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OMELIE / Omelie EN

14 mar 2021
14/03/2021 – 4th Sunday in Lent - year B

14/03/2021 – 4th Sunday in Lent - year B

Reading 1 2CHR 36,14-16.19-23 Psalm 136/137 Reading 2 EPH 2,4-10 Gospel JN 3,14-21

Sin and salvation, this is the theme of today’s readings. The man and men commit sin, so God, who loves them, has to find ways to save them. Sin in fact is source of death, drags who commits it towards his unhappiness, makes the man weak and abandons him to influences which, apparently looking like wellbeing and freedom, enslave him and degrade him to his complete ruin. The man cannot save himself from the whirlwind in which he falls through sin, and neither can save others. God is the one taking care of his salvation, because He loves His creatures, notwithstanding their disobedience. God’s interventions, in order to bring to salvation, need to bring to repentance, to conversion. Often words are not enough, because men sometimes are so hardened in evil that are mocking God’s prophets, and therefore God needs to act like a surgeon. This is the topic of the first reading, which interprets the deportation of the people to Babylon as the hard way used by God in order to get the people’s attention and redirect it to the way of life. He does this even if men themselves could interpret this love of His as a punishment.

Saint Paul makes us notice how God’s salvation is free of charge: it is the salvation won for us by the Lord Jesus. In us death was already working, because we are born into Adam’s family, a family of sinners which shares with its children, like an inheritance, the condition of being far from the Father. It was enough for us to gaze expectantly towards Jesus Christ, and lo and behold, we have been saved. A new life has entered us, thanks to Jesus! The new life expresses itself through “good” works, those which highlight the Father’s love, God’s goodness!

Jesus too is talking about salvation and new life in his night conversation face to face with Nicodemus. The man is already living a unhappy situation in itself, that we can even also call condemnation, even though they did not commit a particular felony: whoever do not welcome Jesus, the Son of God sent by Him, is lacking the light and the beauty of a life of abandonment to the Father, wanting communion and serenity, wanting completeness and light. Today too men are like the Israelites bitten by the snakes in the desert: they are bound to have a life poisoned by selfishness, the selfishness that is constantly creating fruits of death. Moses had raised a snake because of God’s orders: whoever faithfully had performed an action of simple and easy faith, looking at that copper snake, would have had their life spared. Now the son of God has raised Himself, so anyone looking at Him with humble faith, listening to Him, imitating His love and loving Him, will begin following a path leading them to heal from the selfishness which would drag them on a way of death, and to enjoy life more and more and with always increasing strength.

You too realise you begin living when you start believing in Jesus, when you welcome Jesus raised on the cross, and even more when you become His company on the path of the love which costs you. He gives meaning to all your steps, to everything that happens in your life and all the moments which up to now you did not understand and you could not accept.

On earth there will always be those who hate the light and prefer darkness. The latter do evil and hide themselves; they continue raising the Son of God, continue crucifying Him, but even then, without knowing it, they need Him. When they will look at His cross with humble love, then they will reach the light, and they will realise that they have reached the truth: joyfully they will tell their thanks, thanks for having found a safe support for their life and the path to save their brethren too, their loved ones, the whole humanity.