OMELIE / Omelie EN

11 nov 2018

11/11/2018 32nd Sunday in O. T. - B

11/11/2018 32^nd Sunday in O. T. - B

Reading 1, 1 KGS 17,10-16 * Psalm 145 * Reading 2, HEB 9,24-28 * Gospel, MK 12,38-44

The letter to the Hebrews is telling us about the main mystery of our salvation: the sins of many are forgiven thanks to the offering that Jesus Christ made Himself once and for all! He, entering heaven, stood in front of God for our sake! We are living then being grateful to Him, to whom we are in debt for our salvation, and we are awaiting His second coming: then He will judge the world! He will judge it according to the word that He has already given, and that we have heard and we keep in our heart: His judgment then is not going to come as a surprise, because we are aware of His will! Therefore we are lucky; we have received a great grace when we have met the Lord, the master preparing us for eternal life! With a burning desire we are trying to look at Him, to listen to every each one of His words, to pay attention to every different expression of His face!

From today’s gospel we can see how much He was aware of what was going on around Him. He could see the behavior of the important people: if He realized that their action could have been detrimental to the faith of the little and the simple ones, He would not have let them pass without rebuking them! He was paying attention to the ways in which people were behaving, highlighting afterwards for His disciples those that could have been of help in order to guide the faith in a true, free and firm way!

There the scribes are: influential people, because they are expert in God’s things, always there inside the sanctuaries. Everybody’s looking at them in order to take them as an example. However, Jesus can see their pride, He is aware of the vainglory busying their heart, He notices their love for money and the fact that they are keeping prayers longer, not following their love for God, but in order to attract men’s attention on themselves! To take them as an example is dangerous: simple people could imitate their wrong behavior about religion; He warns the crowd about the deception in which could fall whoever imitates the scribes.

The people of Israel however does not have only bad examples to offer. Here comes a poor widow. She as well is queuing in order to put her offering in the assigned room in the temple. When the secretary announces the amount of money she gave, everybody can understand her poverty. Her two coins are not adding practically anything to the value of the offerings given by the rich.

Those two coins, come from the hands of a poor woman, attract the attention of Jesus, who calls the disciples in order for them to see and learn. What could they possibly learn? Jesus is training them to pay attention to things and actions coming from men with God’s eyes, to look for what God sees!

We have known for a long time that God does not look at appearances, but at the heart. Behold, the widow’s heart is richer in faith than everybody else’s heart. The woman’s action shows a greater faith than that, invisible, of the rich. The latter are giving something out of what they do not need: as if to show that they think they do not need God as well. If He wasn’t there, nothing would change. The window is offering everything she has to live on, like the child that gives everything he has to his mother. The child knows that the mother thinks of him every day and that she will not let him wanting anything. The mother’s hands can keep safe, better than his, his small treasures. The widow, entrusting everything to God’s hands, let us see a perfect faith, true, concrete, daily. God for her is necessary, like the mother is necessary to the child, and for her God is “safer” than the security coming from the money!

Jesus would like His disciples to learn this faith. It is the same as the one the prophet Elijah has proposed to the widow of Zarephath during the terrible famine that reduced her to not having anything to eat any more (Reading 1).

Jesus is suggesting not to fear to believe that God is better than us, that He cares about all our needs, and He takes care of them when we trust Him and we obey Him!

In addition, today we learn from Him not to stop at the appearances, to look at everything in order to see what God alone sees! Probably we will discover that the poor, those people that are badly dressed, those you cannot see in important places, those that are overlooked and never asked for an opinion, those are more advanced than us on the way towards truth and sanctity!