{"id":3447,"date":"2025-03-01T18:30:40","date_gmt":"2025-03-01T17:30:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.diffondilaparola.com\/wpdp\/?page_id=3447"},"modified":"2025-03-01T18:38:42","modified_gmt":"2025-03-01T17:38:42","slug":"ronchi_b_eng","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.diffondilaparola.com\/wpdp\/ronchi_b_eng\/","title":{"rendered":"Ronchi_B_ENG"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Father Ermes Ronchi
\nComments on the Gospel of Sunday of the liturgical year B<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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1st SUNDAY OF ADVENT<\/strong> \u00a0Advent: a broadening horizon – Mk 13:33-37<\/strong><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0 Advent is like a door that opens, a horizon that widens, a breach in the walls, a hole in the fence, a crack in the ceiling, a handful of light that the liturgy throws in our faces. Not to dazzle us, but to wake us up. To help us push upward, with all our strength, every black sky we encounter. \u00abBeyond the night, I hope, the taste of a new blue will await us\u00bb (N. Hikmet). The Gospel today tells of a night, it lays out the tiring list of its stages: “you do not know when it will arrive, whether in the evening, at midnight, at cockcrow, or in the morning<\/em>” (Mk 13.35). One thing is certain: He will come. But in the meantime Isaiah fights, on our behalf, against God’s delay: He returns for the love of your servants… if you were to rend the heavens and descend.<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It is not the human being who climbs to heaven, it is the Lord of the Covenants who descends, walking on all roads, a homeless pilgrim, who seeks home, and He seeks it precisely in me. Isaiah overturns our idea of conversion, which is the turning of the creature towards the Creator. He has the audacity to invoke God’s conversion, he asks him to turn towards us, return, rend the heavens, come down: to convert to his creatures.<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 He prophesies the new name of God. He The search for God ends and the time of welcome begins: behold, I stand at the door and knock…<\/p>

\u00abThe most important things should not be sought, they must be waited for\u00bb (S. Weil). Even a human being must always be waited for. It seems like a small thing to us, because we want to be active, do, build, determine things and events. Instead, God is not deserved, He is welcomed; He is not conquered, he is waited for. In this Sunday’s Gospel, Jesus never tires of repeating the refrain of two attitudes, our spiritual equipment for the journey of waiting: be careful and keep watch (Mk 13.33-37<\/em>). Attention has the same root as waiting: it is a tending towards… We have all known days in which life tended towards nothing; we all know what a distracted life is, doing one thing and having your mind elsewhere; meet a person and not remember the color of his eyes; walk the earth and trample treasures of beauty. Distracted. Love is attention. Attention is already a form of prayer, and it is the elementary grammar that saves my interior life.<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The second attitude: stay awake. Don’t let anyone put you to sleep or buy you. Watch over the first steps of peace, of the light of dawn that rests on the wall of the night, or at the end of the tunnel of this pandemic. Watch over and guard all the sprouts, everything that is born and emerges brings a caress and a syllable of God.<\/p>

IMMACULATE CONCEPTION OF THE B.V. MARY<\/strong><\/p>

God calls us to open ourselves to joy – Lk 1:26-38\u00a0 <\/strong>The Gospel of Luke develops the story of the announcement to Mary like the zoom of a camera: it starts from the immensity of the heavens, progressively narrows the gaze to a small village, then to a house, to the close-up of a girl among many, busy with her chores and thoughts. The angel Gabriel visited Her. It’s beautiful to think that God touches you, touches you in your daily life, in your home. He does it on a day of celebration, in the time of tears or when you say the most beautiful words you know to the one you love. The angel’s first word is not a simple greeting, inside vibrates that good and rare thing that we all seek, every day: joy. “Rejoice, rejoice, be happy.” He does not ask: pray, kneel, do this or that. But simply: open yourself to joy, like a door opens to the sun. God approaches and holds you in a hug, He comes and brings a promise of happiness. The angel’s second word reveals the reason for the joy: you are full of grace. A new term, never before heard in the Bible or in the synagogues, literally unheard of, such as to disturb Mary: you are filled, filled with God, who bent over you, fell in love with you, gave Himself to you and you overflow. Her name is: beloved forever. Tenderly, freely, without regrets loved. The angel calls her full of grace, the Christian people call her immaculate. And it’s the same thing. She is not full of grace because she said “yes” to God, but because God said “yes” to her even before her response. And she says it to each of us: each full of grace, all loved as we are, for who we are; good and less good, each loved forever, small or large each filled with heaven.\u00a0<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Mary’s first word is not a yes, but a question: how is it possible? She stands before God with all her human dignity, with her maturity as a woman, with her need to understand. She uses her intelligence and then pronounces her yes, which then has the power of a free and creative yes. Here I am, as the prophets and patriarchs have said, I am the servant of the Lord. Servant is a word that has nothing passive about it: servant of the king is the first after the king, the one who collaborates, who creates together with the creator. \u00abMary’s response is a liberating reality, not a submissive submission. It is she who personally chooses, autonomously, to pronounce that courageous “yes” which sets her against her entire world, which projects her into the grandiose plans of God” (M. Marcolini).\u00a0<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Maria’s story is also mine and your story. Again the angel is sent to your house and tells you: rejoice, you are full of grace! God is within you and fills your life with life.<\/p>

2nd SUNDAY OF ADVENT<\/strong> \/ Show us, Lord, your mercy and give us your salvation.\u00a0It is good news that restarts our life – Mk 1:1-8<\/em><\/strong><\/p>

Two voices, centuries apart, shout the same words, in the heat of the same desert of Judah.\u00a0The joyful voice of Isaiah: \u00abBehold, yours\u00a0God comes!\u00a0Say it to the heart of every creature.”\u00a0The dramatic voice of John, the John of the waters and the burning sun, eater of\u00a0insects and honey, repeats: \u00abBehold, one comes after me, He is the strongest and will immerse us in the holy whirlwind of God!\u00bb\u00a0(Mk 1,7).<\/em>\u00a0Isaiah, voice of\u00a0heart, he says:\u00a0\u00abHe comes with power\u00bb<\/em>, and immediately explains: He holds the youngest lambs on his chest and slowly leads the mother sheep.\u00a0Power possible for every man and every woman, which is the power of tenderness. The two prophets use the same verb, always in the present tense:\u00a0“God comes.”\u00a0Simple, direct, sure: He comes.\u00a0Like a seed that becomes a tree, like the morning line of light, which seems in the minority\u00a0but it is a winner, a small breach that swallows the night.\u00a0Two very intense sentences open and close this gospel.\u00a0The first: Beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, of the good news about Him.\u00a0What makes you start living again, planning, forming bonds, that\u00a0that restarts life is always good news, a crack of hope.\u00a0Beginning of the gospel that is Jesus Christ.\u00a0The good news is one\u00a0person, the Gospel is Jesus, a God who flourishes under our sun, come to make humanity flourish.\u00a0And his eyes that heal when\u00a0they caress, and his voice that knocks down demons is so strong, and that enchants children, it is so sweet, and that it forgives.\u00a0And that he draws another one\u00a0possible world. Another possible heart.\u00a0God presents Himself as the God of the beginning: from there where everything seems to stop, start again;\u00a0when the wind\u00a0of life \u00abturns and turns and comes back around and nothing seems new under the sun\u00bb (Ecclesiastes 1,3-9), it is possible to open up the future, to generate new things.\u00a0How can I start living again, planning, crossing deserts?\u00a0Not from pessimism, nor from bitter observations, not even from reality\u00a0existing and its claimed primacy, which do not contain the wisdom of the Gospel, but from “good news”.\u00a0In the beginning of everything there is one\u00a0good thing, I believe so.\u00a0At the foundation of all life there is one good thing, I believe it. Because the Bible begins like this: and He saw what He had done, and behold, it was good.\u00a0Someone stronger than me comes after me.\u00a0His strength?\u00a0Jesus is the strong one because He has the courage to love to the extreme;\u00a0to hold nothing back and give everything.\u00a0To raise hopes so strong that\u00a0not even death on the cross could wither, on the contrary it strengthened.\u00a0He is the strongest because He is the only one who speaks to the heart, or rather, He speaks \u00abon the\u00a0heart”, close and warm like breathing, tender and strong like a lover, beautiful like the most beautiful dream.<\/p>

3rd SUNDAY OF ADVENT\/ B\u00a0My soul rejoices in my God.\u00a0John the Baptist the witness of light – Jn 1: 6-8.19-28 <\/em><\/strong><\/p>

John came sent by God, he came as a witness, to bear witness to the light.\u00a0To one thing only: to the light, to the friendly light\u00a0who caresses things for hours and hours, and doesn’t get tired.\u00a0Not that infinite, distant light that lives in the heavens of heavens, but that ordinary, light of\u00a0earth, which illuminates every man and every story.\u00a0John is the “martyr” of light, a witness that the approach of God transfigures, is like a handful of light thrown in the face of the world,\u00a0not to dazzle, but to awaken the shapes, colors and beauty of things, to broaden the horizon. Witness that the cornerstone\u00a0on which history rests is not sin but grace, not mud but a ray of sunshine, which never yields.\u00a0Every believer is entrusted with the same prophecy as the Baptist: to announce not the degradation, the ruin, the rot that threatens us, but eyes that\u00a0they see God walking among us, pilgrim’s sandals and a heart of light: among you there is someone you do not know.<\/p>

Priests and Levites came down from Jerusalem to the Jordan, an institutional commission of inquiry, which came not to understand but to\u00a0catch him out: Who do you think you are?\u00a0Elijah?\u00a0The prophet everyone is waiting for?\u00a0Who are you?\u00a0Why do you baptize?\u00a0Six increasingly pressing questions.\u00a0To them Giovanni replies “no”, three times, he does so with increasingly shorter answers: instead of replying “I am” he prefers to say “I am not”.<\/p>

He takes away gratifying, prestigious images, which perhaps they are even ready to recognize in him.\u00a0Locusts, wild honey, a camel’s skin, that rocky and wild man, of few words, boasts no merit, he is the exact\u00a0opposite of an inflated balloon, as happens so frequently on our scenes.\u00a0He responds not by addition of merits, titles, skills,\u00a0but by subtraction: and thus shows us the path towards the essential.\u00a0One is not a prophet by accumulation, but by spoliation.\u00a0I am a voice, I speak words that are not mine, which come from before me, which go beyond me.\u00a0Witness another sun.\u00a0My identity lies\u00a0from the parts of God, from the parts of my sources.\u00a0If God is not, I am not, I live by every word that comes out of his mouth.\u00a0The rigorous voice of the prophet exposes us: I am not my role or my image.\u00a0I am not what others say about me.\u00a0What it does to me\u00a0human is the divine in me;\u00a0the specific of humanity is divinity.<\/p>

Life comes from Another, it flows into the person, like water in someone’s bed\u00a0stream.\u00a0I am not that water, but without it I am no longer.\u00a0“Who are you?”.\u00a0I seek the alms of a voice that tells me who I really am.\u00a0One day Jesus will give the answer, and it will be the most beautiful: You\u00a0you are light!\u00a0Light of the world.<\/p>

4th SUNDAY OF ADVENT \/ B <\/strong><\/p>

The Holy Mother: root of flesh of the Gospel \u2013 Lk 1:26-38<\/strong><\/p>

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 At the opening, a list of seven names crowds the page: Gabriel, God, Galilee, Nazareth, Joseph, David, Mary. Seven, the number of totalities, because what is about to happen will involve all of history, the depths of the sky and all the perennial swarm of life. A Gospel that goes against the grain: for the first time in the Bible an angel addresses a woman; in any house and not in the sanctuary; in her kitchen and not among the golden lampstands of the temple. On an ordinary day but marked on the calendar of life (in the sixth month…). Joy is the first word: rejoice! Gospel within the Gospel! And here’s why: Mary, you are full of grace. You are filled with heaven, not because you answered “yes” to God, but because God first said “yes” to you. And he says \u201cyes\u201d to each of us, before any of our answers. For grace to be grace and not merit or calculation. God is not deserved, he is welcomed. The Almighty fell in love with you and now your name is: beloved forever; like her I too loved forever. All, tenderly, freely loved forever. Love is the passion to unite: the Lord is with you. An expression that he should have warned the girl about, because when he expresses himself like this God is entrusting a beautiful but arduous task (R. Virgili): he calls Mary to a story of chills and courage. Mary, you will have a son, yours and God’s, a son of earth and heaven. You will give Him the name Jesus (first time: only the father had the power to give the name). And the girl, ready, intelligent, and mature, after the first disturbance is not afraid, she dialogues, objects, argues. She stands before God with all the dignity of a woman, with maturity and awareness, she asks questions: explain to me, tell me how it will happen. Zechariah asked for a sign, Mary asks for the meaning and how. And the angel: the infinite comes in your blood, the immense becomes small in you, what does it matter how? The light that created the universes clings to the darkness of your womb. Who cares how it happens? And yet Gabriele stops to explain the inexplicable, to reassure her: he speaks of the Spirit on the waters as at the origin, of the shadow on the tent as at Sinai, he invites her to think big, as big as she can: trust me, it will be He who find the how. He also found it for Elizabeth. You will feel it in your body, like her. The Spirit could have chosen other paths, of course, but without the body of Mary the Gospel loses body, it becomes ideology or ethics. Now God is still looking for mothers. It is up to us, as loving mothers, to help the Lord to incarnate in this world, in these houses and streets, taking care of his word, of his dreams, of his gospel. God will live because of our love.<\/p>

CHRISTMAS OF THE LORD – Mass of the day The whole earth has seen the salvation of our God. In the world the true light that illuminates every man – Jn 1:1-18 <\/strong><\/p>

We hear an immense Gospel today, which forces us to think in great. John begins with a hymn, a song, which calls us to fly high, an eagle flight that projects Jesus of Nazareth towards the boundaries of the cosmos and time. In the beginning was the Word and the Word was God. In the beginning and in the depths, in time and out of time. A myth? No, because the eagle’s flight glides between the tents of the human camp: and he came to live, He pitched His tent among us. Then John opens his wings again and launches towards the origin of things that exist everything was made through Him (v 3). Nothing at all without Him. \u201cIn the beginning\u201d, \u201ceverything\u201d, \u201cnothing\u201d, \u201cGod\u201d, absolute words, which put us in relationship with totality and with eternity, with God and with the cosmos, in an extraordinary vision that embraces time, things, space, divinity. Without him nothing that exists was made. Not just humans, but the blade of grass and the stone and the robin this morning, all life has blossomed from his hands. Nobody and nothing is born from itself…Christmas: the true light came into the world, the one that illuminates every man. Every man, every woman, every child and every elderly person, every sick person and every migrant, everyone, no one excluded; no existence is without a gram of that light, no story without the sparkle of a treasure, deep enough so that no sin can ever extinguish it. And then there is a fragment of the Word in every flesh, a little piece of God in every man, there ‘is holiness in every life. The light shines in the darkness but the darkness has not overcome it! Darkness does not overcome light. They never win it. The night does not defeat the day. Let us repeat it to ourselves and to others, in this hard and sad world: darkness does not win. “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was God…”. Which I would like to translate in the beginning there was tenderness \/ and tenderness was God. And the tenderness of God became flesh. Christmas is the story of God fallen to earth like a kiss (B. Calati). Christmas is the thrill of the divine in history (Pope Francis). This is why we are happier at Christmas, because you listen to the thrill, you slow down time, you look at your child more, you give him a caress…Jesus is the story of God’s tenderness (Ev. Ga.), he brings the revolution not of omnipotence or perfection, but of tenderness and smallness: God in humility, the secret of Christmas. God in smallness, the explosive force of Christmas. God lying on the poor straw like a new ear of corn. We are not waiting for Someone who will suddenly come, but we want to become aware of Someone who, like a light, already inhabits our life.<\/p>

HOLY FAMILY OF JESUS, MARY AND JOSEPH <\/strong><\/p>

The Lord is faithful to his covenant. <\/strong><\/p>

The old age of the world and the eternal youth of God – Lk 2:22-40 <\/strong><\/p>

They took the Child to Jerusalem to present Him to the Lord.<\/p>

A very young couple and a newborn baby carrying the poor offering of the poor: two turtle doves, and the most precious offering in the world: a child. They come to the house of the Lord and on the threshold, it is the Lord who comes to meet them through two creatures imbued with life and the Spirit, two elderly people, Simeon and Anna, eyes tired from old age and young from desire: the old age of the world welcomes among its the eternal youth of God in his arms.<\/p>

And the liturgy that takes place, in that courtyard open to all, is natural and simple, natural and therefore divine: Simeon takes Jesus in his arms and blesses God. He performs a priestly gesture, an authentic liturgy, possible for everyone. An elderly man, who has become a wave of hope, a laywoman under the wing of the Spirit blesses God and the son of God: the blessing is not an elite office, but an excess of joy that everyone can offer to God (R. Virgili). Mary and Joseph are also blessed, the whole family is enveloped in a veil of light due to the blessing and prophecy of that couple of elderly lay people, prophets, and priests at the same time: blessing and prophecy are not reserved for a sacred category, they live in the courtyard open to all. The Spirit had revealed to Simeon that he would not see death without first seeing the Messiah. Words that are for me and for you: I will not die without having seen the offensive of God, the offensive of the light already underway everywhere, the mild and powerful offensive of the yeast and the mustard seed.<\/p>

Then Simeon says three immense words about Jesus: he is here as a fall, a resurrection, as a sign of contradiction. Jesus as fallen. Fall of our small or large idols, ruin of our world of masks and lies, of insufficient and sick life. Come to ruin everything that ruins man, to bring sword and fire to cut and burn what is against humanity. He is here for the resurrection: it is the strength that makes you get up when you think it’s over for you, that makes you leave even if you have emptiness inside and blackness before your eyes. He is here and ensures that living is the infinite patience to start again. Christ is the contradiction of our illusory balance between giving and having; that contradicts all my mediocrity, all my misconceptions about God.<\/p>

Fall, resurrection contradiction. Three words that give breath and movement to life, with within them the luminous power to show that all things are now inhabited by a beyond. The figure of Anna closes the large fresco. A female prophet! Another, in addition to Elizabeth and Mary, capable of being enchanted in front of a newborn because they feel God as the future.<\/p>

MARY HOLY MOTHER OF GOD<\/strong><\/p>

Blessed by those whose faces and hearts are bright \u2013 Lk 2:16-21 <\/strong>Eight days after Christmas, the Gospel takes us back to the Bethlehem cave, to the only visit reported by Luke, that of the shepherds smelling of milk and wool, always following their lambs, never in the synagogue, who arrive at night guided by a cloud singing. And Mary, a victim of amazement, kept everything in her heart! She carved out space within herself for that child, son of the impossible and of his womb; and she meditated, she sought the meaning of words and events, of a God who knows of stars and milk, of infinity and of home. You don’t live only on emotions and amazement, and she has the time and heart to think big, a life teacher who takes care of her dreams. At the beginning of the new year, when the time comes as a messenger from God, the first word of the Bible is a wish, beautiful like few others: the Lord said: You will bless your brothers (Nm 6,22) You will bless… it’s an order, it’s for everyone. In the beginning, first you too will bless, whether they deserve it or not, good and less good, before anything else, as a first attitude you will bless your brothers. God Himself teaches the words: May the Lord bless you, may he descend upon you as the energy of life and births. And may He keep you, be with you in every step you take, in every road you take, be sun and shield. Let his face shine for you. God has a face of light because He has a heart of light. God’s blessing for the coming year is neither health, nor wealth, nor fortune, nor long life but, quite simply, light. Inner light to see deeply, light to your steps to understand the path, light to enjoy beauty and encounters, to not be afraid. True blessing from God, around me are people with luminous faces and hearts, who exude goodness, generosity, beauty, peace. May the Lord be gracious to you: for all the mistakes, for all the abandonments, for some cowardice and for many foolish things. He is not a pointing finger, but a hand that raises. May the Lord turn his face towards you and grant you peace. Turning your face to someone is like saying: I’m interested in you, I like you, I keep you in my eyes. What does the coming year have in store for us? I don’t know, but I am certain of one thing: the Lord will turn towards me, His eyes will seek me. And if I fall and hurt myself, God will bend over me even more. He will be my border of heaven, bent over me like a mother, because not a single sigh must escape Him, not a single tear must be lost. Whatever happens, God will be bending over me this year. And may he grant you peace: peace, fragile miracle, broken a thousand times, in every corner of the earth. May God grant you that dream of Him, which seems to dissolve at every dawn, but which He Himself will not allow us to tire of.<\/p>

