OMELIE / Omelie EN

18 feb 2018

18/02/2018  1st Sunday of Lent - B 

18/02/2018  1^st Sunday of Lent - B 

Reading 1, Genesis 9,8-15 * Psalm 24 * Reading 2, First Peter 3,18-22 * Gospel, Mark 1,12-15

Since the very first centuries of the life of the Church, Lent season has been dedicated to the direct preparation of the Catechumens to receive the Baptism, while who is already baptised  deepens his rootedness in the faith renewing his adhesion to the Lord, that he will express through the baptismal promises during the holy Easter Vigil.

The first two readings inspire us to turn our attention to this mystery. Once the Flood is over, Noah, after leaving the Arc, sees the rainbow and receives a promise from God, not only for himself but also for all the generations to come. The waters, that are waters of death and purification, waters from which surges life ready for a covenant of peace with God, these tell one of the meanings of the new immersion in advance: those who are baptised bury in the waters the attachments to the idols of this world, they are purified from the sins and the vanity of the past life, they are freed from the constraints of other beliefs or religions created by men, and, finally, they begin looking at God without fear, even better, with filial confidence and freedom, joyfully and lovingly. All this happens thanks to Jesus Christ! Saint Peter is sure of it! Jesus has died to bring us back to God, and he has risen and he has ascended to the Father, because, if we invoke His name, we can be saved!

The apostle too reminds us how the waters of the Flood are an image of the Baptism, him who is reading the Sacred Scriptures in the light of the experience of the Church!

The Baptism is the moment in which God's desire and will of salvation finally meet with a "yes" coming from the man. When a person gets to know the One sent by the Father, Jesus Christ, he gets to know Him through His Church, thanks to the glowing experience that he lives among it. If this person decides to adhere with all his heart to the Son of God, then the Church, the body of Christ, welcomes him in its bosom: this happens precisely when he lets the "old" man die in the water and rises again from it renewed in the Spirit!

How do the Catechumens prepare for this moment? And how do we prepare ourselves to repeat the baptismal promises, in a way to let God to clothe us and renew us within, in order for our life to be a true sign of His presence in the world?

We can see Jesus at the beginning of His journey among His people. He obeyed the Holy Spirit that urged Him to retire in the desert: in that situation of solitude, of fragility and sacrifice he persevered for 40 days. He has persevered in the prayer, in the renunciation of Himself and in the contemplation of the Father for a very long time, for a time the length of which was already established by tradition. We too obey the tradition of the Bible and of the Church: for 40 days we will persevere in a deeper and more committed prayer, accompanied by some sort of fasting, by renunciations that touch the desires of the body or the soul, by the desire and the will of listening to the Word of God as food of the soul and guide in our daily decisions. The renunciations and the listening are useful in order to make the death of our “old man” more concrete, to make our prayer more truthful, and to prepare in our heart the proper environment to receive the grace all spiritual of the baptismal renewal.

In the desert, Jesus wins the several temptations that the enemy of God and men lays in front of Him. Saint Mark does not tell us what shape these temptations take: we know it from the other evangelists, and we know it from our own experience.  The temptations that Jesus has won are those that want to distract us too from accepting the way of God.  The Father is suggesting the way of the cross, that is the way of His Son, and we find very logical or wise reasons to reject it. We search for compromises with the world, with the ways of living that are all around us, we try to justify behaviors that are not distinguishing us from those who are adoring idols and useless vanities: we do it out of fear to be rejected by men! The desert will help us to try not to be rejected by God!

In these 40 days that lead us to the Paschal celebration I will try, and you will try too, to find moments of true desert: hours or half days of solitude in order to stay in the presence of the God of our Lord Jesus Christ! He is the one who has to shape our inner self, our heart, our desires and our will! He is the one who needs to be the source of our life, as he has been of that of the Son! In this way becomes complete the conversion that Jesus is asking from us in order for us to enter the Kingdom of God, already come! In saying: “Repent, and believe the gospel”, Jesus is compelling us to think and reason in a new way. The gospel, that is to say the good news that God loves us, will become the starting point of our thoughts. We will live in a way to make our brothers enjoy and become aware of the Father’s love. The water of the Baptism will be the sign of this change, to the point that we will shine like true children of God!