05/07/2009 – 14th. Sunday in Ordinary Season - B

Ist. Reading Ezek 2,2-5 Psalm 122 IInd. Reading 2Cor 12,7-10 Gospel Mk 6,1-6

“Your Kingdom come”. With these words we relive the joy of Jesus who proclaimed: “The Kingdom of God is at hand”. Jesus knew that he was the King: also his mother, Mary, knew it because it was told to her by the angel. Jesus knew also from the many Psalms that give only to God this title, but also to the one he sent, “today” begotten as Son are given “power over the far away coastlands” (Ps 2). He is the king for all to serve with joy: “Serve the Lord with joy, present yourselves to him with gladness” (Ps 100). There should be no fear in front of the royalty of God and therefore not even the royalty of the Son. He is a good King, a King who loves justice and right, a King to be jealous off. To obey him is better than doing what one wants to do. To obey him mean to secure one’s future, harmony with all, and peace between the peoples. His Reign has no territorial boundaries, is not limited to certain cultures or languages, neither to geographical places or distances. His Reign goes through all the human reigns. Even st. Paul, upon arriving Ephesus, in the synagogue tried “to persuade his listeners about the things of the Reign of God”. The way of defining the presence of the Father’s love among men is to say, it is the gathering of all the cultures of the world. In the entire world one understands the language of love, new language given by the Holy Spirit to those who believe in Jesus. It is because the Reign is already present that men and women from different peoples come together to help those who are weak, to help them finding food and water, to spare them from being abused from the multinational societies. Thanks to this Reign, founded already two thousand years ago, that money come out from our pockets to help the poor in the world, those stricken by natural disasters, such as earthquakes or tsunami, cyclones or natural disasters, or those who the human reigns have impoverished and damaged both materially and psychologically. We continue to pray: Your Kingdom come, offering our generous disposition to help so that the love of the Father reaches every person who might be forgotten on our planet.

Even though the Pauline Year came to an end, we want to continue to turn our attention to his writings because they are a word through which God wants to reach us using Paul’s wisdom. In today’s Second Reading the apostle shares a personal note. He has a serious pain that torments him continuously, “a thorn in the flesh”: it won’t satisfy our curiosity to know what it was. It is enough for us to learn how to behave in a situation of on going suffering. He interprets his pain as “a messenger from Satan to hit him”. He knows that sufferings don’t come from God, but from the enemy, who does everything to stop the proclamation of the Gospel. To this st. Paul reacts with prayer: “For three times I prayed to the Lord to keep it away from me”, and God won’t answer his prayer, on the contrary, he leaves him in pain because he could serve him by suffering, even so better: “Strength is manifested in weakness”. The disciple who suffers and is stopped from proclaiming the Gospel, and keeps on hoping and smiling, give the world a living witness of how beautiful and great is the power of God, of how a life lived in communion with the Lord Jesus is attractive and rich in harvest. Once this is understood, the apostle won’t ask anymore to the Lord to be freed, but prides in his weaknesses, be they sicknesses or persecutions, difficulties or anxieties. Paul’s example is precious to us in several moments in which we are tempted with discouragement when we find ourselves not doing what we would like to do for the Lord.

Jesus himself went through “a weakness” in proclaiming God’s Reign. His weakness lied in the fact of being known since his childhood as the carpenter of his town, as the relative of the one and the other who were known. Those who knew him so, could not welcome the Word of God from his mouth. Those who knew him as a relative or friend, or as a worker, were not able to catch the newness in him, the divine life. Such a knowledge was an obstacle, ‘a scandal’ to the faith of those who knew him. To Jesus this was a weakness that didn’t help him even to perform miracles in his town Nazareth! But this weakness became a prophecy, was part of God’s plan: “A prophet is not without honor except in his native place and among his own kin and in his own house”. This is to fulfill the prophecy of Ezechiel. The Word of God is proclaimed to all, even to those who don’t want to listen to it. It’s not the Word that is wrong, but the listeners, who look at the outside part of God’s instrument, instead of being ready for God himself, who is able to use whoever to communicate his will and his wisdom.

Let us make ours the prayer of the psalmist: “To you I lift up my eyes who are enthroned in heaven. As the eyes of the servants are on the hands of their masters…so are our eyes on the Lord our God, till he have pity on us”. Let us always want the will of God” his wisdom is higher than ours, and the love by whichhe loves us is far more deep than that we can have for ourselves!