EPIPHANY OF THE LORD<\/strong> \/ B\u00a0<\/p>

All the peoples of the earth will adore you, Lord.<\/p>

The most precious gift of the Magi? Their own journey<\/strong> – Mt 2:1-12<\/strong><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0 Epiphany, feast of seekers of God, of those far away, who set out following their inner prophet, with words like those of Isaiah. \u00abHe raises his head and looks\u00bb. Two beautiful verbs: he raises, raises his eyes, looks up and around, opens the windows of the house to the great breath of the world. And he looks, searches for a hole, a corner of the sky, a polar star, and from up there interprets life, starting from lofty objectives. The Gospel tells of the search for God as a journey, at the pace of the caravan, at the pace of a small community: they walk together, attentive to the stars and attentive to each other. Staring at the sky and at the same time at the eyes of those walking alongside, slowing down the pace of the other, of those who are struggling more. Then the most surprising moment: the journey of the Magi is full of errors: they lose the star, they find the big city instead of the small village; they ask a child killer about the child; they look for a palace and they will find a poor house. But they have the infinite patience to start again. Our tragedy is not to fall, but to surrender to falls. And behold: they saw the child in his mother’s arms, they prostrated themselves and offered gifts. The most precious gift that the Magi bring is not gold, it is their own journey. The priceless gift is the months spent searching, going and still going after a stronger desire for deserts and toil. God wants us to desire Him. God thirsts for our thirst: our greatest gift. When they entered, they saw the Child and His mother and adored Him. They love a child. Mysterious lesson: not the man of the cross nor the glorious risen one, not a wise man with words of light nor a young man in full vigor, simply a child. Not only at Christmas is God like us, not only is he the God-with-us, but He is a small God among us. And you can’t be afraid of Him, and you can’t walk away from a child you love. Find out carefully about the Child and then let me know so that I too can come and adore him! Herod is the killer of still-infant dreams, He is inside us, it is that cynicism, that contempt that destroys dreams and hopes. I would like to redeem these words from their prophecy of death and repeat them to my friend, to the theologian, to the artist, to the poet, to the scientist, to the man in the street, to anyone: Have you found the Child? Please search again, carefully, in history, in books, in the heart of things, in the Gospel and in people; search carefully again, staring into the abyss of the sky and the abyss of the heart, and then tell it to me like you tell a love story, so that I too come to adore it, with my dreams saved by all the Herods of history and of the heart .<\/p>

BAPTISM OF THE LORD<\/strong> We will draw joyfully from the sources of salvation.<\/p>

A love so great that it even pierces the heavens –<\/strong> Mk 1:7-11<\/strong><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 On the banks of the Jordan, the Father presents Jesus to the world, snatching Him from the anonymity of thirty years. Jesus had no need to be baptized, it is as if he had instead baptized the Jordan, sanctified the creature of water by contact. He knows it and the celebrant repeats it in the third Eucharistic prayer: “You who make the universe live and sanctify”. Extraordinary theology of creation: You who not only give life to man but to the entire universe; you not only give life to things, but you make them holy! Sanctity of the sky, of the water, of the earth, of the stars, of the blade of grass, of creation… “And immediately, coming out of the water, He saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending towards Him like a dove.” I feel all the beauty and power of the verb: the heavens are torn apart, as if by an irrepressible love; they tear, they tear under the pressure of God, under the urgency of Adam and the poor. They open wide like the arms of the beloved for the beloved. From this open sky resounding with life comes, like a dove, the breath of God.<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0 A dance of the Spirit on the water is the first movement of the Bible (Gen 1:2). A dance in the waters of the mother’s womb is the first movement of every child of the earth. A dove dancing on the river is the beginning of Jesus’ public life. A voice came from heaven and said: \u201cYou are my Son, the beloved, my pleasure\u201d. \u00a0Three powerful words, but first comes you, the most important word in the cosmos. An \u201cI\u201d addresses a \u201cyou\u201d. The sky is not empty, it is not silent. And he speaks with the words of a birth. Son is the first word, a powerful term for the heart. And for faith. Summit of human history. God begets children of God, he begets children according to his own kind. And the begotten, you and I, we all have a source in the sky, the divine chromosome in us.<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Second word: my name is not just son, but beloved. I am immediately, before I do anything, before I respond. For who I am, as I am, I am loved. And whether I am loved depends on him, it does not depend on me.<\/p>

The third word: I have placed my pleasure in you. The Voice shouts from the sky, shouts over the world and in the heart, the joy of God: it is beautiful to be with you. I love you, son, and I like you. I’m happy with you. Before you say yes to me, even before you open your heart, you give me joy, you are beautiful, a prodigy who looks and breathes and loves and is enchanted. But what joy can I give to God, I with my bumpy and distracted life, I who have so little to give back? With all the times I forget about Him? Yet those three words are for me, a lamp to my steps, a light lit on my path: son, beloved, my joy.<\/p>

2nd SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME<\/strong><\/p>

Behold, Lord, I come to do your will.<\/p>

The look of the Master is the first announcement<\/strong> – Jn 1:35-42\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong>The characters of the story: a Giovanni with penetrating eyes; two wonderful disciples, who do not sit comfortably and satisfied, in the shadow of the greatest prophet of the time, but set out along unknown paths, following a young rabbi of whom they ignore everything, except for a dazzling image: here is the lamb of God! A story that smells of freedom and courage, where the first words of Jesus are set: what are you looking for? So along the river; so, three years later, in the garden: woman, who are you looking for? Always the same verb, the one that defines us: we are gold diggers born from the breath of the Spirit (G. Vannucci).\u00a0 <\/strong>What are you looking for? The Master begins by listening, He does not want to impose Himself or indoctrinate, the two boys will dictate the agenda. The question is like a fish hook lowered into them (the shape of the question mark resembles that of an upside down hook), which descends deep inside to hook, to bring hidden things to light. With this question, Jesus places his holy hands in the deep and living fabric of the person, which is desire: what do you really want? What is your strongest desire? Words that are “like a hand that takes your bowels and makes you give birth” (A. Merini): Jesus, master of desire, exegete and interpreter of the heart, asks each one: what hunger keeps your life alive? What dream are you walking behind? And it does not ask for renunciations or sacrifices, not to sacrifice oneself on the altar of duty, but to return to oneself, return to the heart (reditus ad cor, of the spiritual masters), look at what happens in the vital space, guard what is it moves and germinates within. He asks each one, in the words of Saint Bernard, “put your lips close to the source of the heart and drink”. Rabbi, where do you live? Come and see. The master shows us that the Christian message, before being made up of words, is made up of glances, testimonies, experiences, encounters, closeness. In a word, life. And that is what Jesus came to bring, not theories but life in fullness (Jn 10:10). And they go with him: conversion means leaving the security of yesterday for the open future of Jesus; move from God as duty to God as desire and amazement. Millions of people would like and dream of being able to spend the rest of their lives in their pajamas on the sofa at home. Perhaps this is the worst that can happen to us: feeling like we have arrived, remaining still. On the contrary, the two disciples, those of the first Christian steps, were formed, trained, trained by the Baptist, the rocky and wild prophet, not to stop, to go and go again, to move in search of God’s exodus , even further. Like them, “happy is the man, blessed is the woman who has paths in her heart” (Ps 83.6<\/em>).<\/p>

3rd SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME <\/strong>Let me know, Lord, your ways.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Those who follow him know that God gives everything, fills the nets – Mk 1:14-20<\/strong>\u00a0 \u00a0<\/strong>\u00abPassing along the Sea of Galilee<\/em>\u00bb (the watery landscape of the lake is Jesus’ favorite natural environment) \u00abHe saw Simon and Andrew casting their nets into the sea<\/em>\u00bb. Fishermen carrying out their daily activity, and that is where the Master meets them. God incarnates Himself in life, He prefers time to the temple, the small to the extraordinary. As throughout the Bible: Moses and David are met while following their flocks to pasture; Saul is looking for his father’s donkeys; Elisha plows the land with six yoke of oxen, Levi is sitting at the tax office… There is nothing profane in loving labor. And Jesus, the carpenter’s son, who got his hands dirty with His father, who knows how to recognize every tree by the grain and scent of the wood, who became mature and strong in daily toil, there He encountered the exodus of God in search of His creatures: \u00abGod is somehow found at the tip of my pen, of my pickaxe, of my brush, of my needle, of my heart, of my thought<\/em>\u00bb (Teilhard de Chardin). Come after Me, I will make you become fishers of men. And immediately they left the nets and followed Him. They don’t even recover them, they drop them in the water, and they go, like Elisha who burns the plow in the furrows of the field… “throughout the Bible the actions say the heart” (A. Guida). Jesus passes and sets lives in motion. Where is His strength? What was missing from the four to convince them to give up everything for an unlikely profession like fishing for men? Leaving behind that young rabbi, without even knowing where He would lead them? They had a job, a home, a family, health, faith, everything they needed, yet they felt the bite of an absence: what is life? fish, eat, sleep? And then again fishing, eating, sleeping. That’s all? They knew the lake routes by heart. Jesus offers them the path of the world. Instead of small fishing after fish, He offers an adventure into the heart of God and His children. A dream was missing, and Jesus, healer of dreams, gives the dream of new heavens and a new earth. Jesus doesn’t explain, they don’t ask: and leaving their father, boat, nets, workmates, they went after Him. Those who have followed the Nazarene have experienced that God fills the nets, fills life, multiplies courage and fruitfulness. He steals nothing and gives everything. That \u00abgiving up for Him is the same as flourishing<\/em>\u00bb (M. Marcolini). Two pairs of silent brothers are the first nucleus of universal brotherhood, the project of Jesus, who will speak of God with the language of home (abb\u00e0), who will want to extend family relationships to the level of all humanity, which he has experienced so beautiful and generative : all children, \u201call brothers\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>

4th SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME <\/strong>Listen to the voice of the Lord today.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Yes, the Lord truly came “to ruin us” – Mk 1:21-28\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0People were amazed by His teaching, like when in the desert of the always same you come across the unheard of. He was amazed, and the listening became disarmed. And the reason: because He taught with authority. Jesus is authoritative because he is credible, in Him both message and messenger coincide: He says what He is, and it is what He says. He doesn’t play a role. Authoritative, literally means “that makes you grow”. He is growth of life, great breath, free horizon. He did not teach like the scribes … The scribes are intelligent, they have studied, they know the Scriptures well, but they listen to them only with their heads, in a reading that does not move the heart, does not ignite it, does not become bread and gesture. Many times we too are like scribes with ourselves, we just need to approach the Gospel with reason, we even seem to have understood it, we often like it, but existence does not change. Faith is not knowing things, but making them become blood and life. Jesus taught as someone in authority. The world desperately needs authoritative teachers. But who do we listen to? Let us choose our teachers carefully and with humility, walking at the pace of those who have gone further? Who to learn from? From those who help us grow in wisdom and grace, that is, in the capacity for infinite amazement. We must choose who gives wings. The true masters are not those who will put further ties to my life or new stakes, but those who will give me further wings, who will allow me to transform them, comb them, lengthen them, make them strong. They will give me the ability to fly (A. Potente). The first miracle then takes place in the synagogue of Capernaum. A demoniac is praying in the community, he is a regular on Saturday. He had listened to many sermons… You can spend your whole life going to the synagogue every Saturday, to church every Sunday, praying and listening to the Word, and yet keep inside a sick spirit, a distant soul that cannot be reached. You can live your whole life as a Sunday Christian without ever being touched by the Word of God (G. Piccolo), without it truly making your life new. The following two questions are beautiful and engaging: What does Jesus have to do with us, with our daily life? You are in the Sunday rite, you are in church, or in the highest heavens; but what do you have to do with our everyday life? Do you want to know if you believe? If this changes your life. Have you come to ruin us? The answer is \u201cyes!\u201d: He came to ruin the swords that become sickles; it is the ruin of the spears that become plows, of the hard shells that imprisoned the pearl. \u00abMy sweet ruin<\/em>\u00bb (D. M. Turoldo<\/em>), which ruins masks and fears, and everything that ruins humanity.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>

5th SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME \/ B<\/strong> Heal us, Lord, God of life.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0A “beyond” to which we can entrust our hope – Mk 1:29-39<\/strong>\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0At the beginning of His public life, Jesus passes through the places where life beats strongest: work (boats, nets, lake), prayer and assemblies (the synagogue), the place of feelings and affection (Simon’s house). Jesus, having freed a man from his sick spirit, leaves the synagogue and “immediately”, as if pressed by something, enters the house of Simon and Andrew, where “immediately” (the urgency, the pressure of affection is beautiful again) they speak to Him of the mother-in-law with a fever. He is an unexpected guest, in a house where the service manager is ill, and the environment is not ready, He has not been prepared as best as possible, he is probably in disarray. Great master, Jesus, who does not worry about disorder, about what is unprepared in us, about that much dirt, about the somewhat closed air of our lives. And she too, now an elderly woman, is not ashamed of being seen by a stranger, sick and feverish: he came precisely for the sick. Jesus takes her by the hand, raises her up, “resurrects” her and that house with a blocked life comes back to life, and the woman, without setting aside a time, “immediately”, without saying “I need a moment, I have to settle down, recover” ( A. Guida) begins to serve, with the verb of the angels in the desert. We are used to thinking of our spiritual life as something that takes place in the living room, and we are well dressed and tidy before God. We believe that the reality of life in other rooms, the banal, daily, bumpy one, is not suitable for God. And we are wrong: God is in love with normality. He seeks our imperfect life to become leaven and salt and a lifting hand. This story of a modest, unobtrusive miracle, without comments from Jesus, inspires us to believe that the human limit is God’s space, the place where his power lands. The sequel is energy: the house opens up, or rather expands, becomes large to the point of being able to welcome all the sick people of Capernaum on its doorstep in the evening. The entire city is gathered on the threshold between the house and the street, between the house and the square. Jesus, pollen of gestures and words, who loves open doors and open roofs where eyes and stars enter, who loves the risk of pain, of love, of living, heals there. When it was still dark, He went out secretly and prayed. Simone chases Him, looks for Him, finds Him: \u00abwhat are you doing here? Let’s exploit the success, Capernaum is at your feet.<\/em>” And Jesus begins to deconstruct Peter’s expectations, our illusions: let’s go elsewhere! An elsewhere that we don’t know; I only know that I haven’t arrived, that I can’t sit down; a “beyond” that every day seduces me a little and scares me a little, but to which I return to entrust my hope every day.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>

6th SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME <\/strong>You are my refuge, you free me from anguish.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0God wants to heal everyone.<\/strong> He never rejects anyone – Mk 1:40-45\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong>A leper enters the scene, a desperate man who has lost everything: home, job, friends, hugs, dignity and even God. For society, that man who is decomposing while alive is a sinner, rejected by God and punished with leprosy. He comes and approaches Jesus, and he must not, he cannot, the law imposes absolute segregation on him. But Jesus doesn’t run away, He doesn’t shy away, He doesn’t send him away, He stands in front of him and listens. The leper should have shouted from afar, to anyone he met: “unclean, contagious”; instead, up close, face to face, he whispers: if you want you can make me pure! “If you want”. The shipwrecked leper clings to an “if”, it is the “hook of Him in the middle of the sky”, dry land after the swamp. And I seem to see Jesus falter before the subdued request of this adrift creature. Wavering, like someone who has received a blow to the stomach, a fingernail to his heart: “he was gripped in the gut by compassion.” \u00abIf you want\u00bb … big question: tell me the heart of God! What does he really want for me? Do you want leprosy? That I am the country’s garbage? Is he the one who sends the cancer? Jesus sees, stops, is moved and touches. For too long no one had dared to touch him, his flesh was dying of loneliness. Jesus stretches out His hand and touches the untouchable, against all laws and all prudence, He touches him while he is still contagious; and this is how He begins to heal him, with a caress that arrives before His voice, with fingers more eloquent than words. Touching, an experience of communion, of body to body, always reciprocal action (we touch and are touched, inseparably!), a communication of our closeness, a touching, a shiver, a vibration of God with me, of me with Him. Then, the beautiful answer, the cornerstone on which the new image of God rests: “I want!” A total, absolute verb. God wants it, He is involved, He cares, He cares about it, He suffers with me, He urges in Him a passion for me, a suffering and a passion. The second word illuminates God’s will: “be purified”. God intends good. No one is rejected. According to the law the leper was excluded from the temple, he could not approach God until he was pure. Instead that day here is the reversal: get closer to God and you will be purified. Welcome Him and you will be healed. And He sent him away, in a stern tone, ordering him not to say anything. But the healed man does not obey: and he began to proclaim the message. The excluded becomes a source of amazement. He carries around his happiness, his happy experience of God. Who knows how many villages he had to escape from, and now it is precisely in the villages that he enters, looking for the people from whom he had to escape before, to say that everything has changed, because it has changed , with Jesus, the image of God.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a01st SUNDAY OF LENT \/ B<\/strong>\u00a0All the paths of the Lord are love and faithfulness.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Temptation pushes you to choose your compass \u2013 Mk 1:12-15 <\/strong>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The Spirit pushed Jesus into the desert and He remained there for forty days, tempted by Satan.\u00a0The temptation?\u00a0A choice between two loves.\u00a0To live is to choose.\u00a0Temptation asks you to choose the compass, the polar star for your heart.\u00a0If you don’t choose you don’t live, not a\u00a0full heart.\u00a0To the point that the apostle James, walking along this thin but very strong thread, makes us jump: consider\u00a0perfect joy to undergo all sorts of trials and temptations.\u00a0Almost as if to tell us that being tempted is perhaps even beautiful, which it certainly is\u00a0absolutely vital, for the truth and freedom of the person.\u00a0The rainbow, launched on Noah’s ark between heaven and earth, after forty days of navigation in the flood, takes new roots\u00a0in the desert, in the forty days of Jesus. I glimpse the colors in the words: He was with the wild animals and the angels served Him.\u00a0It emerges\u00a0nostalgia for the garden of Eden, the echo of the great alliance after the flood.\u00a0Jesus rebuilds the lost harmony and also the infinite\u00a0aligns.\u00a0And nothing that’s scary anymore.\u00a0But those beasts that Jesus encounters are also the symbol of our dark sides, the shadowy spaces that inhabit us, what\u00a0does not allow me to be completely free or happy, which slows me down, which scares me: our wild beasts that a\u00a0day they scratched us, mauled us, clawed us.\u00a0Jesus was with… Let’s learn with Him to stay there, to look them in the face, to name them.\u00a0You must neither ignore nor fear them, you must not even kill them, but give them a name, which is like knowing them, and then giving them\u00a0a direction: they are your share of chaos, but who makes you encounter them is the Holy Spirit.\u00a0To you too, as to Israel, God speaks in the\u00a0time of trial, in the desert, it does so through your weakness, which becomes your strength.\u00a0Maybe you won’t heal completely\u00a0your problems, but man’s maturity consists in starting a path, with patience (you mature not when you solve everything, but\u00a0when you have patience and harmony with everything).\u00a0Then you realize that God speaks to you in your fragility and that the Spirit is the one who speaks to you\u00a0it allows you to fall back in love with reality in its entirety, starting from your deserts.\u00a0After John was arrested Jesus went to Galilee proclaiming the gospel of God. And He said: the Kingdom of God is near.\u00a0Jesus proclaims the “gospel of God”.\u00a0God as “good news”.\u00a0It wasn’t obvious at all.\u00a0Not all of the Bible is gospel;\u00a0Not\u00a0everything is beautiful, joyful news;\u00a0sometimes it is threat and judgement, often it is precept and injunction.\u00a0But the original feature of the\u00a0rabbi of Nazareth is announcing the gospel, a word that comforts life, joyful news: God has come close, He is an ally\u00a0lovable, it is a hug, a rainbow, a kiss on every creature.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>

