18/01/2009 – 2nd. Sunday in Ordinary Time - B

1st. Reading 1Sam 3,3-10.19 Psalm 39 2^nd. Reading 1 Cor 6,13-15.17-20 Gospel Jn 1,35-42

First Day of Prayer for Christian Unity

The Christians who want to learn how to pray need to learn it from Jesus. His disciples, watching how he use to pray, realized that they were not able to pray like him, even though they have always did it in the synagogue or during the family liturgies as Jews. Watching Jesus praying they realized that his way of relating with God was different than theirs, and therefore they needed to learn how to pray. Hence they asked him: “Lord, teach us how to pray!” What was this newness that they have seen in him? In what way the prayer of Jesus was different from any other prayer? What was characteristic of the prayer of Jesus, that the word used by the pagans to show their relationship with the divinity, could not explain correctly his way of praying? Jesus, when praying, does not think of himself: he thinks only of the Father, of his desires, of his will, of his merciful love for all peoples and for each and every single person. Jesus, praying, is all to be united with the Father, to take upon himself the way the Father looks at the world, to become one heart with him, to let him be filled with his love. When Jesus prays, he does not think of his own material needs, of his created needs, and not even for the needs of others. He knows that nothing is hidden from God, and that if we do his will, God showers all his blessings. Jesus knows that sin generates suffering and disorder, pain and sicknesses, and therefore he sees prayers as the instrument by which he conforms to the will of the Father, a will that can only be love. This characteristic of prayer is to be expressed even in the terminology used: the Christians form a new word in Greek, composed of the one used by the pagans, adding a particle, that leads to the understanding that prayer is not looking towards ourselves, but to God with all the love and desire with which we are able to! In the Italian, like other western languages, heirs of Latin terminology, we don’t have a word that expresses this important aspect: the Latins did not feel the need for a new word like the Greeks and we are to be happy with the same terminology used by the pagans. But we are to be aware that we risk understanding prayer only as the request of favors and blessings, of answering to our desires.

Today we listen to the call of Samuel and his disposition to answer to it. His openness is almost a prophecy to the immediateness by which the two disciples of John the Baptist decided to follow Jesus. They had heard their master saying: “Here is the Lamb of God”; and so they understood that Jesus was the promised Messiah. He is the lamb that God had given to Abram to offer in place of his son Isaac, the lamb whose blood saved the people from being exterminated while in Egypt, the lamb on whom every year all the sins of the people was put and left wandering into the desert to die, the lamb upon whom every family nourishes itself during the celebration of the covenant with God at Easter! The two disciples, therefore, follow Jesus not to obtain something, but to stay with him, to serve him and learn from him to live according to the Father.

Samuel, who was ready to wake up during the night in obedience to God’s call and to obey to the command of the priest Eli who kept on sending back to bed, is an example for all those who follow Jesus. They stay with him, and draw to him those they love. The most beautiful love is that to help others know Jesus. Andrew, one of the two disciples, accompanied his brother to Jesus, and this is called by the Lord! To him Jesus gives a new name, to show that as from now on he has a new life, changed, all to be discovered! Simon is called Peter, not any more with a fisherman’s name, but with the name of the disciple that finds in Jesus life, security.

Life with Jesus is truly new: st. Paul takes by hand, like little children, the Corinthians to teach them, so that they can understand their new life in the light of belonging to the Lord. Who belongs to Jesus becomes a temple of the Holy Spirit. This is a beautiful and consoling truth, real, from which springs a new way of living. Who usually follows his instincts, in particular those sexual instincts, is not to feel justified by their general behavior: if you belong to Jesus, even your body belong to him, and he is to use it for his kingdom. If you use your body to satisfy your passions, blame Jesus, who acquired you with his death so that you become one of his members, for the glory of God! “Stay away from impurity”, says the apostle, who was living in a world where sexual impurity was not only fashionable, but also consecrated, practiced in the temples. The purity of the light of God is to shine through our bodies and the newness of the resurrection of Jesus. We cannot do what all the other do, satisfying our wants and our pleasures: we would accomplices of grave scandals: couples wont be helped to reciprocal faithfulness, but drawn away from one another, unable to carry the cross in case of a crisis.

Our yes to Jesus is to be whole, both for our personal life and for the life of the Church: She is the Body of Christ, and no member should do what the head does not want. Let us pray in these days that every Christians answers to the call of following always and only Jesus. Let us pray for those who listen more to their reasoning than to the Spirit of unity that God gave us!