HOMILY PRONOUNCED BY MONS. DIEGO MONROY PONCE; GENERAL AND EPISCOPAL VICAR OF GUADALUPE, RECTOR OF THE SANCTUARY.
ORDINARY XIII SUNDAY

Sunday, July 1st of 2007

MY HEART IS HAPPY, MY INHERITANCE IS THE LORD

Dear brothers, the grace of God our Father, is kept effective and active. Definitively, its effectiveness depends on us, because His mercy is constant and infinite. Let us thank to him because of his kindness in spite of our lack of perseverance in the pursuit of His son.

My dear brothers, this Sunday we have again the topic of the following. This idea is not just connected with the monks, nuns or priests. It is a very important subject for our Christian faith. For the faith of all those that call themselves Christians by the baptism and that feed constantly their faith with the Eucharist, the Penance, and the practice of the charity.

The readings of the first book of the kings and the one of the Gospel are apparently in contradiction. If it would be like this, it would not be an invitation to understand with great depth the subject that is presented to us, because we know that we can not admit any contradiction in the Holy Scripture. Let us look for how they complement each other.

The life, the mission, and the ministry of Jesus are marked by the opposition and the rejection by his contemporaries, especially by the religious authorities. We see that when He started his work in Galilee, he was immediately rejected by the Jews in the same synagogue of Nazareth. Today we also see in the Gospel that He suffered the same thing when he started his way to Jerusalem where he would complete his mission through his passion and death. Now the ones who are against are the Samaritans simply by their opposition to the richness of the Jewish faith.

Jesus is a man of firm decisions: when his departure from this world was approaching, Jesus took the decision to go to Jerusalem, as Saint Luke said to us in the paragraph of the gospel that we just listened. The project of His father is first. This is the thing that impels him to take that determination. It is fidelity that is expressed in obedience. And it is what also demands to his disciples: promptness to make what is interesting to God.

My brothers, to follow Jesus, it is something very serious and very compromising because it is determining for the salvation of whom is proud of being disciple of Him. For that reason to follow Jesus it is needed certain degree of radical decision. So, the problem for the believer it is not to leave or not the fastenings that do not allow us to follow Him, but, to follow or not Jesus. When the decision is taken, then everything is left back, although it could be or seem noble, valuable and legitimate.

My brothers, in this life it is not possible to have everything. It is necessary to take decisions. We have to select something and we have to leave the rest of the other things. We just live intensely if we take constantly free decisions with sense. The best thing would be that we are able to choose always the best. In this way we learn to be free!.

My brothers, to be Christians implies many risks. If we did not realize the seriousness of this, it is probable that we had made Christianity to the measurement of our convenience. There are many Christians that we have not taken deeply our faith, a radical following of Jesus. We want to have everything. And we desire, perhaps ingenuously, to follow Jesus, but in a romantic way and in a very sentimental way. It means that it is a way that does not take us to compromise ourselves with the real interests of God and of Christ, because we do not separate from all the things that are obstacles and that are not necessary to serve Him as He wants to be served.

Saint Paul remains us, in the second reading, that Christ has liberate us to stay free. We can not ignore, brothers, that there are many things that enslave us and that they impede to us to follow radically Jesus. In fact, to follow Jesus we have to go with a very light luggage. It is necessary to leave all the ballasts that serve as a pretext to stop us or to slow down the pursuit and to make it more difficult.

Brothers, let us accept (somehow) that to follow Jesus, in fact it is not difficult. What makes it difficult is the lack of decision to follow Him leaving all that hinders. Let us ask the lord the joy of not having other thing that what He gives us. Even more, God grant that we could recite, from the deepest of our heart with the psalmist, that the Lord is our unique good, that He is our inheritance.

When the Eucharist is celebrated and we can contemplate the freedom with which Jesus, who was moved by the love to his father and to us, undertook the way of the cross and he embraced it giving his life for us, let us listen the call of Jesus to follow him with our cross that maybe consists in leaving the things that are obstacles to follow Him in joy and freedom by love; not to have more than Jesus whom is given continuously in the communion and in his word to us.

May our little girl and sweet lady, model of faithful and free pursuit for all her children, keeps us in the firm decision to follow the footsteps of his Son.

Amen.