2nd SUNDAY OF LENT<\/strong>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I will walk in the presence of the Lord in the land of the living.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Save the light for when darkness comes – Mk 9:2-10<\/strong> \u00a0<\/strong>The mountain of light, located halfway through Mark’s story, is the watershed of the search into who Jesus is. As in a diptych, the first part\u00a0of his booklet recounts the works and days of the Messiah, the second part, starting from here, draws the other face of the “Son of God”: gospel of\u00a0Jesus, the Christ, the son of God (Mk 1,1).\u00a0The story is artfully woven with the golden threads of the language of Exodus, mountain, cloud, voice, Moses, splendor, listening, frame of revelations.\u00a0What is new, however, is Peter’s enthusiastic cry: how beautiful it is here!\u00a0Experience of beauty, from which joy flows without interests.\u00a0Marco is telling\u00a0a moment of happiness of Jesus (G. Piccolo) which infects his.\u00a0It is proposed to us who eternal Pharisaism has made us wary of joy\u00a0a Jesus who is not afraid of happiness.\u00a0And His disciples with Him.\u00a0Jesus is happy because the light is a symptom, the symptom that He, the rabbi of\u00a0Nazareth, is walking well, towards the face of God;\u00a0and then because He feels loved by the Father, He hears the words that every child would like to hear\u00a0to say;\u00a0and He is happy because He is talking about His dreams with the greatest dreamers of the Bible, Moses and Elijah, the deliverer and the prophet;\u00a0because he has\u00a0nearby three boys who don’t understand much, but who still love Him, and have followed Him for years, everywhere.\u00a0Even the three apostles look, get excited, are stunned, feel the impact of happiness and beauty on the mountain, something that takes away the\u00a0breath: how nice with you, rabbi!\u00a0They see faces soaked in light, eyes full of sunshine, what we also notice in a happy person: your eyes shine.\u00a0eyes!\u00a0They would like to freeze that experience, the most beautiful ever lived: let’s make three huts!\u00a0Let’s stop here on the mountain, it’s a moment\u00a0perfect, the best!\u00a0There is a God to enjoy, to be happy with.\u00a0But it’s a short illusion, you can’t stop life, life is infinite and infinity\u00a0it is in life, ordinary, weekday, fragile and always on the move.\u00a0You cannot keep happiness under a glass bell or lock it up\u00a0inside a hut.\u00a0When it is given to you, an intermittent miracle, enjoy it without fear, it is a caress from God, a glimpse of resurrection, a\u00a0life card created.\u00a0Enjoy and give thanks.\u00a0And when the light fades and goes, let it go, without regrets, come down from the mountain but not\u00a0forget it, preserve and cherish the memory of the light experienced.\u00a0So it will be for the disciples when everything gets dark, when their Master\u00a0He will be taken, chained, mocked, stripped, tortured, crucified.\u00a0Like them, for us too in our winters, it will be necessary to look for the\u00a0archives of the soul, the traces of light, the memory of the sun to support your heart and faith.\u00a0<\/strong>Night descends from oblivion. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a03rd SUNDAY OF LENT<\/strong> Lord, you have words of eternal life. The merchants in the temple and those in our heart – Jn 2:13-25<\/strong>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The episode of the expulsion of the merchants in the temple was so forcefully imprinted in the disciples’ memories that it was reported in all the Gospels. What is surprising and moving in Jesus is seeing how in him the tenderness of a woman in love and the courage of a hero coexist and alternate, as in a dance step (C. Biscontin<\/em>), with all the passion and the impetuosity of the Middle East. Jesus enters the temple: and it is like entering the center of time and space. What Jesus will now do and say in the holiest place in Israel is of capital importance: it affects God Himself. In the temple He finds the animal sellers: sheep, oxen and merchants are chased out, all together, eloquence of gestures. Instead he addresses the dove sellers: the dove was the offering of the poor, there is a sort of respect towards them. He threw down the money, the God of money, the mammon idol raised above all, installed in the temple like a king on the throne, the eternal golden calf.\u00a0Do not make my Father’s house a market..<\/em>. I wonder what the true house of the father is. A house of stones? “We are the house of God if we cherish freedom and hope<\/em>” (Heb 3:6). \u00a0The word of Jesus then reaches us: do not market people! Don’t buy or sell life, any life, you who buy the poor, the migrants, for a pair of sandals, or a worker for a few euros. If you take away freedom, if you let hopes die, you desecrate and profane the truest tabernacle of God. And again: don’t make a market of faith. We have all placed a money changer’s table with God firmly in our soul: I give you prayers, sacrifices and offerings, in return you assure me of health and well-being, for me and mine. Faith of shopkeepers, who use the poor, decadent law of barter with God, almost as if God’s was a mercenary love. But love, if it is true, cannot be bought, it cannot be begged, it cannot be pretended. God has a mother’s bowels: you can’t buy a mother, you don’t have to pay for her, you are born anew every day from her. A father must not be appeased with offers or sacrifices, we are nourished by his every gesture and word as a life force. A few minutes later, the dove merchants had already lined up their cages, the money changers had recovered even the last change from the pavement. The money was weighed and counted again, it was laundered according to the law. Blessed by all: pilgrims, priests, merchants and beggars. Jesus’ gesture seems to have no immediate consequences, but it is prophecy in action. And the prophet loves the word of God even more than his results. The prophet is the guardian who watches over the slit through which hope and freedom enter the heart. Anyone who wants to pay for love goes against his very nature and treats him like a prostitute. When the prophets spoke of prostitution in the temple, they meant this cult, both pious and offensive to God, when the faithful want to manage God: I give you prayers and sacrifices, you give me security and health. Love cannot be bought, it cannot beg, it cannot be imposed, it cannot be pretended. But then, if he entered my house, what would he ask me to throw on the ground, among my small or large idols? All the superfluous…\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 4th SUNDAY OF LENT<\/strong> The memory of you, Lord, is our joy.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The essential thing is God’s great love for the world – Jn 3:14-21<\/strong> \u00a0The impetuous, thunderous scene of Jesus driving the merchants out of the temple has just ended. In Jerusalem, leaders and common people all talk about the novelty of that young rabbi. Now, from that sensational and subversive scene we move on to an intimate and collected gospel. Nicodemus has great respect for Jesus and wants to understand more, but he does not dare to compromise himself and goes to Him at night. First surprise: that Jesus who will say \u00abyour speaking be yes yes, no no<\/em>\u00bb, respects Nicodemus’ fear, does not get lost within the limits of his lack of coherence, but by showing understanding for his weakness, transforms him into the courageous one who he will oppose his group (Jn 7.50) and will come at sunset on Great Friday (Jn 19:39) to take care of the body of the Crucified. When all the brave flee, the fearful one goes under the cross, carrying thirty kilos of aloes and myrrh, an excess quantity, a surplus of affection and gratitude.\u00a0 Jesus transforms. It is a completely new path for us who the masters of the spirit have always had to choose between: courage or cowardice, coherence or incoherence, resistance or weakness, perfection or error. Jesus shows a third way: the respect that embraces imperfection, the trust that welcomes fragility and transforms it. Jesus’ third way is to believe in man’s journey more than in the finish line, to focus on the humble truth of the first step rather than on reaching the distant goal. Master of sprouts. In that nocturnal dialogue, Jesus communicates, in a few words, the essentials of faith: God loved the world so much… it is something certain, something that has already happened, a central certainty: God is the lover who saves you. His decisive words, to be savored every day and to which we always cling. You must be born from above: I live from my sources, and I have sources of heaven to find. Then I will finally be able to be born into a higher and greater life, and look at existence from a new perspective, from a hole opened in the sky, to see what is ephemeral and what is eternal. That which is born from the Spirit is Spirit. And the night lights up. He who is born of the Spirit not only has the Spirit but is the Spirit. Not only is it a temple of the Spirit, but it is of the same substance as the Spirit. Every being generates children according to its own species, plants, animals, man and woman. Well, God also generates children according to God’s species. And there is no upper or lower case in the original texts: upper case for the Spirit of God, his generating force, lower case for the spirit of the generated man. It is not possible to distinguish whether \u201cspirit\u201d refers to man or to God. This confusion is extraordinary. A beautiful revelation: you, reborn from the Spirit, are Spirit. V SUNDAY OF LENT<\/strong> Create in me, O God, a pure heart.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0The “life” lesson of the grain that “dies” – Jn 12:20-33<\/strong>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cWe want to see Jesus\u201d: question of the eternal soul of the man who seeks, and which I feel is mine.\u00a0Jesus’ response requires deep eyes:\u00a0if you want to understand, look at the grain of wheat, look in the cross, the ultimate synthesis of the Gospel.\u00a0If the grain of wheat does not die it remains alone, if\u00a0dies and produces much fruit.\u00a0One of the most famous and most difficult phrases in the Gospel.\u00a0That “if he dies” weighs on the heart and overshadows everything else.\u00a0But if you listen to the lesson of the grain, the meaning shifts;\u00a0if you observe, you see that the heart of the seed, the intimate and living nucleus from which the\u00a0ear, it is the germ, and the womb that envelops it is its nourishment.\u00a0The grain is actually a treasure chest of life that slowly opens, a small one\u00a0live volcano from which, instead of lava, a small green miracle erupts.\u00a0In the earth what happens is not the death of the seed (the seed\u00a0rotten is sterile) but a tireless and wonderful work, a continuous and uninterrupted donation, a true gift of self: the earth gives the grain its\u00a0of him mineral elements of him, the grain offers itself to the germ (and they are one) as nourishment, as a mother offers her breast to the child.\u00a0And when the grain has given everything, the germ throws itself around with its roots hungry for life, it throws itself upwards with its fragile tip and\u00a0very powerful of its little leaves.\u00a0Then the grain dies, yes, but in the sense that life is not taken away from it but transformed into a more evolved and powerful form of life.\u00a0\u201cWhat the\u00a0caterpillar calls end of the world everyone else calls butterfly \u201d(Lao Tze), he no longer crawls, he flies;\u00a0he dies to his former life to continue\u00a0live in a higher form.\u00a0The main verb that governs the parable of the seed is “produces fruit”.\u00a0Glory of God is not dying but fruitfulness, and its trigger is\u00a0gift of self.\u00a0The keystone that holds the world, from the grain to Christ, is not the victory of the strongest but the gift.\u00a0The second icon offered by Jesus is the cross, the purest and highest image that God gave of Himself.\u00a0To know who God is I just have to\u00a0kneel at the foot of the Cross (Karl Rahner).\u00a0God enters death because every child of him goes there.\u00a0But from death he comes out like a germ from\u00a0earth, an indestructible form of life, and drags us out, up, with it.\u00a0Jesus: a grain of wheat that is consumed and sprouts;\u00a0a naked cross\u00a0where he already breathes the resurrection.\u00a0\u201cThe Cross was not given to us to understand but to cling to it\u201d (Bonhoeffer): attracted by something I don’t understand, but which seduces me\u00a0and he reassures me, I cling to his Cross, I walk with Him, eternally dying in his brothers, eternally resurrecting.\u00a0Art on the cross\u00a0divine love offers itself to cosmic contemplation, gives itself to the fruitfulness of lives.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 PALM SUNDAY: PASSION OF THE LORD<\/strong> My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? The Week in which to stay close to the wounds of Jesus \u2013 Mk 15:1-39<\/strong>\u00a0\u00a0 Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem is not just a historical event, but a parable in action.\u00a0More: a love trap because the city\u00a0welcome Him, so that I can welcome Him.\u00a0God courts His city (faith is my response to God’s courtship): He comes like a beggar King (the master needs it, but\u00a0he will send it back immediately), so poor that He does not even own the poorest beast of burden.\u00a0A humble Powerful One, who does not impose Himself, yes\u00a0proposes;\u00a0like an unarmed lover.\u00a0Blessed is He who comes.\u00a0It is extraordinary to be able to say: God comes.\u00a0In this country, for these\u00a0streets, in my house that smells of bread and hugs, God still comes, traveler of millennia and of hearts.\u00a0He approaches, He is at the door.\u00a0Holy Week unfolds, one by one, the days of our destiny;\u00a0they come towards us slowly, each generous with signs, with\u00a0symbols, of light.\u00a0In this week, the rhythm of the liturgical year slows down, we can follow Jesus day by day, almost hour by hour.\u00a0There\u00a0holiest thing we can do is to be with Him: \u00abmen and women go to God in their suffering, they cry for help, they ask for bread and\u00a0comfort.\u00a0That’s what everyone does, everyone.\u00a0Christians, on the other hand, remain close to God in his suffering” (Bonhoffer).<\/em>\u00a0They are close to a God who on\u00a0cross is no longer “the omnipotent” of our infantile desires, the lifesaver in our shipwrecks, but he is the All-embracing, the Omni-loving cha\u00a0he is shipwrecked in the perfect storm of love for us.\u00a0These are days to be close to God in His suffering: the passion of Christ is still consumed, live, in the infinite crosses of the world,\u00a0where we can stand next to the crucified of history, let ourselves be wounded by their wounds, feel pain for the pain of the earth, of God,\u00a0of man, to suffer and bring comfort.\u00a0The cross disorientates, but if I persist in remaining next to it like the women, looking at it like the centurion,\u00a0an expert in death, I certainly won’t understand everything, but one thing is, that there, in that death, is the first cry of a new world.\u00a0What did the centurion see to make him, a pagan, pronounce the first complete Christian act of faith?\u00a0\u201cHe Truly he was the Son of God\u201d!\u00a0He has seen\u00a0a God who loves to death, to die for it.\u00a0The Christian faith is based on the most beautiful thing in the world: a perfect act of love.\u00a0He saw the\u00a0turning the world upside down;\u00a0God who gives life even to those who give Him death;\u00a0whose power is to serve rather than enslave;\u00a0overcome violence not\u00a0with more violence, but taking it upon Himself.\u00a0The cross is the purest, highest, most beautiful image that God has given of Himself.\u00a0These are the days that reveal it: “to know who God is\u00a0I just have to kneel at the foot of the Cross” (K. Rahner<\/em>).\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0EASTER VIGIL ON THE HOLY NIGHT<\/strong> Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah.The Easter movement of endless love – Mk 16:1-7<\/strong> Three women, early in the morning, almost clandestinely, in the hour when we pass from darkness to light, go to take care of the\u00a0body of Jesus, as they know, with the little they have.\u00a0They love Him even in death, their Master, and discover that the time of love\u00a0is longer than the time of life, as they pass from surprise to surprise: \u00ablooking.. they saw that the large boulder had already been\u00a0moved<\/em>.”\u00a0Easter is the celebration of boulders rolled away, of stones overturned from the mouth of the heart, from the entrance to the soul.\u00a0Amazement,\u00a0disorientation, fear, yet they enter, fragile and indomitable, meeting a greater surprise: a young messenger (the world\u00a0whole is new, fresh, young, on that morning) with an announcement that seems to be the long-awaited good news: \u00abJesus you have\u00a0seen crucified, He rose again.<\/em>”\u00a0They should have rejoiced, but instead they fell silent.\u00a0The young man urges her “He’s not here<\/em>“.\u00a0How beautiful is this\u00a0word: “he is not here”, he is there, he lives, but not here.\u00a0He is the living one, a God to be surprised in life.\u00a0He is there, but He must be looked for outside\u00a0territory of the tombs, around the streets, in the houses, everywhere, except among dead things: “He is in every choice for a more\u00a0great love, He is in the hunger for peace, in the embraces of lovers, in the victorious cry of the child being born, in the last breath of\u00a0dying<\/em>” (G. Vannucci<\/em>).\u00a0And then yet another surprise: the immense trust of the Lord who entrusts the great announcement to them, so disoriented:\u00a0“Go and tell<\/em>“, with the two imperatives of the mission.\u00a0From disciples without words, to missionaries of disciples without courage.\u00a0\u00abHe precedes you in Galilee<\/em>\u00bb.\u00a0And a migratory God appears, who loves open spaces, who opens paths, crosses walls and throws open doors:\u00a0a seed of fire that opens its way into history.\u00a0He precedes you: He advances at the head of the long caravan of humanity on its way\u00a0towards life;\u00a0He walks in front, opening the immense migration towards the promised land.\u00a0In front, to receive the wind in the face, the\u00a0death, and then the early morning sun, without ever taking a step back.\u00a0The Easter Gospel tells us that in life He is hidden\u00a0a secret that Christ came to whisper lovingly in our ear.\u00a0The secret is this: there is a movement of love within life that never allows it to remain still, which sets it in motion again\u00a0after every death, which relaunches it after every setback, that for every man who kills a hundred there are those who heal the wounds, and a thousand\u00a0cherry trees that stubbornly continue to bloom.\u00a0A movement of love that never ends, that no human violence can ever do\u00a0arrest, a vital flow within which everything that lives is caught, and which reveals the ultimate name of God: Resurrection.<\/p>

2nd EASTER SUNDAY \/B\u00a0<\/strong>Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good: his love endures forever.\u00a0The wounds of the Risen One, alphabet of love – Jn 20:19-31<\/strong><\/p>

The disciples were locked in the house out of fear.\u00a0Fear of the Jewish leaders, of the temple guards, of the fickle crowd, of the Romans, of\u00a0themselves.\u00a0And yet Jesus comes.\u00a0In that house with barred doors, in that room where there is no air, where you can’t feel good,\u00a0despite everything Jesus comes.<\/p>

Eight days later the disciples were back in the house and Thomas was also with them.\u00a0Jesus came to\u00a0closed doors.\u00a0His first coming seems without effect, eight days later everything is as before, and yet He is there again.\u00a0Centuries later He is still\u00a0here, in front of my closed doors, meek and determined like a seed that doesn’t let itself be dismayed by any black earth.\u00a0How beautiful is\u00a0our God!!\u00a0\u00a0He does not accuse, He does not reproach, He does not abandon, but He proposes Himself again, He gives Himself back to disciples who did not understand Him,\u00a0easy to cowardice and lies.\u00a0He had sent them through the streets of Jerusalem and the world, and He found them still paralyzed by fear.\u00a0In\u00a0what poor hands He put himself in.\u00a0Who get tired quickly, who get dirty quickly.\u00a0Yet He accompanies faith with infinite delicacy\u00a0slow gods of Him, of whom\u00a0He does not ask to be perfect, but to be authentic;\u00a0not of being immaculate, but of being on the path.\u00a0AND\u00a0He turns to Tommaso-poor dear Tommaso who has become proverbial.\u00a0But it is precisely the Master who had educated Him to interior freedom\u00a0, not to conform, rigorous and courageous, to come and go, he a Galilean, through the streets of the great Jewish and hostile city.\u00a0Jesus invites him: Put your finger here and look at my hands;\u00a0reach out your hand and place it in my side.\u00a0The resurrection has not\u00a0closed the nail holes, it did not heal the lips of the wounds, as we would have expected.\u00a0Because the cross is not simple\u00a0accident along the way to overcome and forget, but it is the glory of Jesus, the highest point of the divine art of loving, which in those\u00a0wounds are offered forever to the contemplation of the universe.\u00a0It is precisely because of those holes in His hands and side that God has it\u00a0resurrected, and not despite them: they are the indelible alphabet of\u00a0His love letter.\u00a0Jesus doesn’t want to force Thomas, either\u00a0He respects fatigue and doubts,\u00a0He knows everyone’s times,\u00a0He knows the complexity of living.\u00a0What\u00a0He wants is\u00a0His amazement when\u00a0He understands\u00a0that\u00a0His faith is based on the most beautiful thing in the world: a perfect act of love.\u00a0Touch, look, put!\u00a0Whether in the end Tommaso touched or not, it no longer matters.\u00a0My Lord and my God. Thomas repeats that little one\u00a0adjective \u201cmine\u201d that changes everything.\u00a0Mine not of possession, but of belonging: hold me in You, hold on to me.\u00a0Mine, as is the heart.\u00a0And, without it, I wouldn’t be.\u00a0Mine, as is the breath.\u00a0And without it, I wouldn’t live.<\/p>

3rd SUNDAY OF EASTER <\/strong>May the light of your face shine upon us, Lord.\u00a0The risen Jesus and that invitation to eat with him \u2013 Lk 24:35-48<\/strong><\/p>

