OMELIE / Omelie EN

10 nov 2019

10/11/2019 – 32nd Sunday in O. T. Year C

10/11/2019 – 32^nd Sunday in O. T. Year C

Thanksgiving Day

Reading 1 2MC 7,1-2.9-14 * Psalm 16 * Reading 2 2THES 2,16 - 3,5 * Gospel LK 20,27-38

“For not all have faith”: with these words Saint Paul explains the reason of many sufferings that befall the Christians. They find themselves among “perverse and wicked people”, who are like this exactly because they have no faith. Faith generates love, faith generates wisdom and culture focused on looking for peace and good deeds, faith is providing consolation for everyone, faith makes men look for occasions to donate themselves. Faith, in fact, is a gift from the God of love, God the Father of our God Jesus Christ who has given Himself up for the sinful men.

Whoever believes becomes able to surrender himself and finds his joy in this ability to donate himself.

“For not all have faith”: when a believer lives among people who are not believers, ha has the impression to find himself as a sheep into the midst of wolves. He who does not believe, in fact, feels himself at ease when he despises, limits, conditions and even makes the believers suffer. This is nothing new: history is full of great and small examples, far and close to us, past, recent and happening now. Saint Paul does not let himself to get scared because of this situation. He knows that the Lord is faithful and therefore gives strength and protects from the evil; He protects us in a way that hatred surrounding us cannot enter our heart and in a way that the incredulity causing us to suffer cannot root itself in us. The apostle is only recommending to pray: a prayer that is not asking the Lord for us to be spared persecutions, but that the latter would turn up being to the advantage of preaching the Gospel and the joy of whoever welcomes Him!

The first reading is talking about persecution, introducing an event happened during the kingdom of Antiochus Epiphanes, less than two decades before Christ. Seven brothers with their mother, forced to disobey their own religious rules, which – by the way – were not doing anything bad to anyone, forced to go against their own conscience to despise their fathers' God, let instead themselves to be tortured and killed.

This is the situation in which Christians found themselves in, not only in Saint Paul's times, but still now and always. I am thinking of many believers who are suffering because of their faith, because each one of their choices goes daily against the way of thinking and doing that are despising their principles, those regarding family life and the respect for life and the purity of the heart and the body, and the generosity in dealing with money and richness and all of this simply because the world despises Jesus.

“For not all have faith”. Jesus Himself has suffered for the beauty of His faith in God the Father, friend of the men, hoping to get the sinner back. Even in front of Him there were people who did not want to believe. The faith puts everything in play, even wealth: therefore, the owners of riches did not want to believe in the revelation of a perpetual life, so in the existence of paradise and hell. The Sadducees were gathering exactly the richest in Jerusalem: these are the ones who want to put to the test the faith of Jesus and of the entire people with a convenient reasoning of theirs. They, at their convenience, did not accept as Word of God anything but the first five books of the Sacred Scriptures, thinking that in them there is no reference to a future life. Jesus though knows how to read the Word of God with love and intelligence, and therefore even in the first five books He can read the Father’s project to have us as children of His for all eternity. He did not create men in order to abandon them to death, but in order to keep them in front of Himself forever: what kind of love would it be otherwise his love? What kind of faithfulness would it be His? God is not the God of the dead, so of the emptiness, of nothingness, but He is the God of life and of the living. For Him we will never die, on the contrary, when we will reach the next world, our life will no longer have those limitations that the things of this world are constricting it in. In the next world our love will not be limited any more to some people, to a husband or a wife, but we will have part in the fullness of the Father’s love!

And Jesus then enjoys to let us see that already since now, someone is allowed to get close to this dimension of love: there is someone who gives up marriage (an incredible choice until then!) in order to tell the world that there are different dimensions of love, God's ones, and to show in advance the future life. Verginity given and welcomed for love of Jesus is a concrete announcement of the resurrection everyone is waiting for. And, if we are waiting for resurrection, we do not let ourselves be driven by richness and the honours of this world, but we will remain fastly secured to our faith, even to the point of suffering, even to the point of being object of mocking and having to stand injustice.

Today we renew the decision to live our faith seriously: it helps the example of a great number of martyrs, the news of the sufferings of many brethren of ours spread throughout the world and the presence among us of people who have given up marriage to make clear the message of the resurrection!