Brothers: faith is a gift from God.
He does not give us bad things that can displease us. He asks us that
today we accept the gift of His kingdom; it means that He invites
us to participate in the eternal banquet of happiness and joy. What
does the narrow door mean? We do not have to make a mistake in the
attempt to understand the message from today.
The kingdom of God is as a banquet;
it is a place of a happy and joyful encounter, with the own characteristic
of the eternity; although it is a gratuitous gift, it demands to be
accepted in the freedom and in the responsibility. Dear brothers,
maybe that is what causes that it seems too difficult.
When we are vain and we believe that
we are the center of the universe, we think that we deserve everything.
That’s what happed to the people of Israel that when they saw their
glorious past and that it was so favored; they thought that they were
privileged beings over all the towns of the earth and that they could
enjoy unconditionally everything. Specially, once God had made them
return from the captivity in Babylonia, they started to believe that
that was what God had to do with them, because they were His people.
The task of the prophets of Israel
was to remind them that that was not like that, they had the great
responsibility of being only the great entrance door of all the nations
in the eternal project of salvation that God had for the whole humanity.
That was their mission, being just a sign, and an instrument of salvation
for the whole humanity, like now the Church is!.
In the first reading, the prophet Isaiah
(at the end of his book) expresses it like this when he talks about
the messianic times as the meeting of all the towns in the true temple
of God, like a new Jerusalem. The Bible of America says that the book
could not finish in a more universalist way: “all the towns form with
Israel a great cultural and liturgical community”.
The past Sunday, the letter to the Hebrews exhorted us to the perseverance
in the combat of faith in order to obtain the salvation that God offers
us. Today, God invites us, through the same sacred writer, to accept
the paternal correction of God in order to fit what is not oriented
in a good way to get what is given to us as a gratuitous gift.
In the Gospel of Saint Luke, that we
continue listening to these Sundays, Jesus warns us, with his words
from this Sunday, that in the kingdom of God, the entry of many towns
and nations to this project of salvation, it has been foreseen, and
that it is very probable that the Jews, although they are from the
chosen town, they will not enter.
My dear brothers, the reason that we
must consider is that in the kingdom we can not buy a place, and we
do not have the acquired rights. We need to listen to Jesus, to follow
Him faithfully, and to be firm in the way of living in order to belong
to the kingdom. The effort would consist in this.
Speaking
more concretely: we are not going to save ourselves just because of
being baptized or being very docile to the cult (of the sacramental
practice of a mechanical way, without reflection), even more, we will
not save ourselves just because of being people that practice a merely
external religiosity, in spite of that it seems very emotive to us.
Then, it is not about multiplying the
acts of religion to gain heaven; this does not give any right. It
is not about doing the most difficult things, as if the narrow door
would consist in this. What we have to do is to receive, to be thankful
and to respond to the gift of God, and we also have to trust in that
it is what saves us (I think that there is no a thing more difficult);
and that it saves everybody, including the ones that do not belong
to the ours, it means, the ones that are not baptized, the moved away
ones, the ones that we call “sinners”, as if we would not be.
Let
us notice that Jesus does not answer the question, as He does frequently.
It is not about knowing how many people will save themselves. We do
not have to play at futurism, and we also do not have to dare to think
that we can indicate to God what He has to do. “God wants that all
men save themselves”. Christ is the redeemer, but there are just
a few people that think about this salvation!; my dear brothers, let
us put ourselves in hands of His mercy and let us always look for
fulfill His will every day, and in all fields of our life. All the
rest things is work of His loving providence and His mercy.
From our deep adhesion to Christ, and
we encouraged by our little girl Guadalupe, let us work on the salvation
of the whole man: we have to save him in his dignity of person, when
he lives like an animal; we have to save him in his love when he lives
hating; we have to save him in his happiness when he lives in a hell.
We all know that man is in danger. A earthquake, a violent hurricane,
a neutron pump, an violence explosion, an epidemic, all this can destroy
man. Men are slaves of their own inventions; and these monsters try
to annihilate man. We have to save him from the hatred, and egoism.
Mainly we have to save him from himself,
from earth, from evil, from his own freedom. To man, what is created
is a staircase to save himself in heaven. It is not enough with men,
money, ideologies of the right or of the left or any other human security,
for this “rescue”.
Every
Sunday we praise God, provident and merciful father, in the Holy Eucharist
when we approach to listen to Him, in order to follow Him with a bigger
compromise (every time more and more) with His Son asking His grace
to respond to His love. Brothers, we can no forget that the church
is not the kingdom; it is an instrument for the service of God in
Christ, with Him and by Him to achieve the salvation of the whole
humanity.
May our sweet little girl, celestial
lady and teacher teach us to live in hope thanking for the love and the sweetness
with which the father of the whole humanity treats us. Amen.