They are still talking, after the joyous night ride back to Jerusalem, when Jesus Himself appeared among them\u00a0to them.\u00a0In between: not above them;\u00a0not in front, so that no one is closer than others.\u00a0But in between: all important allo\u00a0same way and He is the glue of lives.\u00a0Peace is the first word.\u00a0Peace is here: peace to your fears, to your shadows, to your thoughts\u00a0who torture you, to remorse, to broken paths, peace also to those who have fled, to Thomas who is not there, peace also to Judas…\u00a0Shocked and full of fear, they thought they were seeing a ghost.\u00a0They knew\u00a0Him well, after three years of Galilee, of olive trees, of the lake, of\u00a0villages, eye to eye, yet they don’t recognize\u00a0Him.\u00a0Jesus is the same and\u00a0He is different,\u00a0He is the same and\u00a0He is transformed,\u00a0He is that\u00a0than before but no longer as before: the Resurrection is not a simple return back, it is moving forward, transformation, fullness.\u00a0Jesus explained it with the parable of the grain of wheat that becomes an ear: it is buried like a small seed and rises again from the\u00a0earth like a full ear of corn.\u00a0I am consoled by the disciples’ difficulty in believing, it is the guarantee that this is not an event invented by\u00a0them, but of a fact that shocked them.\u00a0Then Jesus pronounces, to dispel fears and doubts, the simplest and most familiar verbs:\u00a0\u201cLook, touch, let’s eat together!\u00a0I’m not a ghost.”\u00a0I<\/em>\u00a0am struck by the lament of Jesus, a very human lament: I am not\u00a0a breath in the air, a cloak of words full of wind… And you feel His desire to be welcomed like a friend returning from\u00a0far away, to be embraced with joy.\u00a0You cannot love a ghost or hold it close to you, what Jesus asks for.\u00a0Touch me: by whom\u00a0do you want to be touched?\u00a0Only from those who are friends and love you.\u00a0The apostles surrender to a portion of roasted fish, at most\u00a0familiar with signs, with the most human of needs, with a lake fish and not with angels, with friendship and not with a prodigious theophany.\u00a0They will tell it as proof of their meeting with the Risen One: we ate with Him after His resurrection (Acts 10.41<\/em>).\u00a0Eating is the sign of life;\u00a0eating together is the most eloquent sign of a rediscovered communion;\u00a0a gesture that strengthens the\u00a0bonds of lives and makes them grow.\u00a0Together, to feed on bread and dreams, on understandings and reciprocity.\u00a0And He concludes: you belong to Me\u00a0witnesses.\u00a0Not preachers, but witnesses, that’s another thing.\u00a0With the simplicity of children who have good news to give, and\u00a0they can’t keep quiet, and you can see it on their faces.\u00a0The good news is this: Jesus is alive, He is the power of life, He envelops you in peace, He cries\u00a0our tears, He captures us within His resurrection, He lifts us to fullness, on eagle’s wings, in time and eternity.<\/p>

4th SUNDAY OF EASTER <\/strong>The rejected stone has become the cornerstone.\u00a0<\/p>

The God-shepherd gives life even to those who take it away – Jn 10:11-18<\/strong>\u00a0<\/p>

I am the good shepherd! Seven times Jesus introduces Himself: “I am” bread, life, path, truth, vine, door, good shepherd. And He doesn’t mean “good” in the sense of patient and gentle with sheep and lambs; not a shepherd, but the shepherd, the real one, the authentic one. Not a paid shepherd, but the one, the only one, who puts his life on the table. I am the handsome shepherd, the original Gospel text -literally – says. And we understand that His beauty does not lie in his appearance, but in His beautiful relationship with the flock, expressed with a lofty verb that the Gospel today relaunches five times: I offer! I don’t ask, I give. I don’t demand, I give. What is the content of this gift? The maximum possible: \u201cI offer life\u201d. Much more than pastures and water, infinitely more than grass and a safe sheepfold. The shepherd is true because He makes the most regal and powerful gesture: giving, offering, donating, throwing his life on the scales. Here is the God-shepherd who does not ask, He offers; He takes nothing and gives the best; He does not take life but gives His life even to those who take it away from Him. I try to understand more: with the words “I offer My life” Jesus is not referring to His dying, that Friday, nailed to a tree. \u201cGiving life\u201d is God’s job, His work, His inexhaustible activity, understood in the way of mothers, in the way of the vine that gives life to the branches (John), of the spring that gushes living water (Samaritana), of the olive trunk that transmits good power to the grafted branch (Paolo). From Him life flows inexhaustible, powerful, unlimited. The mercenary, the shepherd, sees the wolf coming and runs away because he doesn’t care about the sheep. On the other hand, the pastor cares, I care. Beautiful verb: to be important to someone! And it moves me to imagine His voice assuring me: I will take care of your happiness. And here the parable, the simile of the handsome shepherd opens on an unrealistic, unsettling, excessive level: no shepherd on earth is willing to die for His sheep; to fight yes, but not to die; it is more important to save life than the flock; losing your life is something irreparable. And here the God of Jesus comes into play, the upside down God, our different God, the shepherd who loses Himself to save me. The image of the shepherd opens onto one of those details that go beyond the realistic aspects of the parable (Paul Ricoeur calls them eccentric). They are those loopholes that open onto the excess of God, on the “more” that comes from Him, on the unthinkable of a God greater than our heart. I trust this God, I entrust myself to Him, I believe in Him like a child and I would like to place all the lambs in the world in His hands.<\/p>

5 SUNDAY OF EASTER <\/strong>My praise to you, Lord, in the great assembly.<\/p>

More than clean, God asks for hands full of the harvest – Jn 15:1-8<\/strong><\/p>

Jesus communicates God to us through the mirror of the simplest creatures: Christ vine, I branch, he and I are the same plant, same life, single root, single sap. And then the wonderful metaphor of the peasant God, a vinedresser scented with sun and earth, who takes care of me and uses all His intelligence so that I bear much fruit; who does not hold the scepter from above the throne but the spade and looks at the world bent over me, at the height of a bud, a branch, a bunch, with beautiful eyes of hope. Of all the fields, the vineyard was my father’s favorite field, the one in which He invested the most time and passion, even poetry. And I believe it is like this for all farmers. Talking about vineyards is therefore revealing a preferential love on the part of our peasant God. You, I, we are God’s favorite field. The metaphor of the vine grows towards a summit already anticipated in the words:\u00a0I am the grapevine, you are the branches<\/em>\u00a0(v.5). We are faced with an unprecedented statement, never heard before in the Scriptures: creatures (the branches) are part of the Creator (the grapevine). What did Jesus come to bring to the world? Perhaps a more noble morality or the forgiveness of sins? Too little; He came to bring much more, to bring Himself, His life into us, the divine chromosome inside our DNA. The great potter who shaped Adam with the dust of the ground became the clay of this soil, the sap of this grape. And if the branch must remain grafted to the grapevine to live, it happens that the grapevine also lives on its branches, without them there is no fruit, no purpose, no history. Without His children, God would be the father of no one. The metaphor of work around the vine has its ultimate meaning in “bearing fruit”. The golden thread that runs through and stitches together the entire passage, the word repeated six times and which illuminates all the other words of Jesus is “fruit”: in this, My Father is glorified that you bear much fruit. The weight of the peasant image of the Gospel lands on the hands full of the harvest, much more than on the clean, perhaps, but empty hands of those who did not want to get dirty with the incandescent and staining matter of life. Evangelical morality consists in fruitfulness and not in the observance of rules, it brings with it happy harvest songs. At the sunset of earthly life, the final question, to tell the ultimate truth of existence, will not concern commandments or prohibitions, sacrifices, and renunciations, but will focus all its sweet light on the fruit: after you have passed into the world, into the family, at work, in the church, have bunches of goodness or a harvest of tears grown from your vine? Is there more life or less life left behind you?<\/p>

VI SUNDAY OF EASTER <\/strong>The Lord revealed His justice to the people.\u00a0If you love, your life is still a success – Jn 15:9-17<\/strong><\/p>

The few verses of today’s Gospel revolve around the magical vocabulary of lovers: love, beloved, love each other, joy.\u00a0\u00abThe whole thing\u00a0\u201claw\u201d begins with \u201cyou are loved<\/em>\u201d and ends with \u201cyou will love<\/em>\u201d.\u00a0Whoever abstracts from this loves the opposite of life” (P. Beauchamp).\u00a0Big stuf\u00a0.\u00a0A question that fills or empties life: I tell you this so that my joy may be in you and your joy may be full.\u00a0Love is from\u00a0take it seriously, our well-being, our joy is at stake.\u00a0Indeed, each of us is playing, consciously or not, the game of\u00a0own eternity.\u00a0But I struggle to follow Him: love is always so little, so at risk, so fragile.\u00a0I even struggle to understand what true love consists of, everything mixes in it: passion, tenderness, emotions, tears, fears, smiles,\u00a0dreams and concrete commitment.\u00a0Love is always wonderfully complicated, and always imperfect, that is, unfinished.\u00a0Always artisanal, and like any job\u00a0craftsmanship requires hands, time, care, rules: if you observe my commandments, you will remain in my love.\u00a0But how, Lord, close\u00a0within the commandments the only thing that cannot be commanded?\u00a0You discourage me: the commandment is a rule, constraint, sanction.\u00a0A\u00a0leash tugging at me.\u00a0Love, on the other hand, is freedom, creativity, a divine madness… But Jesus, the healer of lack of love, offers His\u00a0safe pedagogy in two stages:\u00a01.\u00a0Love one another<\/strong>.\u00a0Not simply: love each other.\u00a0But: one another, one does not love humanity in general or in theory.\u00a0They love each other\u00a0people one by one;\u00a0we love this man, this woman, this child, the poor man next door, face to face, eye to eye.\u00a02.\u00a0Love each other as I have loved you<\/strong>.\u00a0He doesn’t say “as much as me”, because we would never get there, at least me;\u00a0but “like me”, with my style, with the\u00a0my unique way: He, who washes the feet of adults and hugs children;\u00a0who sees someone suffering and feels a cramp in the belly;\u00a0He who, yes,\u00a0it moves and touches the flesh, the skin, the eyes;\u00a0that He doesn’t send anyone away;\u00a0which forces us to grow up and caresses and combs them\u00a0our wings because we think big and fly far.\u00a0Who really loves you?\u00a0Certainly not someone who fills you with sweet words and gifts.\u00a0True love is what pushes you, pushes you, forces you to\u00a0to become so much, infinitely so, to become the best of what you can become (Rainer Maria Rilke).\u00a0So children don’t need things, but\u00a0fathers and mothers who give horizons and great wings, who make them become the best of what they can become.\u00a0Even when He had to\u00a0seem like they forget about us.\u00a0Word of the Gospel:\u00a0if you love, you don’t make mistakes.<\/em>\u00a0If you love, you will not fail in life.\u00a0If you love, your life has already been a\u00a0happened, anyway.<\/em><\/p>

ASCENSION OF THE LORD \/ B\u00a0<\/strong>The Lord ascends amidst songs of joy.\u00a0The mission to make the world a Baptism – Mk 16:15-20<\/strong>
He only has eleven scared and confused men left, and a small group of faithful and courageous women.\u00a0They followed Him for three\u00a0years on the streets of Palestine, they didn’t understand much but they loved Him very much, and they all came to the meeting on the last hill.\u00a0When they saw Him, they bowed down.\u00a0But they doubted.\u00a0Jesus performs an act of enormous, illogical trust in doubting men and women\u00a0again, entrusting the world and the Gospel to them.\u00a0He doesn’t stay with his ones a little longer, to explain better, to clarify\u00a0better, but He entrusts them with the happy news despite the doubts.\u00a0Doubts in faith are like the poors: we will always have them with us.\u00a0Jesus entrusts the\u00a0gospel and the new world, dreamed together, to the poverty of eleven illiterate fishermen and not to the intelligence of the top of the class.\u00a0With\u00a0total trust, entrust the truth to doubters, call the limping to walk, the limping to travel all the roads of the world: it is the\u00a0law of the mustard seed, of the pinch of salt, of the light on the mountain, of the burning heart that can infect with the gospel and births those\u00a0He meets.\u00a0Go, perfume the lives you encounter with heaven, teach them the craft of living, just as you saw me do it, show them your face\u00a0tall and bright of the human.\u00a0Baptize, which means immerse people in God, that they may be imbued with heaven, imbued with God, soaked in living water,\u00a0like someone who is lowered into the river, the lake, the ocean and comes back up, drenched in the dawn.\u00a0Here is the mission of the disciples: to make the world one\u00a0baptism, a laboratory of immersion in God, in that God that Jesus described as love and freedom, as tenderness and justice.\u00a0Each of us today receives the same mission as the apostles: announce.\u00a0Nothing else.\u00a0He doesn’t say: organize, occupy the key positions, do\u00a0great charitable works, but simply: announced.\u00a0And what?\u00a0The Gospel, the good news, the story of God’s tenderness. Not the most beautiful ideas, not the solutions to all problems, not a\u00a0better politics or theology: the Gospel, the life and person of Christ, the fullness of humanity and the tenderness of the Father.\u00a0Ascension is like a navigation of the heart.\u00a0Jesus did not go far or high, to some remote corner of the cosmos.\u00a0He came down\u00a0(ascended) in the depths of things, in the depths of creation and creatures, and from within he presses as an ascending force towards a brighter\u00a0life.\u00a0“Our faith is the certainty that every creature is full of his luminous presence” (encyclical Laudato si’ 100), that \u00abthe risen Christ\u00a0it dwells in the depths of every being, surrounding it with its affection and penetrating it with its light<\/em>” (Laudato si’ 221).<\/p>

PENTECOST SUNDAY \u00a0<\/strong>Send your Spirit, Lord, to renew the earth.\u00a0Humanity needs the Spirit to shake it \u2013 Jn 15:26-27;16:12-15<\/strong><\/p>

When the Spirit comes, He will guide you into all the truth.\u00a0It is the humility of Jesus, who does not claim to have said everything, to have the last word on\u00a0everything, but He talks about our history with God with only verbs in the future: the Spirit will come, He will announce, He will guide, He will speak.\u00a0A sense of vitality, of\u00a0energy, of open spaces!\u00a0The Spirit is like a current that drags history towards the future, opens paths, makes people move forward.\u00a0Praying to Him is like\u00a0look out onto the balcony of the future.\u00a0Which is the fertile and uncultivated land of hope.\u00a0The Spirit causes a short circuit in history and in\u00a0time: it brings us back to the heart, lights up in us, like a flint that raises sparks, the beauty of then, of gestures and words of those three years\u00a0of Galilee.\u00a0And in love with spiritual beauty we become “true seekers of God, who stumble upon a star and, trying new ways\u00a0, they get lost in the magical dust of the desert”<\/em>\u00a0(D.M. Montagna).\u00a0We are like pilgrims without a road, but tenaciously on the move (John of the Cross), or even in the middle of a flat sea, on a\u00a0nutshell, where everything is bigger than us.\u00a0At that moment: you have to know at all costs \/ to raise a sail \/ on the emptiness of the sea\u00a0(Julian Gracq).\u00a0A sail, and the sea changes, it is no longer a void in which to get lost or sink;\u00a0all it takes is for a sail to arise and let it run over you\u00a0from the vigorous breath of the Spirit (I am the sail, God is the wind) to begin an exciting adventure, forgetting the void, following a\u00a0route.\u00a0What is the Holy Spirit?\u00a0It is God in freedom.\u00a0That He invents, opens, shakes, does things you don’t expect.\u00a0Who gives Marya an outlaw son, to\u00a0Elizabeth gave a prophet son, and who tirelessly carries out the same work in us as then: she makes us wombs of the Word, which give flesh\u00a0and blood and history to the Word.\u00a0God in freedom, a nomadic wind, which carries pollen where He wants, brings springs and disperses the mists, and makes us\u00a0all wind in the Wind of Him.\u00a0God in freedom, who cannot stand statistics.\u00a0Scholars look for consistent recurrences and patterns;\u00a0they say: in\u00a0Bible God works like this.\u00a0Don’t believe it.\u00a0In life and in the Bible, God never follows patterns.\u00a0We need the Spirit, He has it\u00a0this stagnant world of ours, without impulse, is needed.\u00a0For this Church that struggles to dream.\u00a0The Spirit with His gifts gives to everyone\u00a0Christian a genius that is his own.\u00a0And humanity is in dire need of brilliant disciples.\u00a0That is, we need everyone to believe in\u00a0own gift, to one’s uniqueness, and so can keep life high with inventiveness, courage, creativity, which are gifts of the Spirit.\u00a0Then He will never lack the wind for my sailing ship, or for that little sail that trembles high above the void of the sea.<\/p>

HOLY TRINITY \/ B\u00a0Blessed are the people chosen by the Lord.\u00a0In the beginning of everything, a bond of love \u2013 Mt 28:16-20<\/strong><\/p>

The Gospel does not offer rational or symbolic formulas to talk about the Trinity, but the story of an appointment and a sending.\u00a0The\u00a0gives names of family and affection: Father, Son, Holy Breath.\u00a0Names that embrace and make you live.\u00a0Everyone went there\u00a0to the meeting on the Mount of Galilee.\u00a0Everyone, even those who still doubted, a wounded community that has known betrayal,\u00a0the escape and suicide of one of them… But the master doesn’t give up on them, and makes one of His most typical gestures: He approached them and told them…\u00a0when he loves God he makes very human gestures.\u00a0Jesus does not accept distances: He is still not tired of approaching and explaining.\u00a0Still\u00a0He is not tired of waiting for me in my slowness to believe, He comes closer, eye to eye, breath upon breath.\u00a0It is the eternal journey\u00a0of our “going out” God, walking throughout the earth, who knocks at the door of the human, and the door of the human is His face, or the\u00a0Heart.\u00a0And if I don’t open, as has happened many times, He leaves me a flower at the door.\u00a0And He will return.\u00a0And He doesn’t doubt me.\u00a0I am with you every day.\u00a0With you, within the solitudes, the abandonments and the falls;\u00a0with you even behind closed doors, in\u00a0days when you doubt and days when you believe;\u00a0in the days of singing and in those of tears, when the night swallows you and whenever you feel like it\u00a0fly.\u00a0The last, supreme pedagogy of Jesus is so simple: \u00abalways get closer, stay together, whisper to the heart, comfort and\u00a0press on<\/em>.”\u00a0Go all over the world and announce.\u00a0He entrusts faith and the word of happiness to disciples with a heavy heart, yet He does it\u00a0they will do, and it will spread across every landscape in the world like fresh clear water.\u00a0Go and baptize, immerse every life in the ocean\u00a0of God. Accompany every life to the encounter with the life of God and be submerged by it, be imbued and imbued with it, and then be lifted up in\u00a0high from its gentle and powerful wave!\u00a0Do it \u201cin the name of the Father\u201d: heart that beats in the heart of the world;\u00a0\u201cin the name of the Son\u201d: the most beautiful born of a woman;\u00a0“In the\u00a0name of the Spirit \u201d: wind that brings spring pollen and makes us all fan in His Wind (D. M. Montagna).\u00a0Like all dogmas, that of the Trinity is not a cold conceptual distillation, but a treasure chest that contains the wisdom of\u00a0to live, a wisdom on life and death: in the beginning of everything, in the cosmos and in my interior, as in heaven so on earth, there is placed a\u00a0bond of love.\u00a0\u201cIn the beginning, the bond\u201d.\u00a0And I, created in the image and likeness of the Trinity, can finally understand why I feel good when I am with those who love me,\u00a0understand why I feel bad when I am alone: it is my profound nature, our divine origin.<\/p>

HOLY BODY AND BLOOD OF CHRIST \/ B\u00a0Him I will raise the cup of salvation and call on the name of the Lord.\u00a0The flow of divine life in our veins – Mk 14:12-16.22-26\u00a0\u201cTake this, this is my body.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>

