OMELIE / Omelie EN

15 set 2024

15/09/2024 - 24th Sunday in O.T. - B

15/09/2024 - 24^th Sunday in O.T. - B

Reading 1 IS 50,5-9 Psalm 114 Reading 2 JAS 2,14-18 Gospel MK 8,27-35

Saint James wants to help us take our faith seriously, to be coherent. It has to change our life by inspiring our actions and defining our relationships with our neighbours. As love does not exist without concrete generous action, so faith does not exist without concrete action. What could concrete action of our faith look like?

We believe in Jesus Christ, crucified and risen. Our faith shows itself in accepting the struggles of our cross, because Jesus has died; we accept them with serenity and without complaining because we are sure of His resurrection. Inside this acceptance of the cross finds space every person we meet: we can see them as loved by our Lord, who has spilled His blood for them as well. This way of looking at things – Saint James is warning us – does not pay attention to the way people clad themselves materially, culturally or socially: Jesus died for the man, for his eternal salvation, and He does not care how much people own, nor how well someone is considered by others. We say about everyone: “You are God’s child, loved by Him, who has sent His Son for you!”.

Jesus asks us, like He asked His disciples: “You, who do you say that I am?”. This question in precious, because is helping us to focus on our relationship with Him, but it is also precious because on our relationship with Him depends our relationship with every person we see and we hear. Who is Jesus? What does His life mean for the world? What is His relevance for me? And what is His relevance for the people around me? Where is He coming from? Why has He come, who has sent Him, for what reason?

I cannot give answers learnt from others or use sentences I read in the catechism. I need to take the time and have a look. Have a look at what are the meaning and the goal of my life, my efforts, my relationships with others, and try to see what are the empty places within. Jesus has come to give eternal life, so to fill all the emptiness my life is «full» of. Who is He to succeed?

He is “the Christ”, Peter has said. He knew that Christ means “anointed”, anointed to be the representative of God on earth. Jesus is the visible and perceivable presence of the invisible and unimaginable God. By listening to Jesus I listen to God, by looking at Jesus I look at God, the God that has chosen the name of Father to allow me to love Him too and to give me His tenderness towards me and everyone.

By answering His question, I will not tell Jesus only who I believe He is, but I will also tell Him: «Come, Lord Jesus. Come to give me your love and to let yourself to be loved by me too. My love does not add anything to your fullness, but turns my life from the fragile vase it is into a container full of goodness and humility».

Jesus is the Christ destined to rise after being rejected and dying. Peter, as I would do, rebukes Jesus because He has allowed for suffering, being rejected by men and looking abandoned by God. The rejection of the cross though is characteristic of Satan, God’s enemy. This needs to disappear from the life of the Children of God, so they may follow the Christ on His path, the very path of the cross. I will lose my life in this world, but I will demonstrate my faith and I will be God’s gift for many.

Jesus does not tell Peter «Go away», as He had said to Satan in the desert, but «Get behind me». He is still retaining him as a disciple, but he will need to be a disciple without forgetting that the disciple is not better than the master. The disciple, Peter too, despite Jesus having approved his sentence, needs to know his place, behind Jesus. Who wants to teach Jesus, or rebuke Him, as Peter did, who did not understand why the Christ had to suffer and to be killed by the chiefs, who wants to teach Jesus is out of line: he is on the tempter’s side, Satan’s.

And the disciple too will need to learn how to lose his life for the love of Jesus, to be a true disciple. In their life too will come true the prophets’ words we have heard today: «My face I did not shield from buffets and spitting». Let us welcome Jesus’s mission in the world: it is the whole Church’s mission. Let us pray with trust and full abandonment to the Father’s will, knowing that, as today’s Psalm says: «I shall walk before the Lord in the land of the living».