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

Sunday, July 8th of 2007

THE KINGDOM IS ANNOUNCED THROUGH POOR MEANS

Brothers, let us thank God, our Father and Lord, because between our limitations he has trusted his Church the joyful news of the salvation and its same realization. In this way, my brothers, it is evident that the work is of Him and not ours, because we only cooperate poorly in the work that He has indicated through his son Jesus Christ.

We have sung in the psalm from this Sunday that the works of the Lord are admirable. It is like this, my brothers, because everything is work of His mercy and of His love for us. The salvation, that the Church announces to all the men, starts in a new world that is already possible from now, because it is work of God.

The Christians are sent to announce and to start new realities because the Lord Jesus, with His death and his resurrection has made them possible. This is the joyful announce of hope and optimism that provokes a great joy in the ones that receive it in the humility.

This great news contrasts with a world that lives submerged in lie, in hatred and in violence and that it resists to believe in something that is different, because of its fatalistic attitude, it believes that it is like this. For that reason the Christian that is in this world, he has to accept that he acts, thinks and speaks against current, with many oppositions that can even take him to death, and Jesus Knows it very well because he says that He is sending to us as lambs between ferocious wolves.

How many times, dear brothers, we acted or maybe we act like wolves, as the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau says: “man is wolf to man”, unfortunately when we act like this, we are affirming these words.

But Jesus sent his disciples to deny this truth that seems incontestable. In this world that is known remarkably by violence and aggressiveness, the Christians have the mission to announce a different world, the one that is known by the humility of the lambs. His only presence in discretion, it is a sentence to violence and hatred, as revenge as well.

Even more: the Disciples of Christ that are not only the twelve, according to the Gospel of Luke, go with lack of power and securities of this world. Their luggage for the mission is their generous and joyful donation; it is their only richness which is expressed in deficiency of money and of clothing that give security and prestige to the ones of the world.

In fact, to the world the mark of the clothing, the amount of money and the power that a person has and the titles that gets, it is something with a great value, it is something very important, whereas the envoys of Jesus have the joy to live, to serve to the kingdom and they are happy and satisfied because of the hospitality that they receive and the attention that they receive when the others listened to them. As long as the others listen and attend to them, they are satisfied. The missionaries of Jesus work for the nearness of the kingdom, and they give testimony of this with their poverty, their limitations and their great joy in the freedom. To live all this, dear brothers, it is the greatest proof of that the presence of the Kingdom has already a place in this world, but it is not absolutely of this world, because it tends to the fullness in beyond the salvation.

To announce the Gospel does not ensure the success, and the faithful disciple of Jesus knows it. This disciple knows very well that he must have a lot of patience and not to be hopeless making fall fire of the sky, as James y John wanted. The rejection of the Samaritan ones, that the last sunday we listened, gives occasion to Jesus to teach about patience and tolerance.

The disciples of Jesus, my dear brothers, have to learn also to coexist with disagreeable situations in exchange for the honor of being bearers of good news of salvation for everybody; this is their payment and the cause of a deep and authentic joy that is able to compensate all the bad moments and all the deficiencies.

Saint Paulo understood it like this according to the second readind from this sunday. To him, there is not another advantage that the cross of Christ, through which “the world is crucified to me , and I am crucified to the world”. The apostle shows whit this expression the paradox of the faith and of the ministry of the missionary: the weakness of the envoy according to the criteria of the world, the cross is the mean that brings the salvation.

In the joyful and simple celebration from every Sunday, we update, my dear brothers, the mystery of death and resurrection of Christ that is His victory over the evil of this world in which we live submerged and often compromised on it. When we enter to the dynamic and the logic of the faith, we can participate in the victory of Jesus. Without the Euchatist we can not escape from the influence of the egoistic, unjust and violent world that surrounds us. Let us be constant in the fervent practice of our mass from the Sundays in order to be true witnesses and to announce the goods of the kingdom.

May our little girl and sweet lady accompanies us with her example to work discreetly and firmly in the preaching of the message of Jesus and about Jesus His Son.

Amen