In the Gospels Jesus always speaks with poor, simple, direct verbs: take, listen, come,\u00a0go, leave;\u00a0body and blood.\u00a0Unknown are those half-words whose ambiguity allows the powerful or the cunning to consolidate theirs\u00a0dominance.\u00a0Jesus is so radically man, even in the language, that He reaches God and communicates Him through the roots,\u00a0through popular gestures.\u00a0We follow the exact sequence of words as reported in the Gospel of Mark:\u00a0You take It,\u00a0this is My body..<\/em>.\u00a0In first place is that verb, clear and precise like a concrete gesture, like hands that open and tense.\u00a0Jesus does not ask the\u00a0apostles to adore, contemplate, venerate that broken bread, He asks much more: “I want to be taken by your hands like\u00a0gift, to be in your mouth like bread, inside you like blood, to make me a cell, a breath, a thought of you.\u00a0Your life<\/em>“.\u00a0Here is the\u00a0miracle, the heartbeat, the purpose: take.\u00a0To become what you receive.\u00a0What is shocking is what happens to the disciple\u00a0more even than in what happens in the bread and wine: He wants the warm flow of His life to flow through our veins,\u00a0His courage may take root in our hearts, that we set out to live human existence as He lived it.\u00a0God in me, my heart is\u00a0absorbed, He absorbs my heart, and we become one, the same vocation: do not leave this world without\u00a0to have become a piece of good bread for someone’s hunger and joy and strength.\u00a0God became man for this reason, because man did\u00a0do as God does. Jesus gave His two simple commands, He doubled them, and in every Eucharist we listen to them again: take and\u00a0eat, take and drink.\u00a0What is the use of a Bread, a God, closed in the tabernacle, to be exposed from time to time to veneration and\u00a0to incense?\u00a0Jesus did not come into the world to create new liturgies.\u00a0But for freeing and loving children.\u00a0Live His life.\u00a0\u201cWho eats My\u00a0flesh and drinks My blood, he abides in Me, and I into him.<\/em>”\u00a0Body and blood indicate His entire existence, His human story, His carpenter’s hands with the scent of wood and the\u00a0nail holes, His tears, His passions, the dust of the streets, His feet soaked in nard and then in blood, and the house that\u00a0fills with perfume and words that taste like heaven.\u00a0He abides in me and I in Him, people, when they love, say the same things: come\u00a0to live in my house, my house is your house.\u00a0God says it to us.\u00a0Before I said, \u201cI’m hungry,\u201d He said, \u201cI want to be with\u00a0you”.\u00a0He looked for me, waits for me and gives Himself.\u00a0You don’t deserve a God like this: you just have to welcome Him and let yourself be loved<\/p>

10th SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME \/ The Lord is goodness and mercy.\u00a0Jesus, outside the box even for his relatives \u2013 Mk 3:20-35<\/strong><\/p>

From the south, from Judea, an inquiry commission of theologians get over while\u00a0from the hills of Galilee His disciples come down to\u00a0take him away.\u00a0It seems like a pincer maneuver against that subversive, that outlaw, outlaw master who made\u00a0Capernaum His headquarters, of a twelve boys army who still feel like fish, of a word that heals\u00a0weapons.\u00a0It is the second time that Jesus’ clan descends from Nazareth to the lake, this time they also brought His mother;\u00a0they come to\u00a0take Him: He’s out of His mind, He’s gone crazy.\u00a0He is saying and doing things that are over the top, against common sense, against\u00a0Nazareth’s common sense: synagogue, shop and family.\u00a0From the commission of inquiry Jesus receives the mark of excommunication: son of the devil.\u00a0Yet the pedagogy of Jesus still\u00a0once enchants: but He called them, He calls near those who judged Him from afar;\u00a0He talks to them who are not themselves\u00a0deign to speak to Him, He explains, tries to make them think.\u00a0Uselessly.\u00a0Jesus has enemies, we see, but He is not an enemy of\u00a0Nobody.\u00a0He is the friend of life.\u00a0His mother and His brothers and sisters, standing outside, sent for Him.\u00a0The Gospel of Mark, so concrete and dry,\u00a0It brings us back down to earth, after the last great feasts, Easter, Pentecost, Trinity, Body and Blood of Christ.\u00a0The Gospel\u00a0starts again from the house, from below: He does not hide, with great honesty, that during the public ministry of Jesus, the relationships with the\u00a0mother and the whole family are marked by contrasts and distance.\u00a0Indeed, it recounts one of the most painful moments in Mary’s life::\u00a0who is My mother?<\/em>\u00a0Harsh words that hurt the heart, almost a denial: woman, I no longer recognize you as mine\u00a0mother … The only time that Mary appears in the Gospel of Mark is the image of a mother who does not understand Her son, who does not\u00a0\u00a0favors Him.\u00a0She who could generate God, was unable to understand Him completely.\u00a0Her greater familiarity did not spare Her from the greater\u00a0misunderstandings.\u00a0Counting on the Messiah as one of the family, having Him at the table, knowing His tastes, did not make it any less difficult for Her\u00a0the way of faith.\u00a0She too, like us, is a pilgrim in faith.\u00a0Jesus does not contest the family, on the contrary He would like to extend the warm and good relationships of the home to a mass level, multiply them\u00a0to infinity, to offer a home to all, to house all the lost children:\u00a0Whoever does the will of the Father is for me a mother, a sister,\u00a0brother..<\/em>. Besieged, Jesus doesn’t stop, He doesn’t turn back, He continues on His journey.\u00a0Lots of crowds and lots of solitude.\u00a0But where is He\u00a0life passes and flourishes.\u00a0And a dream of motherhood, sisterhood and brotherhood that He cannot give up.<\/p>

11th SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME It’s nice to give thanks to the Lord.\u00a0The fullness of the Kingdom and the joy of the harvest – Mk 4:26-34<\/strong>\u00a0Two small parables (the wheat that sprouts by itself, the mustard seed<\/em>): stories of the earth that Jesus turns into stories of God. With words that\u00a0they know of home, of garden, of field, it takes us to the school of seeds and mother earth, it erases the distance between God and life.\u00a0We are summoned\u00a0before the mystery of the bud and of the things that are born, called “to decipher our sacredness, exploring that of the world” (P.\u00a0Ricoeur<\/em>).\u00a0In the Gospel, the green pin of a wheat sprout and a tiny seed become characters in an announcement, a revelation of\u00a0divine (Laudato si’), a syllable of God’s message. Those who have pure and marvelous eyes, like those of a child, can see the divine that\u00a0it shines from the depths of every being (T. De Chardin<\/em>).\u00a0The earth and the Kingdom are an appeal to wonder, to a long feeling that becomes an attitude of life.\u00a0It’s moving and fascinating\u00a0read the world with the gaze of Jesus, starting not from a giant cedar on the top of the mountain (like Ezekiel in the first reading) but\u00a0from the home garden.\u00a0Light and liberating to read the Kingdom of heaven from below, from where the sprout that emerges looks at the world, close to the ground,\u00a0or rather: “I shaved the daisies” as a child corrected me, or the lilies of the field.\u00a0The soil produces itself, whether you sleep or wake: more things\u00a0important things should not be sought, they must be waited for (S. Weil), they do not depend on us, you must not force them.\u00a0Because God is at work, and all the world is\u00a0a womb, a river of life flowing towards fullness.\u00a0The mustard seed is headed towards the great future plant that it does not have\u00a0other purpose than that of being useful to other living beings, even if only to the birds of the sky.\u00a0It is in nature’s nature to be a gift: to welcome, to offer shelter, coolness, food, refreshment.\u00a0It is in the nature of God and also of man.\u00a0God\u00a0it acts not by subtraction, never, but always by addition, addition, intensification, increase of life: there is a dynamic of growth\u00a0settled at the center of life.\u00a0The Creator’s unshakable trust in the small signs of life calls us to take the economy of life seriously\u00a0smallness leads us to look at the world, and our wounds, in another way.\u00a0To look for the kings of tomorrow among the discarded and the poor of today, a\u00a0take young people and children very seriously, to take care of the weak link in the social chain, to find merit where the economy of\u00a0greatness can only see demerits.\u00a0Splendid vision of Jesus on the world, on the person, on the earth: the world is an immense birth, where everything is on the move, with its own rhythm\u00a0mysterious, towards the fullness of the Kingdom.\u00a0Which will come with the flowering of life in all its forms.\u00a0Towards the flowering of life, The Kingdom is\u00a0presented as a contrast, not a clash, but a contrast of growth, of life.\u00a0God as a vital contrast.\u00a0A dynamic that yes\u00a0settles at the center of life.\u00a0towards the paradigm of fullness and fruitfulness.\u00a0The Gospel dreams of confident harvests, ready fruit, bread on the table\u00a0table.\u00a0Positivity.\u00a0Joy of the harvest.<\/p>

12th SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME Give thanks to the Lord, his love is forever.\u00a0God saves us not “from” but “in” the storm – Mk 4:35-41<\/strong>\u00a0The small boats are safe, moored in the harbor, but that’s not what they were built for.\u00a0They are made to sail, and also\u00a0to face storms.\u00a0We are sailors on fragile driftwood in the sea of life, on walnut shells.\u00a0Yet the words of Jesus reach us:\u00a0let’s cross to the other shore, let’s go further.\u00a0There is a beyond that inhabits things.\u00a0It is not in the spirit of the Gospel to remain safe, moored to the\u00a0dock or stopped at anchor.\u00a0Our place is not in successes, but in a boat on the sea, open sea, where sooner or later during the\u00a0navigation of life, rough waters and contrary winds will come.\u00a0True pedagogy is that of Jesus: transmitting, not fear, the passion for\u00a0open sea, the desire to sail ahead, the joy of the high and infinite sea.\u00a0During the short voyage, Jesus falls asleep, exhausted.\u00a0I don’t know why storms arise in life.\u00a0Luke, Mark and Matthew don’t know it:\u00a0they tell of storms that are always the same and all without a reason.\u00a0I too would like an always clear sky and clear lights to indicate navigation, a\u00a0safe and nearby port.\u00a0But in the meantime the boat, a symbol of me, of my fragile life, of the great community, resists in the meantime.\u00a0And not for dying\u00a0of the wind, not because the problems end, but because of the humble miracle of the rowers who do not abandon the oars, who support each\u00a0hope of the other.\u00a0Instead, we seem to be abandoned as soon as the wind of an illness, of a family crisis, of painful relationships, of a\u00a0pandemic.\u00a0We feel shipwrecked in a story where God seems to sleep, rather than intervene immediately, at the first signs of fatigue, at the first\u00a0bite of fear, as soon as the pain claws at us like a predator\u00a0So here’s the cry: Don’t you care that we die?\u00a0Eloquence of gestures: he woke up, threatened the wind and the sea…, why yes, I care about\u00a0you.\u00a0I care about the sparrows of the sky and you are worth more than many sparrows;\u00a0I care about the lilies of the field and you are more beautiful than all the flowers of\u00a0world.\u00a0You matter to me so much that I have counted the hairs on your head and all the fear you carry in your heart.\u00a0And I’m with you, to block the darkness,\u00a0light in the deepest reflection of your tears.\u00a0In my nights God is with me;\u00a0He intertwines His breath with mine, and \u00abdoes not save me\u00bb from the\u00a0storm but \u201cin\u201d the storm.\u00a0He does not protect from pain but in pain.\u00a0He does not save the Son from the cross but in the cross \u00bb(D. Bonhoeffer).\u00a0He\u00a0he is with us, saving us from all our shipwrecks, he has been here since before the miracle: he is in the strong arms of the men on the oars;\u00a0in the firm grip of\u00a0helmsman;\u00a0in the hands that empty the bottom of the boat.\u00a0He is in all those who, together, perform the exact and simple gestures that\u00a0they protect life.<\/p>

13th SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME \/ B\u00a0I will exalt you, Lord, because you have raised me up.\u00a0In pain and in life Jesus holds your hand – Mk 5:21-43<\/strong><\/p>

There is a house, in Capernaum, where death has placed its nest;\u00a0an important house, that of the head of the synagogue.\u00a0Powerful house, and yet\u00a0incapable of guaranteeing the life of a child.\u00a0Jairus came out, walked in search of Jesus, found Him, fell at His feet:\u00a0my little daughter is dying, come!\u00a0She is twelve years old, the age at which one must flourish, not succumb!\u00a0Jesus hears her father’s cry and interrupts\u00a0what He was doing, He changes His plans, and they walk together, the free Master of the streets and the man of the institution.\u00a0The\u00a0pain and love have begun to beat the rhythm of absolute music, and Jesus enters it: they are our roots, and he reaches us, with\u00a0mother’s step, right through the roots.\u00a0From the house they came to say: your daughter is dead.\u00a0Why are you still bothering the master?\u00a0The storm\u00a0definitive has arrived.\u00a0The last hope has fallen.\u00a0And then Jesus turns, approaches, blocks the pain: don’t be afraid, just have faith.\u00a0Once they reach the house, Jesus takes her father and mother with Him and recomposes the vital circle of affection, the circle of love that brings life.\u00a0“Love\u00a0is to say: you will not die” (Gabriel Marcel).\u00a0He also takes His three favorite disciples with Him and puts them in the school of existence.\u00a0He doesn’t explain\u00a0them because she dies at twelve years old, because pain exists, but he takes them with Him in the melee with the last enemy.\u00a0\u00abHe took the hand of the\u00a0girl”.\u00a0Jesus a hand that takes you by the hand.\u00a0Beautiful image: God and a little girl, hand in hand.\u00a0He was not allowed under the law\u00a0touching a dead person became impure, but Jesus smells of freedom.\u00a0And He teaches us that we need to touch people’s desperation\u00a0be able to raise them.\u00a0A story of hands: in all homes, next to the bed of pain or that of birth, the Lord is always an outstretched hand,\u00a0as it is for Peter when he is sinking in the storm.\u00a0Not a pointing finger, but a strong hand grabbing you.\u00a0Suchness kum.\u00a0Girl\u00a0get up.\u00a0He can help her, support her, but it is she, it is only she who can recover: get up.\u00a0And immediately the little girl got up and walked, returned\u00a0to the embrace of her, to a vertical and moving life.\u00a0\u201cShe ordered her parents to feed her.\u201d\u00a0She says to those who love her: guard\u00a0this life with your lives, make it grow, push it to become the best of what it can become.\u00a0Nourished with dreams, caresses and\u00a0trust of her the reborn\u00a0 child heart of her.\u00a0And then God repeats on every creature, on every flower, on every man, on every woman, on every boy and girl, the blessing of\u00a0those ancient words: “Talit\u00e0 kum<\/em>. Young life, I say to you: arise, arise, live again, shine. she Return to hugs.<\/p>

14th SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME Our eyes are turned to the Lord.\u00a0Thus the rejected Jesus continues to love us – Mk 6:1-6\u00a0\u00abBut isn’t he the carpenter, the brother of James, Joses, Judas and Simon?\u00bb<\/strong><\/p>

A few pages earlier these same brothers went down to Capernaum for\u00a0bring Him home, their strange cousin, because they said: He’s gone, He’s out of His mind;\u00a0they call Him a heretic, we must also protect Him from\u00a0Himself.\u00a0And now in Nazareth, where everyone knows each other, where everyone knows everything about everyone (or at least that’s what they think), people are surprised by speeches that never\u00a0heard, of words that seem to come not from sacred scripture, as they have always heard it in the synagogue, and perhaps not even from God: from\u00a0where on earth do these things come from?\u00a0And it was a source of scandal for them.\u00a0What shocks them?\u00a0Humanity, the familiarity of a God who\u00a0He abandons the temple and enters the ordinariness of every home, becoming the “domestic God” (Julian of Norwich, 13th century), the God of the house.\u00a0Jesus, a rabbi without titles and with calluses on His hands, began to talk about God with parables that taste like home, land, a garden, where a\u00a0sprout, a mustard seed, a fig in spring become characters of a revelation.\u00a0It scandalizes the humility of God. It can’t be\u00a0this is our God. Where is the glory and splendor of the Most High?\u00a0And his disciples, these guys from outside, only familiar with boats, what do they have?\u00a0more than Joses, James, Judas and Simon?\u00a0Weren’t the young people of the country better?\u00a0A prophet is only despised in his own house… An observation that reaches us all, surrounded as we are by syllables of God, drops of\u00a0prophecy on the lips and in the gestures of a thousand people, at home, on the street, at work, or in another part of the world.\u00a0But we: I’m not up to par,\u00a0let’s say;\u00a0and we measure them, we weigh them, we give them grades, we make excuses, rather than opening up.\u00a0And God is amazed, but He does not give up and repeats:\u00a0“whether they listen or not, let them know that at least a prophet is among them” (Ez. 2,5).\u00a0We are surrounded by prophets, perhaps small ones,\u00a0maybe minimal, but continuously sent.\u00a0And we, like the inhabitants of Nazareth, squander and squander our prophets, without listening\u00a0the unheard of God. Even Jesus is surprised at the refusal of His fellow villagers, but He does not give up.\u00a0His response is neither resentment nor condemnation,\u00a0much less depression, but a wonder that reveals how God has a heart of light: “No wonder could work there”.\u00a0But immediately yes\u00a0He corrects: “He alone laid His hands on a few sick people and healed them”.\u00a0The rejected God still heals, even for a few, even for just one.\u00a0The rejected lover continues to love, even without return.\u00a0God is not tired of us: He is only amazed.\u00a0And then He “sends prophets again, certain men of God, men with hearts on fire, and you come on to speak\u00a0their bushes” (Turoldo<\/em>).<\/p>

15th SUNDAY ORDINARY T. Show us, Lord, your mercy.\u00a0Life without demons and a healed world \u2013 Mk 6:7-13<\/strong><\/p>

He called the Twelve to Him and began sending them.\u00a0Every time God calls you, He sets you on a journey.\u00a0Our God loves horizons and gaps.\u00a0Two by two: because two is not simply the sum of one plus one, it is the beginning of us, the first cell of the community.\u00a0He ordered them to\u00a0take nothing but a stick.\u00a0Just a stick to support the tiredness and a friend to rest your heart on.\u00a0Neither bread nor\u00a0bag, nor money, nor two tunics.\u00a0They will be daily dependent on heaven.\u00a0You see them advancing from a bend in the road, it seems\u00a0beggars under the sky of Abraham.\u00a0People who know that their secret is beyond them, \u00abinfinitely small announcers, because only like this\u00a0the announcement will be infinitely great” (G. Vannucci).\u00a0But if you look closer, you can notice that in addition to the stick they carry something: a jar of oil on their belt.\u00a0Theirs is a gentle pilgrimage and\u00a0body to body, house to house healer.\u00a0The mission of the disciples is simple: they are called to carry life forward, the weak life:\u00a0they anointed many sick people with oil and healed them.\u00a0They deal with life, like the prophet Amos, they chase away demons, they touch the sick and their\u00a0hands say: \u00abGod is here, he is close to you, with love\u00bb.\u00a0They saw with Jesus how wounds are touched, how he never runs away from pain,\u00a0they have learned the art of caress and proximity.\u00a0And they proclaimed that people should convert: convert to God’s dream: one world\u00a0healed, life without demons, relationships become harmonious and happy, a world of open doors and breaches in the walls.\u00a0Their hands on the sick\u00a0they preach that God is already here.\u00a0He is near me with love.\u00a0He is here and heals life.\u00a0Francis warned his friars: one can also preach\u00a0with words, when there is nothing else left.\u00a0If somewhere they don’t welcome you and don’t listen to you, go away and shake it up\u00a0dust under your feet as a testimony to them.\u00a0Jesus also prepares them for failure and the courage not to give up.\u00a0Like the prophets, who believe in the word of God even more than in\u00a0its fulfillment: Isaiah will not see the virgin give birth, nor will Hosea see Israel led back into the desert of first love.\u00a0But the prophets\u00a0they love the word of God even more than His successes.\u00a0The Twelve have that same faith as prophets: they believe in the Kingdom well before\u00a0see it take place.\u00a0The ideal in them matters more than what they can achieve from it.\u00a0Beautiful Gospel, where a triple economy emerges:\u00a0of smallness, of the road, of prophecy.\u00a0The Twelve go, smaller than the small;\u00a0on the road that is free, that belongs to everyone, that doesn’t stop\u00a0never and takes you away, like God with Amos;\u00a0they go, prophets of God’s dream: a world totally healed.<\/p>

16<\/strong>th<\/strong> SUNDAY ORDINARY T The Lord is my shepherd: I don’t need anything.\u00a0As long as there is compassion the world can hope \u2013 Mk 6:30-34<\/strong><\/p>

