READING OF THE DAY First reading from the Book of the Prophet Baruch Bar 5:1-9
Jerusalem, take off your robe of mourning and misery; put on the splendor of glory from God forever: wrapped in the cloak of justice from God, bear on your head the mitre that displays the glory of the eternal name. For God will show all the earth your splendor: you will be named by God forever the peace of justice, the glory of God’s worship.
Up, Jerusalem! stand upon the heights; look to the east and see your children gathered from the east and the west at the word of the Holy One, rejoicing that they are remembered by God. Led away on foot by their enemies they left you: but God will bring them back to you borne aloft in glory as on royal thrones. For God has commanded that every lofty mountain be made low, and that the age-old depths and gorges be filled to level ground, that Israel may advance secure in the glory of God. The forests and every fragrant kind of tree have overshadowed Israel at God’s command; for God is leading Israel in joy by the light of his glory, with his mercy and justice for company.
PSALM 126
When the Lord turned again the captivity of Zion,
we were like them that dream.
Then was our mouth filled with laughter,
and our tongue with singing: then said they among the heathen,
The Lord hath done great things for them.
The Lord hath done great things for us; whereof we are glad.
Turn again our captivity, O Lord, as the streams in the south.
They that sow in tears shall reap in joy.
He that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him.
Second reading from the Letter of St. Paul to the Philippians Phil 1:4-6, 8-11
Brothers and sisters: I pray always with joy in my every prayer for all of you, because of your partnership for the gospel from the first day until now. I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work in you will continue to complete it until the day of Christ Jesus. God is my witness, how I long for all of you with the affection of Christ Jesus. And this is my prayer: that your love may increase ever more and more in knowledge and every kind of perception, to discern what is of value, so that you may be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God.
GOSPEL OF THE DAY From the Gospel according to Luke Lk 3:1-6
In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip tetrarch of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias was tetrarch of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John the son of Zechariah in the desert. John went throughout the whole region of the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, as it is written in the book of the words of the prophet Isaiah: A voice of one crying out in the desert: “Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths. Every valley shall be filled and every mountain and hill shall be made low. The winding roads shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth, and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.”
WORDS OF THE HOLY FATHER In this season of Advent, let us be guided by the Baptist’s exhortation: “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight!”, he tells us. We prepare the way of the Lord and make his paths straight when we examine our conscience, when we scrutinize our attitudes, in order to eliminate these sinful manners that I mentioned, which are not from God: success at all costs; power to the detriment of the weak; the desire for wealth; pleasure at any price. May the Virgin Mary help us to prepare ourselves for the encounter with this ever greater Love, which is what Jesus brings and which, on Christmas night, becomes very very small, like a seed fallen on the soil. And Jesus is this seed: the seed of the kingdom of God. (Angelus, 4 December 2016)
FAUSTI - John is the prototype of the man that God has prepared to stand before His face, which is Jesus, and to open this way of access to others. It is the person ready to welcome the Lord Who comes. Living synthesis of the Old Testament, in him we see the fundamental characteristic of the whole history of Israel: the expectation. Fruit of an absolute faith in the promise, it is the indispensable condition for the accomplishment. God was so late in fulfilling His promise, because He waited to be expected by someone who should had welcomed Him. If He is not received, even if He comes, it is as if He had not come. Whoever waits "tends to" what do not yet ther'is. John is all outstretched towards God's future and calls the men to break their balancing act. to turn to God. Whoever waits "tends to" what i do not yet have there. John is all outstretched towards God's future and calls people to break their balance to turn to it. The Word of God is addressed to all, religious or not; every flesh is called to conversion to see salvation. The place where the Word reaches us is the wilderness. It is the empty and uninhabitable space where man finds his own truth and God's truth. Only its silence is earthly suitable for accepting His Word. The desert recalls the fundamental experience of exodus, the exit from the non-identity and slavery towards freedom and the service of God. John lives in the desert to indicate that the permanent situation of man is that of exodus. He must constantly come out of all slavery and walk towards God's promise, with no other guarantee except His faithfulness. In the desert heaven and earth are equally empty, strained of silence. Nothing distracts. In this nothing of what ther'is , the new and creating Word can resonate and be heard. The desert is in synthesis the life of God, the opposite of that of man who escapes from it. In fact, he prefers the tombs of Egypt, the flight from freedom. John travels through the region of the Jordan, the threshold of the promised land. This geographical fact is also theological. It qualifies him as the last prophet before the fulfillment. He preaches a Baptism. To be baptized means to immerse oneself, to go to the bottom. To the acceptance of one's own symbolic death, expressed in immersion in water, the desire for a rebirth is added, symbolised by the emergence. John calls to a baptism of conversion. It is not simply a rite. It really implies a change of mentality and life. This conversion is ordered to the remission of sins. Evil should not be expiated: it is forgiven by the One who loves us. God is Love, therefore gift. Evil is conquered by forgiveness, the eminent super-giving of His Love for us, so that there, where sin abounded, Grace may had overabounded. The important thing is to recognize before Him one's own sin. Sin is objective, and it is towards God. They come out from it with His forgiveness. Guilt, on the other hand, is subjective: it is a sense of failure towards oneself, which leads to an expiation that never redeems. One can only come out of it with a correct sense of sin, in an experience of God as Love that forgives.
