OMELIE / Omelie EN

30 nov 2025

30/11/2025 - 1st Sunday T. A. - Year A

30/11/2025 - 1st Sunday T. A. - Year A

1st reading Is 2:1-5 from Psalm 121 2nd reading Rom 13:11-14 Gospel Mt 24:37-44

“Come, let us climb the LORD’s mountain, to the house of the God of Jacob, that he may instruct us in his ways, and we may walk in his paths.” Beginning a Liturgical Year is like beginning the ascent to the mountain of the Lord, that mountain where we can encounter God, the God who has already made himself present in the lives of the human beings. In fact, he has established covenants with them to make himself known as Father and friend, protector and teacher, just as he did with Jacob.

We set out on a journey to meet him and to welcome his teachings. We set out on those paths where we are sure to find him, that is, on those paths that he himself shows us through the words of the prophets and, in particular, through Jesus. We are sure that God's paths are the best, where our humanity becomes fully realised, both as individuals and as a people. On this journey, which we start each year anew, we will experience the various stages of waiting, recognition, listening, identification and immersion in his love in order to receive it and give it as a present. These are the stages of Advent, Christmas, Lent and Easter, until Pentecost, and the rest of the time we receive as a gift to fulfil our mission. We will experience these stages in a new way, enriched by the new experiences that have marked our lives.

We have been placed in the world by God precisely to transform the world. We find it always immersed in wars and struggles that make it a place of fear, suffering and death. In it, it seems that no other language is known than that of Cain. This is not what God intended when he created it, and so here is our task to transform “their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks”, so that peace may envelop the whole earth. We will introduce the new language, that of Abel, capable of loving to the point of giving up his life: we will learn it always and only from Jesus.

We want to make the effort to walk in the ways of the Lord, not in order to achieve our own peace, but to immerse the world in the love of the Father and the obedience of the Son. We do not delude ourselves that we can change the whole world, either in a short or a long time. We ourselves struggle greatly to replace our own resentments with thoughts of benevolence, with desires for blessing and prayers for the salvation of those who use the sword against us. With our love for God and obedience of faith, we will also be of help to others so that they too may be conquered, “taken” by the same light and the same love.

People are distracted by their own occupations and material needs and do not think that one day they will leave this world. Such forgetfulness makes them superficial and weak, and, worse still, unable to discern the times they live, like that ninety-year-old man who yesterday told me of his hatred for a person who had defrauded him of a metre of land. He did not realise that this hatred prevented him from enjoying the metres he had left and, above all, from attaining the bliss of God's servants when he will have to leave everything behind.

St Paul therefore urges us to wake up from our slumber: it is a slumber that prevents us from seeing things and events, both beautiful and unpleasant, in the light of God and of the path that should lead us to him. The apostle therefore exhorts us to behave in such a way that we are found “not in orgies and drunkenness, not in promiscuity and lust, not in rivalry and jealousy”.

Jesus is the true garment which clads our whole life: his word and his love are a more secure life than the pleasures that the world wants us to see as legitimate or as our right. These create strife and struggle, while the Word of the Lord creates harmony, order and fraternal communion.