Come aside and rest a bit.\u00a0His parents returned happy from that expedition two by two, from that mission in which He had them\u00a0launch themself, a pilgrimage of the Word and of poverty.\u00a0The Twelve met many people, they did it with the art learned from Jesus: the art of closeness and caress, of\u00a0healing from the demons of life.\u00a0Now is the time to meet yourself, to reconnect with what happens in your vital space\u00a0.\u00a0There is a time for everything, says the wise man of Israel, a time to act and a time to question the reasons for acting.\u00a0A time to go from house to house and a time to “make home” among friends and with oneself.\u00a0There is so much to do in Israel, sick people,\u00a0lepers, widows of Nain, tears, yet Jesus, instead of throwing His disciples into the vortex of pain and hunger, brings them\u00a0away with Him and teaches them the wisdom of living.\u00a0We live today in a culture where income that must grow and productivity that must always increase have convinced us that\u00a0It is commitments that give value to life.\u00a0Jesus teaches us that life is valid regardless of our commitments (G. Piccolo).\u00a0The people understood, and the unstoppable flow of people reaches them even in that secluded place.\u00a0And Jesus instead of giving the\u00a0priority to His program, He gives it to the people.\u00a0The reason is said in two words: feel compassion.\u00a0Term of a\u00a0\u00a0beautiful meaning, infinite one, a term that recalls the bowels, and indicates a bite, a cramp, a spasm inside.\u00a0Jesus’ first reaction:\u00a0He feels pain for the pain of the world.\u00a0And He began to teach many things.\u00a0Perhaps, we would say, there were more pressing problems for the\u00a0crowd: heal, feed, liberate;\u00a0more immediate needs than teaching.\u00a0Maybe we have forgotten that there is a life\u00a0deep within us who continue to mortify, starve, dehydrate.\u00a0Jesus turns to this, like a handful of light\u00a0thrown into the heart of each one, to light the way.\u00a0This Jesus who makes himself available, who doesn’t spare himself, who lets it dictate\u00a0to others the agenda, generous with feelings, delivers something great to the crowd: \u00abYou can give the bread, it’s true, but whoever receives the\u00a0bread may not be in extreme need.\u00a0Instead of a gesture of affection every tired heart needs.\u00a0And every heart is tired” (Sister\u00a0Maria di Campello).\u00a0It is the great teaching to the Twelve: learning a gaze that has emotion and tenderness.\u00a0The words\u00a0they will be born.\u00a0And it applies to each of us: when you learn compassion, when you find the ability to be moved, the world does\u00a0graft into your soul, and we become one river.\u00a0If there are still those among us who know how to be moved by man, this world can\u00a0still hope.<\/p>

17<\/strong>th<\/strong> SUNDAY T. ODINARIO Open your hand, Lord, and satisfy every living person.\u00a0That multiplied bread that calls to brotherhood – Jn 6:1-15<\/strong><\/p>

Sunday of bread that overflows from hands, from baskets, which seems to never end.\u00a0And while they were handing it out, it didn’t come to\u00a0to miss;\u00a0and as it passed from hand to hand, it remained in each hand.\u00a0There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fishes… A barley loaf, the first cereal that it ripens;\u00a0a boy, in which\u00a0a man matures.\u00a0That first fruit of humanity understood everything, no one asked him anything and the boy made everything available.\u00a0He is\u00a0this is the first spark of the response to the crowd’s hunger.\u00a0But what are five loaves for 5,000: one for a thousand.\u00a0The Gospel\u00a0underlines the disproportion between the little starting point and the innumerable hunger that besieges.\u00a0Disproportion, however, is also the name of\u00a0hope, which has reasons that reason does not know.\u00a0And the Christian cannot measure his choices only on the reasonable, on the\u00a0possible.\u00a0Why should we believe in a Risen One, if we are tied to the possible?\u00a0We feel the same disproportion when faced with\u00a0immense problems of our world.\u00a0I only have five loaves of bread, and the poors are legion.\u00a0Yet Jesus doesn’t care about quantity, enough of it\u00a0even less, much less, a crumb.\u00a0it is\u00a0 the madness of generosity.\u00a0And in fact, as soon as they tell him the poetry and courage of\u00a0this boy feels like a spring snapping inside him: Make them sit down!\u00a0Now it’s possible to start tackling hunger!\u00a0Jesus took the loaves and after giving thanks He gave them… John does not report how this happens.\u00a0How certain miracles happen is not\u00a0we will never know.\u00a0They’re just there.\u00a0There are even too many.\u00a0There are, when the law of generosity wins: little bread broken with\u00a0the others is mysteriously sufficient;\u00a0our bread jealously kept for us is the beginning of hunger: \u00abIn the world there is bread\u00a0sufficient for the hunger of all, but insufficient for the greed of a few<\/em>” (Gandhi).\u00a0He took the loaves and after giving thanks He gave them… Three\u00a0blessed verbs: take, thank, donate.\u00a0Jesus is not the master of the bread, He receives it, He is crossed by it, a simple place of\u00a0ride.\u00a0When we consider ourselves the masters of things, we profane their soul, we ruin the air, the water, the earth, the bread.\u00a0Nothing is ours, we receive and we give, we are crossed by a life that comes before us and goes beyond us.\u00a0He gave thanks: to the Father and the nameless boy, to the soil and the autumn rain, to the millstone and the fire, mother and father of bread.\u00a0Everything comes to us, it is life that hosts us, a gift that comes \u00abfrom a divine labyrinth of causes and effects<\/em>\u00bb (M. Gualtieri).\u00a0What does it do\u00a0life a sacrament of communion.\u00a0And he gave them.\u00a0Because life is like breath, which you cannot hold or accumulate;\u00a0it’s like a\u00a0manna that doesn’t last for tomorrow.\u00a0Giving is living.<\/p>

18<\/strong>th<\/strong> SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME \/ B\u00a0Give us, Lord, the bread of heaven.\u00a0The work of the Lord is to nourish life \u2013 Jn 6:24-35<\/strong><\/p>

Jesus has just performed the “sign” that He cares about most, the shared bread, and it is also the most misunderstood, the least understood.\u00a0There\u00a0in fact, people look for it, reach it and would like to grab it as a guarantee against any future hunger.\u00a0But the Gospel of Jesus does not\u00a0it provides bread, but rather mild and powerful leaven to the heart of history, to make it flow upwards, towards indestructible life.\u00a0In front of them Jesus announces His absolute claim: just as I have satisfied your hunger for one day, so I can fill your\u00a0depth of your life!\u00a0And they can’t follow Him.\u00a0Like them, even I, who I am a creature of the earth, prefer bread, it makes me live, I feel it in my mouth, I taste it, I swallow it, it’s like that\u00a0concrete and immediate.\u00a0God and eternity remain elusive, vague ideas, little more than a blur of words.\u00a0And I don’t judge them, those of\u00a0Capernaum, I don’t feel superior to them: there is so much hunger on earth that for many God can only have the form of a\u00a0bread.\u00a0A fundamental misunderstanding then begins, a dialogue on two different levels: What is God’s work?\u00a0And Jesus responds\u00a0drawing the friendly face of God before them: Just as He once gave you the manna bread , so today God still gives.\u00a0Two words\u00a0very simple and yet the keystone of biblical revelation: nourishing life is the work of God. God does not ask, God gives.\u00a0He doesn not\u00a0demands, He offers.\u00a0God doesn’t demand, He gives everything.\u00a0But what exactly does the God of Jesus give?\u00a0Nothing among things or consumer goods:\u00a0\u00abHe cannot give anything less of Himself.\u00a0But by giving us Himself, He gives us everything<\/em>” (Caterina of Siena).\u00a0We are before one of the peaks of the Gospel, one of the most beautiful names of the Lord: He is, in life, the giver of life.\u00a0The gift of\u00a0God is God who gives Himself.\u00a0One of the most beautiful names of Jesus: I am the bread of life.\u00a0From His hands life flows unlimitedly and\u00a0unstoppable.\u00a0Peter will confirm it a little later: \u00abLord, to whom shall we go?\u00a0You alone have words that makes life to be alive.<\/em>”\u00a0Words that\u00a0give life to the spirit, mind, heart, eyes and hands.\u00a0God’s work is a warm current of love that enters and makes life flourish\u00a0roots of every human being.\u00a0So that you become, like Him, a giver of life in life.\u00a0This is the work of God, to believe in Him who\u00a0He sent.\u00a0At the heart of faith is the tenacious, sweet trust that the work of God is Jesus: a high and luminous face\u00a0of the human, free like no one, healer of disaffection, which urges you to become the best of what you can become.\u00a0No\u00a0threatening appearance in Him, but only\u00a0the two open wings of a hen who protects and guards his chicks<\/em>\u00a0(Lk 13.34), and makes them\u00a0grow with combative tenderness, against everything that is bad for life.<\/p>

19<\/strong>th<\/strong> SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME Taste and see how good the Lord is.\u00a0Thus Jesus is the bread of life and force of attraction – Jn 6:41-51<\/strong><\/p>

I am the bread that came down from heaven.<\/p>

In a single sentence Jesus collects and interweaves three images: bread, sky, descending.\u00a0Power of writing,\u00a0creativity of the Gospels, and even before Power of a\u00a0 language so full of imagination and breakthroughs that are typical of the poet from Nazareth.\u00a0I am bread, but\u00a0not like a handful of flour and water passed through the fire: bread because my job is to nourish the bottom of life.\u00a0I am heaven that\u00a0descends down to earth.\u00a0Earth with sky is garden.\u00a0Without it, it is dust that has no breath.\u00a0some contestation arised in the synagogue:\u00a0but what kind of bread and what kind of sky!?\u00a0We know everything about you and your family<\/em>…\u00a0And here is the key of the story.\u00a0Jesus has within Himself something that goes beyond.\u00a0Something that applies to all the reality: there is a part of the sky that\u00a0makes up the earth;\u00a0a “beyond” that inhabits all the things;\u00a0our secret is not within us, it is beyond us.\u00a0Like bread, which has the dust of the ground into it and\u00a0the gold of the sun, the hands of the sower and those of the reaper;\u00a0It suffered the harshness of the millstone and the fire;\u00a0it sprouted as it is called by the ear\u00a0future;\u00a0it was nourished by light and now it can nourish others.\u00a0Like bread, Jesus is a son of the earth and a Son of heaven.\u00a0And He adds a beautiful phrase:\u00a0no one can come to me unless the Father who sent Me draws him up to Heaven<\/em>.\u00a0Here is a new image of God: not the judge, but the strength of\u00a0attraction of the cosmos, the force of celestial gravity, the force of cohesion of atoms and planets, the force of every communion.\u00a0Inside each one\u00a0There is a tireless force of divine attraction at work within us, calling us to embrace beauty and tenderness.\u00a0And we will never become real,\u00a0never ourselves, never happy, if we do not set out on the roads of enchantment for everything that calls us to embrace.\u00a0Jesus says:\u00a0let the Father attract, let communion speak deeply, and not either evil or fear.<\/em>\u00a0Then yes that \u201ceveryone will be\u00a0instructed by God”,<\/em>\u00a0educated with gestures and words and dreams that attract us and convey well-being, because they are clear and healthy, they taste like fresh bread and\u00a0life.\u00a0The bread that I will give is My flesh given for the life of the world.\u00a0Always the word “life”, Jesus’ pounding certainty that He has something\u00a0unique to give so that we can live better.\u00a0But he doesn’t say my “body”, but my “flesh”.\u00a0In the Gospel of John meat indicates\u00a0the original and fragile humanity that is ours: the word became flesh.\u00a0I give you this humanity of mine, take it as a high and luminous measure\u00a0of living.\u00a0Learn from me, stop the bleeding of humanity in history.\u00a0Be human, because the more human you are, the more the Word manifests itself\u00a0divine germ that is into the people.\u00a0If we feed ourselves in this way with the gospel and humanity, we will become good news for the world.<\/p>

\u00a0ASSUMPTION OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY – Evening mass\u00a0Arise Lord, You and the ark of Your power.\u00a0Magnificat, an open window on the future – Lk 11:27-28<\/strong><\/p>

Luke offers us, on this feast of the Assumption of Mary, the only evangelical page in which women are the protagonists.\u00a0Two mothers, both\u00a0“impossibly” pregnant, they are the first prophetesses of the New Testament.\u00a0Sun, no other presence, except that of the mystery of\u00a0God pulsating in the womb.\u00a0Blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of your womb!<\/em>\u00a0Elisabeth teaches us the first word of every true dialogue: to those who are close to us, to those who share the road and home, to those who bring me light, to those who\u00a0bring a hug, I repeat Her first word: may You be blessed;\u00a0You are a blessing that has come to my life!\u00a0Elizabeth introduced the\u00a0melody, she began to beat the rhythm of the soul, and Mary became music and dance, Her body is a psalm: My soul magnifies the\u00a0Lord!\u00a0Where does Mary’s song come from?\u00a0She felt God enter history, come as life in the womb, intervene not with deeds\u00a0spectacular of commanders or heroes, but through the humble and amazing miracle of life: a girl who says YES, an old woman who flourishes again,\u00a0a six month old baby dancing with joy in his mothers embrace.\u00a0She comes through the miracle of all who save lives, on earth and in\u00a0sea.\u00a0The Magnificat is the gospel of Mary, the good news about Her reaching all the generations.\u00a0Ten times she repeats: it is Him who has\u00a0looked at me, it is Him who does great things, which He has unfolded, which He has scattered, which He has overthrown, which He has raised, which He has filled, which He has\u00a0sent back, who helped, who remembered… it’s Him, ten times over.\u00a0The cornerstone of faith is not what I do for God, but what God does for me;\u00a0salvation is that He loves me, not that I do\u00a0I love.\u00a0And whether I am loved depends on Him, it does not depend on me.\u00a0Mary sees a God with His hands entangled in the thick of life.\u00a0And She uses al verbs\u00a0past, with a prophetic stratagem, as if everything had already happened.\u00a0Instead it’s Her bold way of saying that it will be done, with\u00a0absolute certainty, a new earth and sky, that God’s future is as certain as the past, that this world brings another world into\u00a0womb.\u00a0Praying the Magnificat means looking out with her onto the balcony of the future.\u00a0Saint Mary, taken up into heaven, victorious over the dragon, brings down upon us a blessing of hope, consoling, over everything that\u00a0represents our pain in living: a blessing on the years that pass, on the tenderness denied, on the loneliness suffered, on the\u00a0decay of this body of ours, on the corruption of death, on the suffering of dear faces, on our small or large red dragon,\u00a0which however will not win, because beauty and tenderness are, in time and eternity, stronger than violence.<\/p>

20<\/strong>th<\/strong> SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME Taste and see how good the Lord is.\u00a0Eternal life is already here, in the flesh and blood of Jesus \u2013 Jn 6:51-58<\/strong><\/p>

A Gospel of only eight verses, and Jesus repeating eight times:\u00a0Whoever eats my flesh will live forever<\/em>.\u00a0Almost an incantatory rhythm,\u00a0a divine monotony, in the style of John which advances in concentric and ascending circles, like a spiral;\u00a0like a stone you throw\u00a0in the water and you see the circles of the waves getting wider and wider.\u00a0Eight times, Jesus insists on why eat His flesh: for\u00a0simply live, to really live.\u00a0It’s one thing to live, another thing to just survive.\u00a0It is the pressing certainty on the part of Jesus that he possesses the\u00a0secret that changes the direction, the meaning, the flavor of the whole life.\u00a0Whoever eats my flesh has eternal life<\/em>.\u00a0With the verb in the present tense: \u201chas\u201d, not \u201cwill have\u201d.\u00a0Eternal life is a free and authentic, just,\u00a0who gets up and doesn’t give up, who does things that deserve not to die.\u00a0A life like that of Jesus, capable of loving like no one else.\u00a0Blood and flesh is a word that indicates the full humanity of Jesus, his carpenter’s hands with the scent of wood, his tears, his\u00a0passions, his hugs, the feet soaked in spikenard and the house filled with perfume and friendship.\u00a0And here is a surprise, a thing\u00a0unpredictable.\u00a0Jesus does not say: take my wisdom upon yourselves, eat my holiness, the sublime that is in me.\u00a0Instead he says:\u00a0take it\u00a0my humanity, my way of inhabiting the earth and of living relationships as a leaven of yours.\u00a0Feed on my way of being human, how\u00a0a child who is still in his mother’s womb feeds on his blood<\/em>.\u00a0Jesus is not talking about the sacrament of the Eucharist, but about the sacrament of His existence:\u00a0eat and drink every drop and every fiber\u00a0of me<\/em>.\u00a0He wants the warm flow of His life to flow through our veins, for His courage to take root in our hearts, so that we set out\u00a0to live human existence as He lived it.\u00a0He became man for this, so that man might become like God. Then eat and drink\u00a0Christ means taking Him as measure, leaven, energy.\u00a0Not “going to receive Communion” but\u00a0“making ourselves the sacrament of communion”<\/em>.\u00a0At that time\u00a0the fundamental movement is not our going to Him, it is instead He who comes to us.\u00a0He on the way, He who travels the heavens, He\u00a0happy to see me arrive, that He says to me: I’m happy you’re here.\u00a0I can only welcome Him in amazement.\u00a0Before I say, \u201cI\u2019m hungry,\u201d He has\u00a0said: “Take and eat”<\/em>, He sought me, He waited for me and He gives Himself.\u00a0Take, eat!\u00a0His words that surprise me every time, like a declaration of love: “I want to be in your hands as a gift,\u00a0in your mouth like bread, in your depths like blood, to make me a cell, a breath, a thought of you.\u00a0<\/em>Your life<\/em>“.<\/p>

21<\/strong>st<\/strong> SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME Taste and see how good the Lord is.\u00a0God, there is no one else to whom we can entrust our lives – Jn 6:60-69\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>

John stages the account of a dramatic crisis.\u00a0After the long speech in the synagogue of Capernaum on His flesh as food, Jesus sees the shadow of failure looming: many of His disciples withdrew and no longer went with Him.\u00a0And they clearly explain:\u00a0this word is hard for us.\u00a0Who can listen to it?<\/em>\u00a0It had been hard for the rich young man too:\u00a0You sell everything you have and give it to the poors<\/em>.\u00a0The words on the mountain were hard:\u00a0blessed are the persecuted, blessed are those who weep<\/em>.\u00a0But what Jesus now proposes is not a new morality, more difficult than ever, but an even more revolutionary vision, an even more subversive faith: I am the bread of God;\u00a0I transmit the life of God;\u00a0My flesh gives life to the world.\u00a0No one had ever said “I” with this absolute claim.\u00a0No one had ever spoken of God like this: a God who does not shed blood, sheds His blood;\u00a0a God who goes to die of love, who makes Himself small like a piece of bread, makes Himself food for men.\u00a0The religion of external practices, of rites, of obligations is over, this is the religion of being one with God: I in Him, He in me.\u00a0The turning point of the story occurs around the disconcerting words of Jesus:\u00a0do you also want to leave?<\/em>\u00a0The Master does not try to stop them, to convince them, He does not beg them: wait a moment, stay, I will explain better.\u00a0There is sadness in His words, but also pride and challenge, and above all an appeal to the freedom of each: you are free, go or stay, but choose!\u00a0I am even called to choose again, either to go or stay.\u00a0And Peter’s wonderful answer comes to my aid:\u00a0Lord, to whom shall we go?\u00a0You alone have the words of eternal life.<\/em>\u00a0You alone.\u00a0God alone.\u00a0A beautiful beginning.\u00a0Nothing better than this.\u00a0And it excludes an entire world.\u00a0You alone.\u00a0There is no one else to whom I can entrust my life.\u00a0You alone have the words: God has words, the sky is not empty and silent, and His word is creative, it rolls away the stone of the tomb, conquers the frost, opens roads and clouds and encounters, opens caresses and fires.\u00a0You alone have the words of life.\u00a0Words that give life, they give it to every part of me.\u00a0They give life to the heart, they give it either courage and horizons, they dissolve its hardness.\u00a0They give life to the mind because the mind lives on freedom and truth, and you are the truth that sets us free.\u00a0Life to the spirit, to this divine part deposited in us, to this portion of heaven that composes us.\u00a0Words that also give life to the body because in Him we are, we live and breathe;\u00a0and his words move the hands and make them generous and ready, they sow new eyes, bright and welcoming.\u00a0Words of eternal life, which bring eternity as a gift to all that is most beautiful in our hearts.\u00a0Which make life alive, finally.<\/p>