-->John, in accordance with his name, proclaims the Grace and Consolation of God It is a cry that rises in that place of truth of man that is the desert. It is a human cry, a voice, but not yet a word: "I am the voice of one who cries out in the desert: prepare the way of the Lord, straighten his paths". (Is 40,3). We perceive the voice before the word. John then indicates Christ, just as the Word is expressed by the voice. The voice gives a substance to the Word, the Word gives a meaning to the voice. So each of us, like the Baptist, must be a voice whose Word is Christ. The whole of human history is a voice-over and a nonsenseful shouting, which finds in Jesus, the Eternal Word of God, its own meaning and its own life. This cry also invites us to make right His paths, that is, God's paths. Man does not know this paths, loses them, and goes wrong on this paths. Filled precipices are inequalities and levelled injustices. May the abyss of injustice be filled with the mercy of man and the abyss of despair be filled with the Mercy of God. Faith, the first gift of God's Mercy, fills the ravine of distrust. Humility is the truth of man, who is earth, and in this truth the man encounters God who alone in it comes to meet him to save him. To each one who experiences the precariousness of his being a man and the sinfulness of not being a man, God's salvation is given.
D. Fredo - When we read the Gospel, in order to enjoy its richness we must put ourselves in the shoes of the first readers or listeners who did not know how it would all end. The evangelist writes with pomposity: "In the fifteenth year of the empire of Tiberius Caesar..." The beginning of this passage is solemn, because the evangelist then wants to arouse surprise. It begins with Tiberius Caesar. At that time the powerful considered themselves gods, so the evangelist begins with the person who is the highest, for them closest to God, and is a God himself, the emperor. While Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, Herod was governor of Galilee, and Philip, his brother, governor of Iturée and Trachonitis, we see how solemn is this beginning, the evangelist goes to fish out a certain Lysania, a semi-unknown personage, governor of Abilene, that is of anti-Lebanon, under the high priests Annas and Caiaphas. Why "high priests"? The high priest was one. But the evangelist places two, Annas and Caiaphas. Why all this? The evangelist wants to reach the number seven. The number seven, in the language of the Bible, represents what is full, what is complete, what is total. We could say with a language understandable to us today "it was the G7 of the time", the most powerful people on earth. Well, here is the surprise: the Word of God came upon ... On whom will the Word of God come down? Here we have Tiberius Caesar, the emperor, God himself, we also have the high priests who were God's representatives on earth. To whom will God turn to manifest His Word? Well, when God has to intervene in history - this is the surprise - he carefully avoids sacred and religious places and persons because He knows that they are notoriously resistant to His message. In fact, here is the surprise, the Word of God came to ... none of the powerful, but to a certain John, son of Zechariah, in the desert. But what is John doing in the desert? John, as the son of a priest, at the age of eighteen had to go to the temple to be examined to make in order to verify that he had none of the defects that prevented the exercise of the priesthood and then continue, perpetuate the priesthood of his father. John did not. John is the child who from his mother's womb was filled with the Holy Spirit, he is the man of the Spirit, not the man of the ritual. So he breaks with society and goes into the desert, away from Jerusalem and away from the temple. The Word of God descends upon him.He went through the whole region of the Jordan, the Jordan reminds us of the river that the Jewish people had to pass through to enter the promised land.Now the promised land has become a land of slavery from which the people must come out. Preaching a baptism ... the term "baptism" does not have our liturgical meaning, it was a rite in which - the term means immersion - one was completely immersed in water, one symbolically died to what one had been, and came out as a new person,with another vision of values. So John preaches this sign as an image of a change of conversion. In the Greek language conversion is expressed in two ways: one is religious conversion, the return to God, the return to religion and the evangelists carefully avoid this term. The other, used by the evangelist, is the change of behavior, a radical change in one's existence.That is why this message of change could not be addressed to the priestly caste in power, which does not like change.
