Everything is a gift from Him!, all
the things that come from Him are grace, it means that they are sweetness
and benevolence, and everything, that we can say about Him, is very
little or almost nothing, although all the most beautiful and positive
adjectives, that man has to express the noblest and the most sublime
things, is very short to say to Him. He is this and more than we can
imagine and express about Him.
The same thing happens when we talk
about His mercy. The Hebrews used a term (hesed) which indicated the
merciful love of God to His town. This term indicates the benevolence,
the solidarity, the affection that must exist between the members
of the same family or of a society, people that are ready to help
each other with love, generosity and fidelity. My brothers, the first
reading talks about the relations between God and His town that is
not able to observe the terms of the alliance that was made in the
Sinai.
Israel, symbol of the humanity, is
not able to maintain this attitude before a God who does not stop
loving His town in spite of the infidelities of it. God does not let
Himself be taken by the resentment and the desire of revenge, as we,
the humans, do; instead of this, “the kindness becomes in the sweetness,
and the mercy that God has to man, He offers the salvation that He
takes from the same sin, and He gives continuously the man new means
that are effective to triumph and to respond to the exigencies of
the alliance. As I said: ¡everything is a gift from God! Even the
capacity to respond to Him in gratitude!
The Biblical tradition reveals a God
who has a main characteristic: the mercy before the man’s sin. This
was very difficult to understand and to accept between the Jews that
were contemporaneous to Jesus; especially the religious authorities
rejected Him, the specialists in the Scripture and the Pharisees who
had the idea of a just God that was implacable before the sinner.
They believed that if they accepted a merciful God, they would be
professing the faith in a weak and too human God.
Dear brothers, Christ, true face of
the Father, according to our faith, makes us see that God loves us
because of pure benevolence of Him, gratuitously, in spite of we had
not deserved it, and we will never be able to deserve it! Jesus has
said to us, with His own testimony until the death in the cross, that
God is love.
My brothers, that’s what the evangelist
Saint Luke means when He transmits the three parabolas about the lost
thing, and found thing. Jesus shows us in these compositions of Him,
one of the most beautiful and sublime in the universal literature-,
that God is always able to forgiveness, simply because He is God and
not a human creature. God is very happy when somebody returns to the
way of good; when that man allows himself to be loved by Him. The
third parabola of these three is the one that better describes the
image of the God that Jesus has revealed, and it could be called:
“parabola of the merciful Father”. This parabola shows us how a patient
God does not want the death of the sinner; he wants the sinner to
get the conversion and to live. (Wisdom 11, 23; 12, 1; Romans 2, 4-5;
2Peter 3, 9).
Brothers, in the same evangelical passage
we can see how the process of the conversion is. In fact, we see,
in the narration, how once the younger son moves away and touches
the bottom, he realizes what he has lost, but he also knows that he
has the possibility of recuperating it with only one decision of Him:
to return to let himself be loved by his father and to share everything
with Him. We can make another consideration from the figure of the
older brother that by his straightness that was understood like submission
and repression of himself, he is not able to value what he has, and
he does not enjoy it, he distorts everything because of his irrational
attitude of envy and resentment: he is not happy, and he does not
allow the other to be happy.
My brothers, all of us become sinners,
disobedient, and foolish only because we do not let ourselves be loved;
because we do not appreciate all the good that comes with the love
that God has for us. The only way to leave from our situation of
sin is that after we contemplate the mercy of God and the patience
that He has to us, we can take the decision of returning to Him.
In other moment Jesus says to us: be
merciful as your Father is (Lk 6, 36). Dear brothers, in this way
we have to be like God, our Father, it is the way in which the older
brother must have acted with his brother. God grant that in this way
we respond in our daily life with the others.
In these days in which we have political
and enterprise agreements and discords, we, the catholic Mexican,
have a magnificent opportunity to practice the mercy, specially with
the people that have less in all the aspects of their lives, may the
ones, that have more, do not take as a pretext two cents of increase
in the liter of the fuels and the new taxes to increase the prices
of the products and services that they offer. Remembering that the
mercy is solidarity and brotherhood, it would not be bad that the
Christians can give testimony of their mercy fitting just a little
bit their necessities to the general situation of the country. The
profit is in opposition to the mercy.
We entrusted our little girl and sweet
Lady of Guadalupe, our mother and teacher, with the desire of building
a righter and brotherly country, in order to have an authentic peace
founded on love and justice.
