OMELIE / Omelie EN

08 lug 2018

08/07/2018 14th Sunday of O. T. - B  

08/07/2018 14^th Sunday of O. T. - B  

Reading 1, Ezekiel 2,2-5 * Psalm 122 * Reading 2, Second Corinthians 12,7-10 * Gospel, Mark 6,1-6

The first reading tells us about the mission given to the prophet Ezekiel: he needs to preach the God’s Word to the people turned rebellious. The pride is preventing the Israelites from listening to prophetic words, words communicating light and guiding down the road to salvation. Despite this, God wants them to be aware that He is not abandoning them, that He still wants to talk to them, that a prophet of His is still in the world.

Of the existence of a prophet they will become aware when Jesus will start teaching in the synagogues of Galilee. But then it will still be pride, disguised in different ways, to keep preventing the people from welcoming and listening to the Father’s Word.

Jesus speaks, and His teachings are recognized as wisdom, Hid actions are surprising everybody. However, today’s Gospel relates, in Nazareth itself, the very village in which He grew up, those who know Him seem to find difficult to recognize that He is speaking the Word of God. They have seen Him working alongside them, they are living close to His brothers and sisters, that is to say to the members of His family, and they know His mother well; they feel compelled then not to jump to conclusion after what they have seen and heard. If those miracles were performed by a complete stranger, or a foreigner spoke in such a wise way, they could think that He is the Messiah, they could believe in Him. But He is known to them, therefore they do not bend with humility in front of Him in order to acknowledge His divine origins.

Jesus is surprised of this “disbelief”, and He suffers deep down like you would suffer when you meet a proud person. With a proud person you cannot create confidence nor communion. To proud people you cannot show your interior richness. Jesus knows that, so much so that in another occasion he will say that even God keeps His things a secret for whom thinks he is great, while He makes them clear for the little and the simple people. Today he just repeats a proverb, the truth in which never gets old: “A prophet is despised only in his own country, among his own relations and in his own house”. The pride of the heart, very subtle, finds many reasons not to recognize Jesus. Pride makes up many excuses to refuse the teachings of the Lord, even if it recognizes the wisdom and greatness in them! I have heard more than one declaring their admiration for Jesus like for a very great man, wise, worthy, but they do not make any use of His teachings, they do not want to follow them. Pride prevents from meeting Jesus, loving Him, following Him, and therefore receiving any benefit from Him.

Pride is feared also by the apostle, Saint Paul, who, writing to the Corinthians, dares to make a personal confidence. He puts a sickness that is making him suffer a lot down to God’s love for him. Why does God allow “a thorn in the flesh, a messenger from Satan to batter me” to make him suffer so much? Why God, Who many times answered his prayers, did not even listen to his continuous prayer to be freed from that suffering in order to be free to preach the gospel without obstacles? This is how he reads this happening: to “prevent me from getting above myself”. The apostle knows that the man is easily getting proud of himself because of the gifts coming from God, also thanks to the preaching of the gospel.

If he was lo let himself get proud he would become pray and tool of Satan and he could not work fruitfully in the kingdom of God! The suffering of the sickness keeps him humble, in need of the help of others, going forward without trusting his own strength, but only the Lord’s grace. Blessed be then sickness as well, that is keeping us humble. If we could put together something beautiful and divine, it was not us, but God’s grace! God can make his beauty, his greatness, his power shine just because of our fragility and sickness.

In today’s readings Ezekiel and Jesus warn us against pride and Paul gives us a practical example of true and saint humility. The great hermits of the Egyptian desert kept the teaching of this behavior alive, that is indispensable for Christian life. They tell us that humility is like the net that, spread on the ground, catches our enemy! Our Enemy is proud and he will never accept to dwell in a humble heart. We would like to thank the Lord then for our weaknesses, for our poverty, even for our defects. He is the Savior!