--> But John says, "Change your life." What does conversion mean? If until now you have lived for yourself, from now you live for others. Well this happens because of the forgiveness of sins. What John does is unheard of, it is a tremendous challenge, because sins were forgiven by going to the temple in Jerusalem, bringing offerings to God. John disagrees. He, the man of the Spirit, says that the forgiveness of sins does not come through a liturgical ritual, offering gifts to the Lord, but through a radical change of life - living for others, and this achieves the forgiveness of sins. As it is written in the book of oracles of the prophet Isaiah, and here the evangelist quotes what is called "the book of consolation," the second part of the prophet Isaiah and was written by an anonymous prophet, at the end of the exile, and is an invitation to leave the land of slavery. "Voice of one crying out in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord, straighten His paths! Every ravine will be filled, every mountain and hill will be lowered; the crooked paths will become straight and the rough ones, leveled. Every man will see the salvation of God!" The text of the prophet Isaiah said, "Every man shall see the glory of God." The evangelist modifies it: "Every man will see the salvation of God". The glory of God is manifested in the salvation of every man. This meaning of "every man" is important. There are no people excluded from the love of God. There are no people excluded from this invitation to conversion in order to realize the kingdom of God. Every man is destined to experience the glory of the Lord, the love of the Lord: this is a message offered to all humanity. No one can feel excluded. Salvation is a gift for all and is not deserved with anything.
READING OF THE DAY
RispondiEliminaFirst reading from the Book of the Prophet Baruch
Bar 5:1-9
Jerusalem, take off your robe of mourning and misery;
put on the splendor of glory from God forever:
wrapped in the cloak of justice from God,
bear on your head the mitre
that displays the glory of the eternal name.
For God will show all the earth your splendor:
you will be named by God forever
the peace of justice, the glory of God’s worship.
Up, Jerusalem! stand upon the heights;
look to the east and see your children
gathered from the east and the west
at the word of the Holy One,
rejoicing that they are remembered by God.
Led away on foot by their enemies they left you:
but God will bring them back to you
borne aloft in glory as on royal thrones.
For God has commanded
that every lofty mountain be made low,
and that the age-old depths and gorges
be filled to level ground,
that Israel may advance secure in the glory of God.
The forests and every fragrant kind of tree
have overshadowed Israel at God’s command;
for God is leading Israel in joy
by the light of his glory,
with his mercy and justice for company.
PSALM 126
When the Lord turned again the captivity of Zion,
we were like them that dream.
Then was our mouth filled with laughter,
and our tongue with singing: then said they among the heathen,
The Lord hath done great things for them.
The Lord hath done great things for us; whereof we are glad.
Turn again our captivity, O Lord, as the streams in the south.
They that sow in tears shall reap in joy.
He that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed,
shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him.
Second reading from the Letter of St. Paul to the Philippians
Phil 1:4-6, 8-11
Brothers and sisters:
I pray always with joy in my every prayer for all of you,
because of your partnership for the gospel
from the first day until now.
I am confident of this,
that the one who began a good work in you
will continue to complete it
until the day of Christ Jesus.
God is my witness,
how I long for all of you with the affection of Christ Jesus.
And this is my prayer:
that your love may increase ever more and more
in knowledge and every kind of perception,
to discern what is of value,
so that you may be pure and blameless for the day of Christ,
filled with the fruit of righteousness
that comes through Jesus Christ
for the glory and praise of God.
GOSPEL OF THE DAY
From the Gospel according to Luke
Lk 3:1-6
In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar,
when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea,
and Herod was tetrarch of Galilee,
and his brother Philip tetrarch of the region
of Ituraea and Trachonitis,
and Lysanias was tetrarch of Abilene,
during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas,
the word of God came to John the son of Zechariah in the desert.
John went throughout the whole region of the Jordan,
proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins,
as it is written in the book of the words of the prophet Isaiah:
A voice of one crying out in the desert:
“Prepare the way of the Lord,
make straight his paths.
