HOMILY BY MSGR. DIEGO MONROY PONCE; GENERAL AND EPISCOPAL VICAR OF GUADALUPE, RECTOR OF THE SANCTUARY.
ORDINARY XXVIII SUNDAY

Sunday, October 14th of 2007

GRATITUDE IS THE BEST EXPRESSION OF FAITH

Brothers: we being illuminated by the Word, let us begin our reflection giving thanks to God, our Father, for the faith in His Son Jesus Christ, our Lord and Redeemer, because of it, we find full sense to life that we receive as a gift and as a place where we already experience the things that are promised us to achieve one day.

The last Sunday, we saw that request of the disciples to the Lord: “increase our faith”. This request came preceded by the previous parabolas, the one of the unfaithful administrator and the one of the poor Lazarus and the one of the anonymous rich man. The answer of Jesus describes us faith not for its material amount, but for its quality, and its thickness. It means, because of its gratitude and confidence, which pass through service to the other ones.

This Sunday seems a practical continuity. It is not about any parabola or dialogue with the disciples, it is about the story of an action, of a miracle, the healing of 10 lepers that went to Jerusalem. The ten people were healed, and they were pure while Jesus continued his way to Jerusalem. The ten ones were pure while they continued their way to Jerusalem to present themselves to the priests, but only one leper, a Samaritan, by surprise, returned back to thank the Lord for his healing.

If we make a statistic of this evangelical fragment from today, we could conclude that 90 % of the cured people are in the frame of the valid legality, while the 10% of them value the gratitude. In other words, some of them believe that they have been cured because of a verifiable right, and one of them considers it as a gift to be thankful.

“Faith and gratitude”, “two foreigners, only one faith”; “physical health, sign of something else”. Three titles that can be given to our reflection, but I would like to title it like: “gratitude is the best expression of faith”. It is, dear brothers, the conclusion to what I find preparing this reflection that I did with you. 

As I have said to you, the topic from this Sunday is a continuation of the last Sunday. My brothers, when we discover that we do not deserve anything, and that all the things that we have, have been given us gratuitously, we realize that we can not demand, but we can be thankful for what we have. 

Consumptive world that we suffer, and in which we frequently are surrounded, it make us live obsessively to get more of everything, supposedly to be better; but it send us to live in competition with everybody creating a barrier to the good and constructive coexistence; even more, it makes us forget and ignore the value of what we have.

My brothers, here we talk about the gratitude not like a moral value, but like an unequivocal expression of faith. The moral aspect comes as a practical consequence, and it is important not to fall in moralizing considerations that are superficial. We just would say that the gratitude is a noble attitude, not only healthy, mainly if it expresses faith as its crown.

The salvation is an incomparable gift of the universal benevolence of God. It is a gift of his love for the whole humanity, because nobody is excluded from it, but not everybody accept it in the terms that God indicates.

My brothers, faith is a gift of God and it is the possibility of an answer; the answer with which the dialogue of love between God and man is closed. The answer of faith is expressed in the renounce everything that is not of the true God: in the first place, the idols as false deities (money, material things, the power and the fame, the fashion, an exacerbated sexuality, etc.), but also the interests, the certainties and securities that are acquired as self affirmation before God.

My dear brothers, renounce everything is what in the Church we called conversion, which means to return to God in order to recognize him as the unique Lord; this is what Nahaman and the Samaritan did, because in ahead they abandoned their believes in order to believe in the true God of Israel and also to believe in the one of Jesus, but the conversion also implies to live permanently in attitude of gratefulness for the salvation and for all what the Lord grants us.

Brothers, any miracle is a sign of something else that happens in the life of the believer, and the miracles of corporal healing mean the definitive health, it means the gift of the eternal life, not only the one that is promised to us beyond death, but also the one (the present one) that we can have in the friendship with God. It is what we called commonly: “living in grace state”

The physical health that we have received as a gift, can be consider as a sign, as an announcement  of future realities that will be reached in fullness in the other life. Ask us, we, the priests of this Basilica, about the wonderful miracles that daily we verify here, through the intercession of our little girl and little mother Guadalupe.

The thanksgiving is the external manifestation, still more, the evidence of that we have faith. Brother, for that reason, the Eucharist (which means thanksgiving) is the greatest expression of our faith. ¡it is the celebration of the gratefulness! Brothers, I invite you to overcome a legalistic attitude or an attitude of just interest when attending the Holy mass from Sunday. Let us approach it with a humble and poor spirit which needs and receives gratuitously the grace of the communion with the true God, the Father of our Lord Jesus and also our Father.

We attend the holy mass because we are sinners that need to be cured and we do not attend it because of other interests that are alien to it. The Eucharistic celebration must fill us with a special joy: ¡the one that comes from the gratitude! If we live in the bitterness, in fear, in anguish, it is because we are not grateful. We will never finish thanking for the salvation, and if we are conscious of it, we will never stop being happy.

May our dark girl of the Tepeyac; the sweet Lady of heaven, the one full of grace, the one that is always joyful because she is totally full of the benevolent protection of a merciful God; attends to us with her intercession to discover and experience the kindness of a merciful God. Amen.