questions that arise in our minds and hearts in quiet moments: why am I here? What is the meaning of my running? Where will I end up?

‘Keep your eyes fixed on Jesus’: this gaze gives us stability, this gaze finds the answer to all our whys! Jesus is ‘the one who gives rise to faith and brings it to fulfilment’: faith is the gift necessary for our life to be complete, and it is precisely our faith that needs Jesus continually: it comes from him and leads us to him. Fixing our gaze on him, we are particularly struck by the suffering he experienced without complaining, indeed, desiring it. Jesus did not desire suffering as if it were a good thing, but because he knew that his obedience to the Father had to pass through this path as well. He knew that it was his task to fulfil all the prophecies, those spoken by the prophets and those offered to our gaze by the events of their lives.

We are particularly familiar with the prophecies of Isaiah, which announce the sufferings of the servant of God who dies for our iniquities.

Jeremiah, on the other hand, was a prophet at various times who experienced suffering himself. Today's first reading presents us with one of the moments when he was persecuted. The Word of God that he had to proclaim contrasted with the diplomatic and economic convictions of the great men of the city of Jerusalem. For this reason, he was thrown into prison where, if a servant of the king had not intervened on his behalf, he would have died of hunger and hardship. His suffering has prophetic value for Jesus.

Jesus knows these prophecies and knows that he must be the one to fulfil them. That is why he exclaims: “I have a baptism to be baptised with, and how distressed I am until it is accomplished!”. He thinks of baptism as a passage into the terrible suffering of rejection and bloody death. He knows that this must happen, and the wait makes him almost impatient. That moment will be a difficult hour, like the blazing of a purifying fire. His death will be the judgement of the world, a judgement that is compared to fire: those who stand with him will see the light, joy and peace, like the good thief, while those who are ashamed of him or despise him will suffer the fate of the rich man in the flames.

Those who accept Jesus as their saviour will be saved, those who want to save themselves through religious practices and rituals or through their own supposed goodness will remain where they are, in the condemnation reserved for the world. In fact, they place their trust and hope in themselves, in their own abilities, even if they are aimed at good, but still the works of man. And man, in the words of the prophet Jeremiah, offers no guarantee of holiness and blessing: “Cursed is the man who trusts in man” (17:5), he said, assuring instead that “Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord” (17:7).

Everyone will have to take a stand before him, before Jesus: and this will never be easy, because even in one's own home there will be misunderstanding and hostility. Thus, Christians participate in the mission lived by Jesus, that of saving the world through passion and death, and pass through the fire that Jesus lit on earth.

It is Jesus who therefore invites us to be vigilant, to commit ourselves to discerning the times in which we live. Our times are also times of his fire and his baptism.

Our faith is publicly despised and the faithful are publicly prevented from manifesting themselves as disciples of Jesus. If they do so, they immediately understand the situation of Jeremiah and that of the Lord.

We prepare ourselves to suffer for our faith, and we prepare ourselves by living in unity with our brothers and sisters, ready to serve the weak and the little ones loved by him, sharing prayer and love for the Word of God, always keeping “our eyes fixed on Jesus”!