Every valley shall be filled
and every mountain and hill shall be made low.
The winding roads shall be made straight,
and the rough ways made smooth,
and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.”
WORDS OF THE HOLY FATHER
In this season of Advent, let us be guided by the Baptist’s exhortation: “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight!”, he tells us. We prepare the way of the Lord and make his paths straight when we examine our conscience, when we scrutinize our attitudes, in order to eliminate these sinful manners that I mentioned, which are not from God: success at all costs; power to the detriment of the weak; the desire for wealth; pleasure at any price. May the Virgin Mary help us to prepare ourselves for the encounter with this ever greater Love, which is what Jesus brings and which, on Christmas night, becomes very very small, like a seed fallen on the soil. And Jesus is this seed: the seed of the kingdom of God. (Angelus, 4 December 2016)
FAUSTI - John is the prototype of the man that God has prepared to stand before His face, which is Jesus, and to open this way of access to others.
RispondiEliminaIt is the person ready to welcome the Lord Who comes.
Living synthesis of the Old Testament, in him we see the fundamental characteristic of the whole history of Israel: the expectation.
Fruit of an absolute faith in the promise, it is the indispensable condition for the accomplishment. God was so late in fulfilling His promise, because He waited to be expected by someone who should had welcomed Him.
If He is not received, even if He comes, it is as if He had not come.
Whoever waits "tends to" what do not yet ther'is.
John is all outstretched towards God's future and calls the men to break their balancing act. to turn to God.
Whoever waits "tends to" what i do not yet have there.
John is all outstretched towards God's future and calls people to break their balance to turn to it.
The Word of God is addressed to all, religious or not; every flesh is called to conversion to see salvation.
The place where the Word reaches us is the wilderness. It is the empty and uninhabitable space where man finds his own truth and God's truth.
Only its silence is earthly suitable for accepting His Word.
The desert recalls the fundamental experience of exodus, the exit from the non-identity and slavery towards freedom and the service of God.
John lives in the desert to indicate that the permanent situation of man is that of exodus. He must constantly come out of all slavery and walk towards God's promise, with no other guarantee except His faithfulness.
In the desert heaven and earth are equally empty, strained of silence. Nothing distracts.
In this nothing of what ther'is , the new and creating Word can resonate and be heard. The desert is in synthesis the life of God, the opposite of that of man who escapes from it. In fact, he prefers the tombs of Egypt, the flight from freedom.
John travels through the region of the Jordan, the threshold of the promised land. This geographical fact is also theological. It qualifies him as the last prophet before the fulfillment. He preaches a Baptism. To be baptized means to immerse oneself, to go to the bottom. To the acceptance of one's own symbolic death, expressed in immersion in water, the desire for a rebirth is added, symbolised by the emergence. John calls to a baptism of conversion. It is not simply a rite. It really implies a change of mentality and life.
This conversion is ordered to the remission of sins. Evil should not be expiated: it is forgiven by the One who loves us. God is Love, therefore gift.
Evil is conquered by forgiveness, the eminent super-giving of His Love for us, so that there, where sin abounded, Grace may had overabounded.
The important thing is to recognize before Him one's own sin.
Sin is objective, and it is towards God. They come out from it with His forgiveness.
Guilt, on the other hand, is subjective: it is a sense of failure towards oneself, which leads to an expiation that never redeems. One can only come out of it with a correct sense of sin, in an experience of God as Love that forgives.
-->John, in accordance with his name, proclaims the Grace and Consolation of God It is a cry that rises in that place of truth of man that is the desert. It is a human cry, a voice, but not yet a word: "I am the voice of one who cries out in the desert: prepare the way of the Lord, straighten his paths".
RispondiElimina(Is 40,3). We perceive the voice before the word. John then indicates Christ, just as the Word is expressed by the voice.
The voice gives a substance to the Word, the Word gives a meaning to the voice.
So each of us, like the Baptist, must be a voice whose Word is Christ.
The whole of human history is a voice-over and a nonsenseful shouting, which finds in Jesus, the Eternal Word of God, its own meaning and its own life.
This cry also invites us to make right His paths, that is, God's paths. Man does not know this paths, loses them, and goes wrong on this paths.
Filled precipices are inequalities and levelled injustices.
May the abyss of injustice be filled with the mercy of man and the abyss of despair be filled with the Mercy of God.
