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OMELIE / Omelie EN

26/6/2016
04/12/2016 – 2nd Sunday of advent - A

04/12/2016 – 2nd Sunday of advent - A

1st reading Is 11,1-10; from Psalm 71/72;   2nd reading Rm 15,4-9  Gospel Mt 3,1-12

The announcement of the prophet is truly beautiful and it is full of hope. Someone will come, whom he calls a shoot, that is a new life, fresh and marvelous. He will be embraced in a positive spirit, he will rich of gifts and capabilities and his ways of making and being will be those which we will like to see in this world. With him we will see the start of a period in which justice and goodness will be present and these will change all society: infact, even the wolf will not scare the lamb and the calf will not be afraid at the sight of the lion. We are not thinking of savage and domestic animals, but rather of those people who till now have been like Abel and Cain. The One who is coming will transform them, he will make them brothers, helpful and humble, capable of living in harmony as never before. The “knowledge of the Lord” will spread, which make of the earth, that is of the human society, a serene place and desirable, as a sort of terrestrial paradise. This page was written at least 5 centuries before the coming of Christ, but we perceive with clarity that it speaks of him. He is announced in a surprising manner. The things announced are realized in the life of our Lord Jesus and in the brotherhood borned among those who accept him and welcome him.

It is also true that which S. Paul writes in his letter to the Romans: “Whatever was written previously was written for our instruction, that by endurance and by the encouragement of the Holy Scriptures, we might have hope”. And then he continues exhorting to live in a manner that which the prophet said, will become a reality, that is that among us there will be harmony of those who know how to accept one another without sentiments of supremacy, vainglory, pride, violence, as Jesus taught. It is among us that it happens that “the leopard shall lie down with the kid”, and this happens after the arrival of the One who must come.   Let us wait for him and prepare for his arrival. St. John the Baptist will help us to do this. He shouts in the desert, in the place where no voice has been heard, and where no one ever pronounced the word: “Repent”. “Repent”: everyone of us must start this interior process to change something of his life. John says it to everyone, to all ages, to all the social conditions: he does not say to the older people to have patience with themselves because of their age, he does not say to the poor “You do not need to repent”, he does not say to the rich to do what they can. “Repent”, change your mind, change your thoughts from which start your actions. The motive is said in a few words: “Because the Kingdom of heaven is at hand”. Do you know what it means? There is no Kingdom without a king, therefore, “the kingdom of heaven is at hand”, means that the king sent from heaven is arriving. Conversion is this change necessary: decide to obey not more to ourselves and to our desires, but to the King. And for this, it is necessary that we have a great humility. It is humility to go down into the waters, to confess and admit that you are a sinner, to accept that a man raises his hand to put water on your head. It is this humility that puts you in attendance for the One who is announced and who will come to baptize “with the Holy Spirit and fire”. These words were new and mysterious for those who were listening to John. These words convince us of our ignorance, and make us aware that we need to be instructed and guided.

John acknowledged that some of those who were approaching him, were coming yes, but they don’t want to change nothing of their own lives, they have not decided projects of conversion. He acknowledged their own hypocrisy. If he were here today he would have acknowledged of my own! Who lives this hypocrisy? These are the people who know the Scriptures, who think that they are accepted by God without having to do other. The king who comes to establish the kingdom will he be indebted towards them? Will he give them the duty of authority and to guide?   They waited for this, but he will not do it. John the Baptist says this very clearly: they do not wait for him worthily, they do not wait for him with the correct necessary humility and with the dispositions that realize in them, as the first ones, the characteristics of his kingdom. It seems that John offends them. He does not want to offend them, but he wants them to wake up, he wants to get them out of their own hypocrisy in which their own self-considerations block them. Whoever pride himself of being already good, of being already the sons of Abraham, and does not need the One who comes for all, is a “brood of vipers”: he belongs to the family of the snake who has been against the man and against God. Who does not accept to prepare himself by this baptizm of conversion in order to be able to meet the Son of God, can not receive the Holy Spirit which Jesus will give to those he will find ready.

Let us thus make ourselves ready for Jesus, recognizing that we need to change something in our own lives. What? Perhaps we do not know: let us be humble, so when he comes, he will tell us and we will be able to obey him.