22<\/strong>nd<\/strong> SUNDAY ORDINARY TIME He who fears the Lord will dwell in His tent.\u00a0The secret to having more love and more freedom \u2013 Mk 7:1-8.14-15.21-23\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>

These people honor me with their lips, but their heart is far away.\u00a0Today Jesus directs our attention to the heart, those interior oceans that threaten us and generate us;\u00a0that sometimes submerge us in shadows and suffering but that more often produce islands of generosity, beauty and light: be free and sincere.\u00a0Jesus came from the true fields of the world where life cries and laughs, And now what does He find?\u00a0People who connect religion to stains, hands and washed dishes, to external practices.\u00a0Jesus, instead of being discouraged, becomes an echo of the ancient cry of the prophets:\u00a0true religion is to purify the heart in the image of the Father of lights\u00a0<\/em>(James 1:17): it is from the hearts of men that evil intentions come out… It is the great turning point: the return to the heart.\u00a0Moving from a religion of external practices to a religion of interiority, because the self exists by gathering itself not by dispersing itself, and because when you gather yourself you make the discovery that God is near: “I was looking for you outside of me and you were within me” (St. Augustine)<\/em>.\u00a0Return to your heart: the term heart appears almost a thousand times in the Bible, which does not indicate the seat of feelings or affectivity, but is the place where actions and dreams are born, where one chooses life or death, where one is sincere and free, where the attraction of God takes hold, and seduces and burns, as at Emmaus.\u00a0The return to the heart is a precept as old as human wisdom (\u00abknow thyself\u00bb was written on the pediment of the temple of Delphi), but it is not enough to save, because in the heart of man there is everything: roots of poison and fruits of light;\u00a0fields of good grain and diseased herbs.\u00a0The decisive action lies in evangelizing the heart, in fertilizing with the Gospel our clods of hardness, our intolerances and closures, our dark desires and our disguised idols… Jesus, Master of the heart, exegete and interpreter of desire, places his holy hands in the deepest tissue of the person, on the engine of life, and saves desire from its death drives: from within, that is, from the heart of man, come evil intentions: prostitution, theft, murder, adultery, greed, wickedness… and an impressive list of twelve evil things follows, which make life impure and empty.\u00a0But you do not give them citizenship, do not legitimize them, do not let them leave you, do not allow them to gallop on the prairies of the world, because they are signs of death.\u00a0Evangelizing then means to bring down on the heart a happy message.\u00a0The joyful announcement that Jesus brings is this: it is possible to live better, for everyone, and I know the secret: a heart free and on the path, that grows towards more love, more conscience, more freedom.<\/p>

23<\/strong>rd<\/strong> SUNDAY ORDINARY TIME Praise the Lord, my soul.\u00a0\u00abEphphatha\u00bb: when you open your door, life comes \u2013 Mk 7:31-37\u00a0<\/strong>They brought to Jesus a deaf-mute.\u00a0A man imprisoned in silence, a life without words and without music, but who did not suffer shipwreck, because he was welcomed within a circle of friends who took care of him: and they brought him to Jesus. Healing begins when someone takes up the very human art of accompaniment.\u00a0And they asked Him to lay His hand on them.\u00a0But Jesus does much more, it is not enough for Him to lay his hands in a hieratic gesture, He wants to show the excess and closeness of God: He took him aside, away from the crowd: \u00abYou and I alone, now only you count and, for this time, nothing is more important than you\u00bb.\u00a0I imagine them looking into each other\u2019s eyes, and Jesus taking that face in His hands.\u00a0Very corporeal and delicate gestures follow: Jesus placed His fingers on the ears of the deaf man.\u00a0The fingers: like the sculptor who delicately models the clay he has shaped.\u00a0Like a caress.\u00a0There are no words, only the tenderness of gestures.\u00a0Then with saliva he touched his tongue.\u00a0An intimate, engaging gesture: I give you something of mine, something that is in the mouth of man, together with the breath and the word, symbols of life.\u00a0A Gospel of contacts, of smells, of flavors.\u00a0Physical contact did not displease Jesus, on the contrary.\u00a0And bodies become a holy place of encounter with the Lord, a laboratory of the Kingdom.\u00a0Salvation is not foreign to bodies, it passes through them, which are not paths of evil but “divine shortcuts” (J.P.Sonnet<\/em>), Then looking towards the sky, He let out a sigh.\u00a0A sigh is not a cry that expresses power, it is not a sob, but the breath of hope, calm and humble, the sigh of the prisoner (Ps 102:21<\/em>), and Jesus is also a prisoner with that man.\u00a0And He told\u00a0 him:\u00a0Ephphatha, open up!\u00a0In Aramaic<\/em>, in the dialect of the house, in the mother tongue, starting from the roots: open up, as one opens a door to a guest, a window to the sun, arms to love.\u00a0Open up to others and to God, even with your wounds, through which life exits and life enters.\u00a0If you open your door, life comes.\u00a0A healed life is one that opens up to others: and immediately his ears were opened, the knot in his tongue was loosened and he spoke correctly.\u00a0First the ears.\u00a0Because the first service to render to God and man is always listening.\u00a0If you do not know how to listen, you lose the word, you become mute or you speak without touching anyone’s heart.\u00a0Perhaps the aphasia of the church today depends on the fact that we no longer know how to listen, to God and to man.\u00a0An eloquent detail: only those who know how to listen can speak.\u00a0A gift to be tirelessly asked for, for the deaf-mute in us: give us, Lord, a heart that listens (see 1 Kings 3:9).\u00a0Then thoughts and words that know of heaven will be born.<\/p>

24<\/strong>th<\/strong> SUNDAY ORDINARY TIME I will walk in the presence of the Lord in the land of the living.\u00a0The question of Jesus that questions my heart – Mk 8:27-35<\/strong>\u00a0<\/p>

And on the way He asked: a continuous, prolonged action, a lifestyle: road and questions.\u00a0Jesus is not the answer, He is the question;\u00a0He is not the arrival spot, but the force that makes life to set sails, dismantle the tents at sunrise.\u00a0The many questions of the gospel function as a meeting point between Him and us.\u00a0People, who do they say that I am?<\/em>\u00a0Not a simple survey to measure His popularity, Jesus wants to understand what of His message has reached the hearts.\u00a0He realized that not everything worked in communication, something broke in that Galilean crisis that all the evangelists report.\u00a0In fact, the people’s response, if it may seem gratifying, instead reveals a distorted perception of Jesus: for some He is a master moralizer of customs (“they say You are John the Baptist<\/em>“);\u00a0others have perceived in Him the strength that knocks down idols and false prophets (“they say you are Elijah<\/em>“);\u00a0still others do not perceive anything new, only the echo of old messages already heard (“they say you are one of the prophets<\/em>“).\u00a0But Jesus is nothing among the things of yesterday.\u00a0He is the newness on the move.\u00a0And the questioning continues, becomes direct:\u00a0but who do you say that I am<\/em>?\u00a0To bring out the ambiguity that dwells in everyone’s heart, Jesus questions Himself.\u00a0It is not easy to submit to the evaluation of others, it costs a lot of humility and freedom to ask: what do you think of me?\u00a0But Jesus is without masks and without fears, free like no one else.\u00a0You are the Christ, Peter exposes Himself, the meaning of Israel, the meaning of my life.\u00a0At this point the register changes and the story becomes disconcerting: Jesus began to teach that Christ had to suffer a lot and be killed and on the third day rise again.\u00a0How can Peter accept a losing Messiah?\u00a0“You are the Messiah, the awaited one, what sense does a defeated Messiah have?”\u00a0Then He takes him aside and begins to reproach him.\u00a0He challenges him, points out another story and other dreams.\u00a0And the tension rises, the dialogue becomes heated and culminates in very harsh words: go behind Me, Satan.\u00a0Your place is to follow me.\u00a0Peter is the voice of every ambiguity in life, this river that carries everything, mud and specks of gold, and passes through patches of sun and shadows;\u00a0gives voice to that ambiguity without guilt (G. Piccolo), for which things are not clear to us, for which in our words we hear at the same time the sound of God (not even flesh or blood have revealed it to you<\/em>) and the whisper of evil (you think according to the world<\/em>).\u00a0The solution is the one indicated to Peter (\u00abgo behind me<\/em>\u00bb).\u00a0Jesus has given a caress to my wounds, has crossed my contradictions and makes me walk right there, along the \u00abuncertain line that divides the light from the dark\u00bb (A. Camilleri<\/em>).\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 2<\/strong>5th SUNDAY ORDINARY TIME <\/strong>The secret to having more love and more freedom \u00a0Mk 7:1-8.14-15.21-23<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0 <\/em>These people honor me with their lips, but their heart is far away.\u00a0Today Jesus directs our attention to the heart, those interior oceans that threaten us and generate us;\u00a0that sometimes submerge us in shadows and suffering but that more often produce islands of generosity, beauty and light: be free and sincere.\u00a0Jesus came from the true fields of the world where life cries and laughs, And now what does He find?\u00a0People who connect religion to stains, hands and washed dishes, to external practices.\u00a0Jesus, instead of being discouraged, becomes an echo of the ancient cry of the prophets:\u00a0true religion is to purify the heart in the image of the Father of lights\u00a0<\/em>(Jm 1:17<\/em>): it is from the hearts of men that evil intentions come out… It is the great turning point: the return to the heart.\u00a0Moving from a religion of external practices to a religion of interiority, because the self exists by gathering itself not by dispersing itself, and because when you gather yourself you make the discovery that God is near: “I was looking for you outside of me and you were within me” (St. Augustine)<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Return to your heart: the term heart appears almost a thousand times in the Bible, which does not indicate the seat of feelings or affectivity, but is the place where actions and dreams are born, where one chooses life or death, where one is sincere and free, where the attraction of God takes hold, and seduces and burns, as at Emmaus.\u00a0The return to the heart is a precept as old as human wisdom (\u00abknow thyself\u00bb was written on the pediment of the temple of Delphi), but it is not enough to save, because in the heart of man there is everything: roots of poison and fruits of light;\u00a0fields of good grain and diseased herbs.\u00a0The decisive action lies in evangelizing the heart, in fertilizing with the Gospel our clods of hardness, our intolerances and closures, our dark desires and our disguised idols…\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Jesus, Master of the heart, exegete and interpreter of desire, places his holy hands in the deepest tissue of the person, on the engine of life, and saves desire from its death drives: from within, that is, from the heart of man, come evil intentions: prostitution, theft, murder, adultery, greed, wickedness… and an impressive list of twelve evil things follows, which make life impure and empty.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 But you do not give them citizenship, do not legitimize them, do not let them leave you, do not allow them to gallop on the prairies of the world, because they are signs of death.\u00a0Evangelizing then means to bring down on the heart a happy message.\u00a0The joyful announcement that Jesus brings is this: it is possible to live better, for everyone, and I know the secret: a heart free and on the path, that grows towards more love, more conscience, more freedom.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 26<\/strong>th<\/strong> SUNDAY OF ORDINARY TIME<\/strong> \/ The Lord\u2019s precepts make the heart to rejoice. He who gives a sip of life is of God – Mk 9:38-43.45.47-48\u00a0Master, that man is not one of us. That stranger who works miracles, but who is not a member of the group; who improves people\u2019s lives, but perhaps is a bit heretical or too free, is blocked. And at the head of the operation is John, the beloved disciple, the fine theologian, \u201cthe son of thunder\u201d, but who is still the son of a small heart, bitten by jealousy. \u201cYou are not allowed to make the world a better place if you are not one of us!\u201d. Form before substance, membership in the group before good, the idea before reality! Instead, Moses, in the first reading, gives such a liberating answer to those who tell him of two who are not on the list and yet prophesy: \u200b\u200bif only they were all prophets… The answer of Jesus, the man without borders, is very articulated and very Moses-like: Let him do it! Do not draw borders. Our aim is not to increase the number of those who follow us, but to increase the good; to increase the number of those who, in many different ways, can experience the Kingdom of God, which is joy, freedom, and fullness. It is a great thing to see that for Jesus the ultimate proof of the goodness of faith does not lie in a theoretical adherence to the “name”, but in its ability to transmit humanity, joy, health, and life. Whoever gives a sip of life, belongs to God. This places us all, serenely and joyfully, alongside so many men and women, believers or non-believers in different ways, who however have life at heart and are passionate about it, who are capable of inventing miracles to bring a smile to someone’s face. The Gospel calls us to “stand beside them, dreaming of life together” (Evangelii Gaudium, 74<\/em>). Whoever gives you a glass of water… will not lose his reward. A little water, almost nothing, something so simple and poor that no one is deprived of it. Jesus simplifies life: the whole Gospel in a glass of water. Faced with the invasiveness of evil, Jesus comforts: oppose evil with your glass of water; and then trust: the worst will not prevail. Moses and Jesus, teachers of the faith, invite us not to plant stakes but to love horizons, to look beyond the courtyard of the house, to the entire human camp, to the entire road to travel: lift your eyes, don’t you see how many seeds of the Spirit are flying everywhere? How many people fight for the lives of their brothers against modern demons: pollution, violence, fake news, corruption, and the economy that kills? And even if they are outside our camp, they are still prophets. They are the ones who hear the cry of the unpaid reapers (James 5:4) and give them back their word because everything that concerns the human adventure concerns us. Because everyone belongs to us and we belong to everyone. \u00a027th SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME<\/strong> May the Lord bless us all the days of our life. From the beginning, the Lord has joined lives together – Mk 10:2-16\u00a0 Is it lawful for a husband to divorce his wife? It is well known, the entire religious tradition, endorsed by the Word of God, legitimized it: yes, it is lawful. But Jesus distances Himself:\u00a0what did Moses order you?<\/em>\u00a0As a Jew, He should have said:\u00a0what did Moses order \u201cus\u201d,<\/em>\u00a0instead He marks His difference. Moses allowed a bill of divorce to be written. Jesus also distances Himself from Moses:\u00a0because of the hardness of your hearts he wrote this rule<\/em>. An enormous statement: the law that we call divine does not always, not all reflect the will of God, sometimes it is the reflection of our hard heart. In the beginning it was not like this. Jesus is not interested in moving the moral stakes forward or backward, disciplining life, but in inspiring it, igniting it, renewing it:\u00a0the Gospel is not a moral, but a shocking liberation (G. Vannucci).<\/em>\u00a0It takes us by the hand and leads us into the territories of God, into His initial, original, original dream; it teaches us to look not from the point of view of the end of love, but of its beginning:\u00a0for this reason the man will leave his father and mother, will unite with his wife and the two will become one flesh<\/em>. God’s dream is the two who seek each other, the two who find each other, the two who love each other and who become one. Let no man separate what God has joined together. From the beginning God joins lives! This is his name: “God joins”, like a prophecy of communion and bond. He brings lives together, unites them, glue of atoms and the cosmos. Instead, the name of his enemy, the enemy of love and life, is exactly the opposite: the devil, that is, He-who-separates. The problem is brought to the root: no longer repudiation or not, but keeping alive the breath of the origin, committing oneself with all one’s strength to nourish God’s dream: protecting and guarding gestures, thoughts, words that in turn have the joyful power to protect love and join lives. Because love is fragile, and hungry for care. The real sin is not to transgress a rule, but God’s dream. And this happens upstream, it is a long thin web that is slowly woven with those harsh or indifferent behaviors that extinguish love: infidelity, lack of respect, offense to dignity, being on top of each other, the cause of daily mortification, rather than life. Jesus lays the foundations for our freedom: my behavior is not called to adapt to a law external to man, but to that internal norm that rekindles the face, protects the smile and the dream of God. So if you do not commit yourself to cultivating it, if you do not mend the tears, if your love over the years has become hard and aggressive instead of sweet and humble, you are repudiating the dream of God, you are already an adulterer in your heart.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a028<\/strong>th<\/strong> SUNDAY ORDINARY TIME<\/strong> Satisfy us, Lord, with your love: we will rejoice forever.\u00a0\u2013 Mk 10:17-30<\/strong>\u00a0Jesus is on the road, the place He loved most: the road, which belongs to everyone, connects those who are far away, is free and open, a breach in the walls, loves horizons. And behold, a man, one without a name but rich (his identity stolen by money) runs towards Him. He runs, like someone in a hurry, in a hurry to live, to truly live. The man without a name is about to face a great risk: he asks Jesus to know the truth about himself. \u00abGood Master, is my life or not? What must I do to be truly alive?\u00bb. Eternal question. Universal. Jesus responds by listing five commandments and a precept. \u00abMaster, I have already done all this, forever. And yet…. Jesus looked at him and loved him. He loved him for that \u201cand yet,\u201d which tells of hunger and thirst for something else: observing the law has not filled his life. Jesus stares at him. That man has a terrifying experience, he feels Jesus\u2019 gaze on him, he meets His loving eyes, he could sink inside. And if I were to continue the story I would say: now he follows him, now he is gripped by the enchantment, by the charm of the Lord, he cannot resist… Instead the conclusion goes in the direction you do not expect: \u201cYou lack one thing, go, sell, give to the poor…\u201d. Give. You will be happy if you make someone happy. You are not what you have, but what you give. To give: a fearful verb. We want to take, hold on to, accumulate. To give to the poor… In the Gospel the verb to love is always translated with the verb to give. But the rich man goes away sad. We all have two lives at war with each other: one is made of things and everyday life and the second is nourished by calls and appeals, by vocation and dream. The rich man walks sadly: things and money have won; he will no longer follow life as an appeal, but only life as an ordinary existence, hostage to things. Three times today it is said that Jesus \u201clooked\u201d: with love, with concern, with encouragement. Faith is nothing other than my response to God\u2019s courtship, an adventure that is born from an encounter, when God enters you and I give him time and heart. Here then is one of Jesus\u2019 most beautiful words: everything is possible with God. He is capable of making a camel pass through the eye of a needle. God has the passion for the impossible. Ten camels will pass. Don Milani on his deathbed understood it: now I finally see the camel pass through the eye of the needle. It was he, the camel, he of a rich and powerful family, who passed through the eye of smallness. Lord, here we have left everything and followed you, what will we have in exchange? You will have in exchange a hundred brothers and a multiplied heart. “With my eyes in the sun at every dawn I know that giving up for you is the same as blooming” (M. Marcolini<\/em>).\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a029<\/strong>th<\/strong> SUNDAY ORDINARY TIME<\/strong> Give us, Lord, your love: we hope in you.\u00a0Jesus surprises us: I came to serve \u2013 Mk 10:35-45<\/strong>\u00a0It is not like this among you!\u00a0A beautiful expression that highlights the Christian difference.\u00a0Others dominate, not be so among you.\u00a0You will put yourselves alongside people, or at their feet, and not above.\u00a0Others oppress.\u00a0You instead will lift people, you will pull them up for another light, another sun, another breath.\u00a0The glorious history of each one is not written by those who had the ability to dominate us, but by those who had the art of loving us: the glory of life.\u00a0I came to give My life as a ransom for the multitude.<\/em>.. Jesus redeems the humans, repaints the icon of what the person is, what life is\u00a0 and what is not, brings out a treasure of light, of sun, of beauty from each one.\u00a0He frees the new face of humanity, He redeems the human from the claws of the inhuman;\u00a0He redeems the heart of man from the deadly power of indifference.\u00a0Jesus is the healer of the sin of the world, which has only one name: lack of love.\u00a0James and John, the “sons of thunder”, asked Him, with a childish tone:\u00a0We want you to do to us what we want<\/em>… The other apostles are indignant, they do it out of rivalry, out of jealousy, because the two brothers have tried to manipulate the community.\u00a0But Jesus does not follow them, He goes ahead, saves the question of the two and also the indignation of the others: He calls them to Himself, in intimacy, heart to heart, and explains, argues.\u00a0Because behind every human desire, even the most twisted, there is always a good matrix, a desire for life, for beauty, for harmony.\u00a0Every human desire always has a healthy part behind it, even a very small one.\u00a0But that is the part that should not be lost.\u00a0Men are not bad, they are fragile and easily mistaken.\u00a0“Even sin is often a wrong way to look for you<\/em>” (D. M. Turoldo).\u00a0The last sentence of the Gospel is of capital importance:\u00a0I came to serve<\/em>.\u00a0The most disconcerting self-definition of Jesus. The most revolutionary and counter-current one.\u00a0But which suddenly illuminates the heart of God, the meaning of the life of Christ, and therefore of the life of every man and every woman.\u00a0A God who, while in our imagination is omnipotent, in his revelation is a servant.\u00a0From omnipotent to servant.\u00a0A complete novelty.\u00a0Why did God create us?\u00a0Many of us remember the answer of the catechism: To know, love and serve God in this life, and enjoy Him in the next.\u00a0Jesus turns the perspective upside down, gives it a beauty and depth that stuns: we were created to be loved and served by God, here and forever.\u00a0God exists for you, to love you and serve you, to give His life for you, to be surprised by us, by these unpredictable, free, splendid, creative and fragile children.\u00a0God considers each child more important than Himself. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a030<\/strong>th<\/strong> SUNDAY ORDINARY TIME<\/strong> The Lord has done great things for us.\u00a0We are all beggars of love and light – Mk 10:46-52<\/strong>\u00a0Gospels of roads and encounters, during these weeks.\u00a0\u00abAs He was leaving Jericho…<\/em>\u00bb.\u00a0We are at the gates of the city, where the caravans of pilgrims gather, where the beggars wander around, hoping for a coin among the many who meet at the gates.\u00a0A blind man, sitting on the ground, motionless, is there begging for his survival from those who pass by.\u00a0But then \u00abfeeling that it was Jesus of Nazareth<\/em>\u00bb Bartimaeus is struck by a shiver, by a shock: he raises his head up, revives, begins to cry out his pain.\u00a0He is not ashamed of being the poorest of all, on the contrary, it is his own strength.\u00a0We are all like him, beggars of affection or love or light.\u00a0Begging is the source of prayer:\u00a0Kyrie eleison, cries out.\u00a0Of all, the most Christian and evangelical prayer, the most ancient and the most human.\u00a0Which in our liturgies we have confined to the penitential act, while it is the request to be born again.\u00a0Lepers, women, blind people repeat it and it is not a request for forgiveness for sins, but for light for dull eyes, for a new skin that still receives caresses.\u00a0Like a child who cries out to his distant mother, they ask God: show yourself as a Father, feel like a Mother to this shipwrecked son, let me be born again, give me back to the light!\u00a0Bartimaeus seeks a God who intertwines with His life in pieces, with his rags.\u00a0But the crowd around him forms like a wall against his own cry: be quiet!\u00a0You disturb!\u00a0Terrible to think that suffering can disturb.\u00a0Disturb God!\u00a0Bartimaeus then does the only thing that can be done in these cases: he cries out louder.\u00a0It is his battle, with the darkness and with the crowd.\u00a0The Nazarene hears the cry and responds in a completely new way: He involves the crowd that first wanted to silence the beggar, He trusts the crowd, even if it is so easily changed in mood:\u00a0call him!<\/em>\u00a0And the crowd goes, spokesmen for Christ, and addresses the blind man with beautiful, thrilling words, where the heart of the evangelical message is kept.\u00a0Easy words that go straight to the heart, to be learned, to be repeated, always, to everyone: “Courage, get up, He is calling you<\/em>“.\u00a0Courage, the virtue of beginnings.\u00a0Get up, it is up to you, you can do it, take your life back into your hands.\u00a0He is calling you, He is here for you, you are not alone, the sky is not silent.\u00a0And here the compressed energy is released, and almost excessive gestures flourish: he does not speak, he shouts;\u00a0he does not take off his cloak, he throws it;\u00a0he does not get up from the ground, but he jumps onto his feet.\u00a0He heals in that voice that caresses him, calls him and becomes the road on which he walks.\u00a0We, who are at the same time beggars and crowd, in our Jericho, along our streets, to every person on the ground, we bring as a gift, without ever tiring, these three generating words: “Courage, get up, he calls you<\/em>“.<\/p>

