OMELIE / Omelie EN

21 mar 2021

21/03/2021 – 5th Sunday of Lent - year B

21/03/2021 – 5^th Sunday of Lent - year B

Reading 1 JER 31,31-34 Psalm 50/51 Reading 2 HEB 5,7-9 Gospel JN 12,20-33

Jeremiah’s prophecy is good news, so ‘gospel’. God promises a «new Covenant», so a renewed effort on His part towards the unfaithful people. The first covenant was about obeying some rules on the people’s part, and in exchange God pledged Himself to protect it and give it everything that was necessary for a simple life. Unfortunately, often the people felt like a burden God’s rules and it followed them only externally, cultivating desires of freedom and independence, which it believed to be able to achieve by disobeying. The consequences of those disobediences ruined the family and social relationships and brought to ruin the whole nation, so much so that it could not defend itself from the enemies anymore, always ready to invade its territory.

In order for the man and the people to be able to survive and reach joy and peace, God makes up a new covenant. His teachings will not come anymore from outside the man’s heart, so he might feel them as imposition, but from within. God will put in every person’s soul His word, He will write it in the heart. Everyone will then live the obedience to God in harmony with themselves, as a joy, as the time of their most beautiful and truest fulfillment. In this way the man will realise He is loved by God and also reconciled with Him since their previous arrangements, and he will have the joy to become on his turn for others a vessel of the divine love, as the Psalm says: “I will teach transgressors your ways, and sinners will return to you”. God’s Joy is really the following: “All, from least to greatest, shall know me”. This is the joy of God, because He sees in this way fulfilled the joy of His children in meeting with Him, when they will look for Him in order to love Him.

Jesus takes part in God’s joy: when the Greeks, so the Pagans, come looking for Him to meet Him, He understands that His earthly mission is coming to an end. When the other peoples want to know Him He knows that the “new covenant” is about to be agreed by the Father with humanity. The Greeks approach Jesus lead by Philip and Andrew. They are, out of the twelve, the only two apostles with a Greek name: this has made easy for the Greeks to approach in order to put forward their request. The prophets already had said that the moment would have come when the Pagans would have caught by the hem of the mantle the Jews in order to let themselves be led to meet God, the only God. Jesus understands therefore that His time has come, because the new covenant will have to be agreed through His blood.

In this moment he is leaving us with some words, almost his last will. With the similitude of the seed of grain He is announcing us His death, and the meaning of His death, a death which lets the seed to blossom in order to bring much fruit. He also knows that it is going to be difficult for us to love Him, because we will see Him hated by everyone: He guarantees eternal life for us if we hate our life in this world. When we will follow Jesus, this world will not honour us, but it will despise us, it will reject is, but the Father Himself will honour us.

The Lord Jesus suffers internally in seeing His own death close, but He knows that the offer of His life is glory of God, of the God who loves all men. And the Father approves Him with a voice come from heaven, a voice heard, even if not understood, by the crowd, and by it rejected, because felt like a thunder or as a mysterious voice addressed to Him only. When He will be on the cross we will look at Him, not with curiosity, but with love and desire to be united to Him, and it will be our salvation. “Salvation for all who obey him” says the letter to the Hebrews. Therefore we obey Him, letting Him in us as the Father’s Word written directly in our heart. We will obey Him because He too has learnt to obey “from what he suffered” “Son though he was”. We will not be shocked then because of the suffering coming from the hate which targets the believers. Exactly because we are children of God we will suffer, and we will take part in the world’s salvation. We too will be like seed sown in the soil in order to die and become new life in the world.