OMELIE / Omelie EN

09 giu 2024

09/06/2024 - 10th Sunday of O.T. - B

09/06/2024 - 10^th Sunday of O.T. - B

Reading 1 GEN 3,9-15 * Psalm 129/130 * Reading 2 2COR 4,13-5,1 * Gospel MK 3,20

With the first reading we jump in a dramatic time of the so-called Garden of Eden. Now it is not a paradise anymore, because the man, Adam with Eve, has felt scared and has hidden. There is no more light, no more serenity, there is no more peace. From the outside everything looks as it was before: the trees and the grass and the animals are the same as before, but the man has changed: he sees everything differently. He sees the trees only as useful or not useful to him to hide in. How is that? What did happen? Furthermore, his soul has started noticing his own body, and it was disgusted. This is why he has fled not to be seen: by whom? By himself first of all, thinking he could hide also from that God he had only received love from. He does not want to cultivate the relationship with Him anymore. He wants to put distance between them. Despite keeping away from Him though his fear and his shame do not disappear.

The way Adam behaves is the same we can often see: when a man or a woman start going down their own path, based on their desires, and not devised by the wise teachings of God’s Church, they cannot or do not want to take part in the gatherings where God is present anymore.

God does not enjoy this distance, on the contrary. He looks for the scared man: He sees the scared man: He sees him suffering and He suffers as well. He tries to call him, to see if he answers. Adam still needs, nay, needs even more than ever, to realise he is loved. God calls him with His voice, like He did not know where he was, He who knows everything and He calls him: « Where are you?».

The following dialogue you have already heard. Fear and shame have transformed the paradise in a hostile place. Where are fear and shame coming from? We know it: they come from sin, which was presented as freedom, as infinite wellbeing. In fact, the voice they heard seemed positive, gentle, convincing, but it was seduction. Now they realise they have been cheated, but too late. They have doubted their God and preferred a stranger, from whom they had still to receive anything good.

That voice is still echoing. It has entered the ears of Jesus’s relatives, and it also enters those of the scribes and the Pharisees. So it is not far from us either. The relatives think that their Jesus is «out of his mind»,since the moment He says they need to listen always to the Father. They leave the house and they set out to get Him, if needed even using violence. At the same time the scribes are even more explicit: they have decided that the miracles Jesus has done are coming from the enemy of men, even worse from the chief of the enemies of men. They are so sure that they even mention its name: «Beelzebul».

Jesus is prepared: the prophets had already said that for God’s friends traps have been prepared, temptations: however, He uses them as proof of authenticity. He tries to make those accusers, or worse, those detractors, think. If Beelzebul had given someone the power and the weapons to fight itself, it would have been really stupid. And anyway, if it had done so, its kingdom would have been over. The alternative is that the skill and the strength to fight it come instead from God: then its kingdom is truly over and instead the kingdom of God in this world has begun.

Nobody can fight this very easy reasoning. How could the enemy penetrate a man’s heart, nay, a Christian’s? It has tried to take away from his heart Jesus’s presence by making him abandon the times for prayer, making him forget the word of God, taking him away from the moments of communion with the brethren in the faith. This is why it was able to establish itself in the life of the believer to rule him. How will Jesus’s disciples be able to defeat the prince of this world which is burrowed in their heart, in their house and in their society?

Jesus wants to help them. They need to restrain it, and to restrain it you need to be stronger than it. The man does not have this ability, he cannot, so he should try to hung on to his shepherd. Every day he will give him space in his heart, in his family, in his small society where he lives and work.

So the believer lives always having faith, not in himself, but in the one who lives in his heart. He does not let himself to be discouraged, not even if he sees his life on earth going towards death, when “our outer self is wasting away”. We are sure that in the intimity with Jesus “our inner self is being renewed day by day”. In fact we can see people who, the more they grow older, the more it looks like they are growing younger. The Lord Jesus’ presence in them makes them freer, more joyful, attentive to understand everyone, to have the ability to immediately forgive and be compassionate. The sin disappears from their heart and the enemy is defeated. The new garden of Eden, the paradise, is growing closer again!