\u00a0ALL SAINTS Here is the generation that seeks your face, Lord.\u00a0That God who chose the least as blessed – Mt 5:1-12a\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>

Blessed is the man, the first word of the first psalm.\u00a0Which is echoed by the first word of Jesus’ first speech, on the mountain: Blessed are the poor.\u00a0What does blessed mean, this somewhat obsolete and faded term?\u00a0The mind immediately runs to synonyms such as: happy, contented, fortunate.\u00a0But the term cannot be compressed only into the world of emotions, impoverished into a random state of mind.\u00a0Instead, it indicates a state of life, it consolidates the most human certainty that we have and that composes us all in unity: the aspiration to joy, to love, to life.\u00a0Blessed, and it is like saying: standing, on the way, forward, you poor (A. Chouraqui<\/em>), God walks with you;\u00a0come on, stand up straight, do not give up, you non-violent people, you are the future of the earth;\u00a0courage, get up and throw away the cloak of mourning, you who cry;\u00a0do not let your arms fall, you who produce love.\u00a0Depths that I will never reach, Gospel that continues to amaze me and escape me, yet to be saved at all costs;\u00a0overpowering nostalgia for a world made of peace and sincerity, of justice and pure hearts, a completely different way of being alive.\u00a0The Beatitudes are not one more precept or a new commandment, but the good news that God gives joy to those who produce love, that if one takes on the happiness of someone, the Father will take care of their happiness.\u00a0Yours is the kingdom: the Kingdom belongs to the poor because the King made Himself poor.\u00a0The earth belongs to the meek because the powerful made Himself meek and humble.\u00a0To this earth, soaked in blood (your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground<\/em>), planet of tombs, who does give a future?\u00a0Who is more armed, stronger, more ruthless?\u00a0Or not instead the weaver of peace, the non-violent, the merciful, the one who cares?\u00a0The second says: Blessed are those who weep.\u00a0The most paradoxical beatitude: tears and happiness mixed together, but not because God loves pain, but in pain He is with you.\u00a0A mysterious angel announces to anyone who weeps: the Lord is with you.\u00a0God is with you, in the deepest reflection of your tears to multiply your courage;\u00a0in every storm he is at your side, strength of your strength, a barrier to your fears.\u00a0As for the disciples caught at night by the storm on the lake, He is there in the strength of the rowers who do not give up, in the firm arms on the tiller, in the eyes of the lookout who seek the dawn.\u00a0Jesus announces a God who is not impartial, who has His hands entangled in the thick of life, who has a weakness for the weak, who begins with the last in line, from the underground of history, who has chosen the world’s rejects to create with them a history that does not advance through the victories of the strongest, but through sowings of justice and harvests of peace. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0COMMEMORATION OF ALL THE FAITHFUL DEPARTED<\/strong> I am sure that I contemplate the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living . The gates of death open to life \u2013 Jn 6:37-40\u00a0 The liturgy has no tears, because what it commemorates is not death, but the resurrection.\u00a0The liturgy has no tears, unless dried by the hand of God;\u00a0in fact, it does not pronounce words about the end but about life.\u00a0\u201cIf you had been here, my brother Lazarus would not have died<\/em>.\u201d\u00a0Martha has faith in Jesus, yet she is wrong.\u00a0So we repeat her words and her mistake: in this illness of my family member, where is God?\u00a0If God exists, why this innocent death?\u00a0If you are here, my loved ones will not die… Instead, God is here, always, but not as an exemption from death.\u00a0Jesus never promised that his friends would not die.\u00a0For Him, the greatest good is not a long life, an infinite survival;\u00a0the essential thing is not in not dying, but in already living a resurrected life.\u00a0Eternity has already entered us long before it happens, it enters with the life of faith (\u2026whoever believes in Him has eternal life<\/em>), it enters with the gestures of daily love.\u00a0The Lord teaches us to be more afraid of a wrong life than of death.\u00a0To fear an empty and useless life more than the last frontier we will cross, holding on tightly to the heart that will not let us fall.\u00a0Who will separate us from the love of Christ?\u00a0Neither angels nor demons, neither life nor death, nothing will ever be able to separate us from love<\/em>\u00a0(Rm 8,35-37).\u00a0This is enough for me.\u00a0If God is love, He will avenge me for my death.\u00a0His revenge is the resurrection, a love never separated again.\u00a0God saves, this is His name.\u00a0To save means to preserve.\u00a0By His precise will nothing will be lost, not a love, not a glass of fresh water, not even the smallest blade of grass.\u00a0A prayer for the deceased, perhaps the most beautiful, invokes: admit them to enjoy the light of your face.\u00a0The verbs of faith yield to a humble and strong verb, defenseless and very human: to enjoy.\u00a0Reason yields to joy, faith to enjoyment.\u00a0Eternity flourishes in the verbs of joy.\u00a0Because God is not the answer to our need for explanations, but to our need for happiness, He is for my senses, my spirit, my affections and my heart, for the totality of my person.\u00a0Our experience maintains that everything goes from life to death.\u00a0The Christian faith declares instead that man’s existence goes from death to life.\u00a0From the sanctuary of God which is the earth and where no man can remain to live, the doors of death lead outwards.\u00a0But what do the doors of this door open onto?\u00a0Don’t you know?\u00a0On life! \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a031<\/strong>st<\/strong> SUNDAY ORDINARY TIME<\/strong> I love you, Lord, my strength.\u00a0To love is to give a future to the world – Mk 12:28b-34<\/strong>\u00a0Which is the greatest commandment of all?\u00a0\u00a0Help us to return to the simple, to the beginning of everything… Jesus does it, He goes outside the box, He answers with a word that is not among the commandments.\u00a0How beautiful is the freedom, the anti-conformist intelligence of Jesus, He is the crystal-clear icon of freedom and imagination.\u00a0The answer begins with a verb:\u00a0you will love<\/em>, in the future, to indicate an infinite story, because love is the future of the world, because without love there is no future: you will love each other, otherwise you will destroy each other.\u00a0And then to live well, because the scale on which the happiness of this life is weighed is to give and receive love.\u00a0But first there is a \u201czero commandment\u201d: shema, listen, remember, do not forget, keep it tied to your wrist, put it as a seal on your heart, as a jewel before your eyes… It is touching to see a God who asks: \u201cListen to me, please\u201d.\u00a0Loving God is listening to Him.\u00a0You will love with all your heart;\u00a0not as a submissive but as a lover.\u00a0Someone has proposed another translation: you will love God with all your hearts.\u00a0As if to say: with your heart of light and with your heart of shadow, love Him with the heart that believes and also with the heart that doubts;\u00a0as you can, as you manage, perhaps out of breath, when the sun shines and when it gets dark, and with your eyes closed when you are a little afraid, even with tears.\u00a0Saint Teresa of Avila in a vision receives this confidence from the Lord: \u201cFor one “I love you” of yours, I would remake the universe again<\/em>\u201d.\u00a0With all your mind.\u00a0Intelligent love must be;\u00a0which means: know him, read, speak, study, think, try to understand more, enjoy a sudden caress, write a prayer, a song, a love poem to your love… But with this, what new thing did Jesus say?\u00a0After all, the same words have been repeated by mystics of all religions, by seekers of God of all faiths, for millennia.\u00a0The evangelical novelty is in the unexpected addition of a second commandment, which is similar to the first… The genius of Christianity: you shall love man is similar to you shall love God. The neighbor is similar to God. The neighbor has a face and voice, hunger for love and beauty, similar to God. Heaven and earth are not opposed, they embrace each other.\u00a0A cross-eyed Gospel, one might say: one eye up, one down, head in the sky and feet on the ground.\u00a0But who is my neighbor?\u00a0Another doctor will ask Him.\u00a0There is an answer that has enlarged my heart, that of Gandhi: “my neighbor is everything that lives with me on earth<\/em>“, nature, water, air, plants, animals.\u00a0Love the earth, then, as yourself, love it as God loves it. To live is to live together, to exist is to coexist.\u00a0Not to obey commandments or celebrate liturgies, but simply, wonderfully, happily: to love. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a032<\/strong>nd<\/strong> SUNDAY ORDINARY TIME<\/strong> Praise the Lord, my soul.\u00a0The poor widow, true teacher of generosity – Mk 12:38-44<\/strong>\u00a0A nameless woman, alone, a poor widow, is the last character that Jesus meets in the Gospel of Mark, the last teacher.\u00a0Jesus has always shown a particular predilection for single women.\u00a0They belong to the biblical triad of the defenseless: widows, orphans and foreigners.\u00a0And then God intervenes and takes their defense: “they are mine<\/em>!”.\u00a0A teacher without words and without titles, wise in tears and courage, and “if you listened only once to the lesson of the heart you would give a lesson to the scholars<\/em>” (Rumi).\u00a0Sitting in the offering room, Jesus observes: His gaze has become penetrating and sharp like that of the prophets, like someone who loves and cares for life in all its details.\u00a0She sees a gesture of nothing in which the divine is hidden, she sees the absolute flash in the detail of two cents.\u00a0She threw two pennies into the treasure, but she gave more than all the others.\u00a0Why more than all the others?\u00a0Because the scales of God are not quantitative, but qualitative.\u00a0His scales do not weigh quantity, but the heart.\u00a0That woman does not give something of her excess, she throws everything away, she spends herself to the full in her relationship with God, she puts in everything she has to live.\u00a0Do not look for holy people in life, perhaps you will find them, perhaps not (in fact we do not know if the woman’s moral life was upright or not), do not look for perfect people, rather look for generous people, who give time and affection, those of small gestures with so much heart inside.\u00a0A gesture of kindness drawn from our poverty is never insignificant or insignificant.\u00a0Let us entrust ourselves to the generous, not to the perfect or the powerful.\u00a0Marco’s original words are brilliant:\u00a0she threw her entire life into the treasure<\/em>.\u00a0That woman has put a lot of heart and the entire heritage of her life into circulation in the veins of the world.\u00a0And all this circulates in the universe like a gentle and powerful energy, because every human gesture done with all our heart brings us closer to the absolute of God. Every “total” human act contains something divine.\u00a0This woman has given more.\u00a0The question of the last evening will resonate with the same verb: have you given little or have you given a lot to life?\u00a0Where you passed, behind you, was there more life or less life left?\u00a0The first places belong to those who, in each of our homes or cities, give what makes us live, give heart with small and large gestures, gestures of care, nurturing, attention, kindness, addressed to parents or children or strangers.\u00a0Even if they were just two pennies of kindness, just crumbs, just a smile or a caress, those who do them with all their heart believe in the future.\u00a0The night begins with the first star, the new world with the first gesture of a little good Samaritan.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u2013 33<\/strong>rd<\/strong> SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME<\/strong>\u00a0 Protect me, O God: in you I take refuge.\u00a0God is near, He is at the door.\u00a0He comes like an embrace – Mk 13:24-32 In those days, the sun will darken, the moon will go out, the stars will fall from the sky… The universe is fragile in its great beauty, but \u201cthose days\u201d are these days, this world darkens with its ongoing wars, the earth is poisoned, endless human caravans migrate across seas and deserts… Does it seem to you like a world that is sinking, that is drifting?\u00a0Look better, look deeper: it is a world that is moving towards rebirth.\u00a0Jesus loves hope, not fear: learn from the fig tree:\u00a0when its branch becomes tender and its leaves sprout, you know that summer is near<\/em>.\u00a0Jesus takes us to the school of plants, because the laws of the spirit and the profound laws of reality coincide.\u00a0Every bud assures that life wins over death.\u00a0Learn from the wisdom of trees: when the branch becomes tender… the softening of the branch you can’t even imagine in winter;\u00a0its softening due to the sap that starts to swell the small channels again is a surprise, and an ancient wonder.\u00a0The most beautiful things are not to be sought, they are to be awaited.\u00a0Like spring.\u00a0And the leaves sprout, and you can’t do anything about it;\u00a0perhaps, however, yes: contemplate and guard.\u00a0Then you understand that summer is near.\u00a0In reality, the buds indicate spring, which however in Palestine is very short, a few days and it is immediately summer.\u00a0So you too know that he is near, at the doors.\u00a0God is near, He is here;\u00a0beautiful, vital and new like the spring of the cosmos.\u00a0From a bud you learn the future of God: who is at the door, and knocks;\u00a0He comes not like a pointing finger, but like an embrace, a humble sprouting of life.\u00a0“The whole world is a germinating reality<\/em>” (R. Guardini<\/em>).\u00a0Then I feel like a ship, which is no longer anxious about the route to follow, because a Wind of heaven blows above it, and the lamp of the Word is lit on the bow of the ship.\u00a0The sun and the moon pass, which are the clock of the universe, the earth crumbles, but my words do not, they are a sun that will never set from the horizons of history, from the heart of man.\u00a0We are a complaining generation, which no longer knows how to give thanks, which has squandered the prophets and the poets, the lovers and the good.\u00a0And instead they are the parable, the sprout, the branch of the fig or almond tree of the saved world.\u00a0I am here and now, on the whole earth and inside my own house, like good shoots, soaked in heaven, imbued with God. Those who love me are lamps to my steps.\u00a0Look at them carefully, a drop of light is caught in every wrinkle, a gram of spring and future has taken root in every face.\u00a0Faith repeats to me that God is at the door, He is near, He is here, He is in them.\u00a0\u00abEach one has his own moment of God<\/em>\u00bb (D. M. Turoldo<\/em>). \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST KING OF THE UNIVERSE<\/strong> The Lord reigns, He dresses himself in splendor.\u00a0It is unarmed love that changes the world – Jn 18:33b-37<\/strong>\u00a0 Pilate, the man who holds the greatest power in Jerusalem, and the young unarmed rabbi: one facing the other, facing the history of the world. Are you the king of the Jews?\u00a0Is it possible that that Galilean with the clear and straight gaze is the leader of a revolt, that a danger for Rome arises from it?\u00a0No, that defenseless man is a danger to the conspiracies of the Sanhedrin, to the games of politicians: they have handed you over to me, they want to kill you.\u00a0What have you done? Jesus moves me with His courage, with His inner stature, as he raises a regal wind of freedom and pride over the praetorium.\u00a0And now He opens Pilate’s world, expands it, makes another dimension burst in, another latitude of the heart: my kingdom is not of this world, where there is fighting, violence, abuse, deception, devouring.\u00a0In my kingdom there are no legions, no swords, no predators.\u00a0For the kingdoms down here, for the heart down here, the essential thing is to win, in my Kingdom the most important thing is to serve.\u00a0My kingdom belongs to the poor, the pure, the free, the artisans of peace and justice… I have come to raise up the kings of tomorrow among the little ones of today.\u00a0“I have come into the world to bear witness to another truth<\/em>.”\u00a0The word of Jesus is true precisely because it is disarmed, it has no other strength than its light.\u00a0It is there in front, the truth;\u00a0it is that man in whom the most beautiful words in the world have become flesh and blood, they have become true.\u00a0Today we do not celebrate the ascension to the throne of the master of the world, Jesus is not this: he is the author and servant of life.\u00a0Who changes the logic of history through the revolution of tenderness, the final word on the meaning of our existence and, together, on the heart of God. So, who is my king?\u00a0Who is my Lord?\u00a0Who gives orders to my future?\u00a0I choose Him, still Him, the Nazarene, with the certainty that our twisted heart, this tangled history, is following, despite all the denials, a path of salvation.\u00a0Because God is involved, He is here, His hands are forever entangled in the thicket of every life.\u00a0Pilate takes Jesus’ statement: I am king, and makes it the title of the condemnation, the derisive inscription to be nailed to the cross: this is the king of the Jews.\u00a0He wanted to mock Him, and instead he was a prophet: the king is visible there, on the cross, with open arms, where He gives everything of Himself and takes nothing of ours.\u00a0True power, the one that changes the world, is the ability to love like this, with disarmed love, until the end, until the extreme, until the end.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Father Ermes Ronchi Comments on the Gospel of Sunday of the liturgical year B 1st SUNDAY OF ADVENT \u00a0Advent: a<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"elementor_header_footer","meta":{"colormag_page_container_layout":"default_layout","colormag_page_sidebar_layout":"default_layout","footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-3447","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diffondilaparola.com\/wpdp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3447","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diffondilaparola.com\/wpdp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diffondilaparola.com\/wpdp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diffondilaparola.com\/wpdp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diffondilaparola.com\/wpdp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3447"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.diffondilaparola.com\/wpdp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3447\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3457,"href":"https:\/\/www.diffondilaparola.com\/wpdp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3447\/revisions\/3457"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diffondilaparola.com\/wpdp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}