Faith, the first gift of God's Mercy, fills the ravine of distrust. Humility is the truth of man, who is earth, and in this truth the man encounters God who alone in it comes to meet him to save him.
To each one who experiences the precariousness of his being a man and the sinfulness of not being a man, God's salvation is given.
D. Fredo - When we read the Gospel, in order to enjoy its richness we must put ourselves in the shoes of the first readers or listeners who did not know how it would all end. The evangelist writes with pomposity: "In the fifteenth year of the empire of Tiberius Caesar..." The beginning of this passage is solemn, because the evangelist then wants to arouse surprise. It begins with Tiberius Caesar. At that time the powerful considered themselves gods, so the evangelist begins with the person who is the highest, for them closest to God, and is a God himself, the emperor. While Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, Herod was governor of Galilee, and Philip, his brother, governor of Iturée and Trachonitis, we see how solemn is this beginning, the evangelist goes to fish out a certain Lysania, a semi-unknown personage, governor of Abilene, that is of anti-Lebanon, under the high priests Annas and Caiaphas. Why "high priests"? The high priest was one. But the evangelist places two, Annas and Caiaphas. Why all this? The evangelist wants to reach the number seven. The number seven, in the language of the Bible, represents what is full, what is complete, what is total. We could say with a language understandable to us today "it was the G7 of the time", the most powerful people on earth.
RispondiEliminaWell, here is the surprise: the Word of God came upon ... On whom will the Word of God come down? Here we have Tiberius Caesar, the emperor, God himself, we also have the high priests who were God's representatives on earth. To whom will God turn to manifest His Word? Well, when God has to intervene in history - this is the surprise - he carefully avoids sacred and religious places and persons because He knows that they are notoriously resistant to His message.
In fact, here is the surprise, the Word of God came to ... none of the powerful, but to a certain John, son of Zechariah, in the desert. But what is John doing in the desert? John, as the son of a priest, at the age of eighteen had to go to the temple to be examined to make in order to verify that he had none of the defects that prevented the exercise of the priesthood and then continue, perpetuate the priesthood of his father. John did not. John is the child who from his mother's womb was filled with the Holy Spirit, he is the man of the Spirit, not the man of the ritual. So he breaks with society and goes into the desert, away from Jerusalem and away from the temple. The Word of God descends upon him.He went through the whole region of the Jordan, the Jordan reminds us of the river that the Jewish people had to pass through to enter the promised land.Now the promised land has become a land of slavery from which the people must come out. Preaching a baptism ... the term "baptism" does not have our liturgical meaning, it was a rite in which - the term means immersion - one was completely immersed in water, one symbolically died to what one had been, and came out as a new person,with another vision of values.
So John preaches this sign as an image of a change of conversion. In the Greek language conversion is expressed in two ways: one is religious conversion, the return to God, the return to religion and the evangelists carefully avoid this term. The other, used by the evangelist, is the change of behavior, a radical change in one's existence.That is why this message of change could not be addressed to the priestly caste in power, which does not like change.
--> But John says, "Change your life." What does conversion mean? If until now you have lived for yourself, from now you live for others. Well this happens because of the forgiveness of sins. What John does is unheard of, it is a tremendous challenge, because sins were forgiven by going to the temple in Jerusalem, bringing offerings to God. John disagrees. He, the man of the Spirit, says that the forgiveness of sins does not come through a liturgical ritual, offering gifts to the Lord, but through a radical change of life - living for others, and this achieves the forgiveness of sins. As it is written in the book of oracles of the prophet Isaiah, and here the evangelist quotes what is called "the book of consolation," the second part of the prophet Isaiah and was written by an anonymous prophet, at the end of the exile, and is an invitation to leave the land of slavery. "Voice of one crying out in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord, straighten His paths!
RispondiEliminaEvery ravine will be filled, every mountain and hill will be lowered; the crooked paths will become straight and the rough ones, leveled. Every man will see the salvation of God!" The text of the prophet Isaiah said, "Every man shall see the glory of God." The evangelist modifies it: "Every man will see the salvation of God". The glory of God is manifested in the salvation of every man. This meaning of "every man" is important. There are no people excluded from the love of God. There are no people excluded from this invitation to conversion in order to realize the kingdom of God. Every man is destined to experience the glory of the Lord, the love of the Lord: this is a message offered to all humanity.
No one can feel excluded.
Salvation is a gift for all and is not deserved with anything.