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

Sunday, August 19th of 2007

“IF YOU WANT PEACE, YOU HAVE TO PREPARE WAR”
Latin adage

Brothers, Saint Paul (Ephesians 2, 14) says that Christ is our peace, that with his death and his resurrection He puts the end to the division between God and us, and also between us. Let us thank to Him and let us praise him with songs and mainly with our attitude of obedience and respect to his will in order to keep the peace that comes from Him as a sure blessing of his mercy.

I leave you peace, my peace I give you. A peace that the world can not give you, Jesus says to us in the Gospel of Saint John (14, 27). Nevertheless, my brothers, we can be sure (with Saint Paul) that Christ is our peace, and with Saint John, we can be sure that only Jesus gives us the true peace.

Both affirmations are not contradictory. Jesus, in his teaching from today He gives us a light to understand that there is a peace that it is not the true one; it is false like the one from the world. Which is this? It is the one that we look for, just to be well at the moment, it is hypocritical, it is the one that we try to establish when we want to avoid many problems instead of facing the truth. It is a peace that is not longer, because it has not its beginning in the truth, neither in the justice, nor in love.

The peace of Jesus is the result of the faith, of the war against everything that goes against justice, truth and love. It is not a romantic peace, it is reached after a faith (many times this faith is against oneself). This peace goes against many very human certainties and that for that reason they are deceptive.

Dear brothers, the believer, the disciple of Jesus reaches peace through the practice of love, the search of truth and the defense of justice. It does not matter if it is very difficult to reach. My brothers, although it is true love, there is not expression of love that does not incommode other people. Truth and love are inseparable, and there are truths that incommode; and it is much more when they are lived and said from love to God and to the fellow.

Always, men do not tolerate that truth is said to them. They do two things: they cover the ears in order to not hear, or they try to cover the mouth to the one that says the truth. Jeremiah said very hard things to the great people of his epoch, and one day, they made him keep silent by killing him. Christ said many truths that they did not tolerate it. The truth hurts mainly when “it puts the finger on the sore”. And many wounds in men, through the times, exist.

Lately some truths have been said, and some people did not tolerate the voice of truth. “Do not rob the farmers”; “do not admit the abortion, the euthanasia”; “do not dispossess the natives of their lands”; do not become rich with the sweat of the worker, when it starves”. And then the attempts begin to keep silent the voice. Do you remember some reporters of television? Do your remember the notes of the newspapers?, they have killed bishops, priests, and lays that wanted to defend justice, to denounce corruption. They have expelled the disagreeable voices from many nations (in ours). And it is said: “they were communist”, “they are altering the order”.

It should say: “we do not like that you put us in evidence”; “we hate that you remove our mine”; “we do not tolerate that our bad acts become public”. We do not tolerate the God’s voice”; let us kill God”.

Truth without love is injustice. But if we look for it from love, it put us in syntony with the Gospel, but it is cause of suffering for who exposes it. How is that?, how does love triggers hatred, rivalry, division and war? It is a question that only has an answer looking at Jesus Christ in his life, but mainly in his passion and his death.

In the first reading from this Sunday, which was taken from the book of the prophet Jeremiah, this says to us how the prophet became in a man of discord because of having announced truth to the Jewish people that had sinned against God.  In fact, the Jews (as a punishment of God because of their sins) suffer the invasion of Nebuchadnezzar and Jeremiah, he warns them that it is not good for them to rebel, and that they must be put under, in order to be saved by God with His power (once they are purified of their sins). The reaction of the people, who were headed by the old ones, was to persecute the prophet and to throw him towards a mud cistern, because his words were seen like words from a traitor.

Brothers, the prophet is the one that announces the deepest truth of the facts. It does not stay in a superficial analysis. Frequently, the reality of the facts reveals that in the bottom there are people or institutions, that in serious situations, do not want to assume their responsibilities, and only, as we say, they extend smoke screens to distract the attention and to hide injustices and lies. For that reason, those who are taken by the love to God and to the fellow, they denounce the abuses and the crimes; they are not seen in a good way by the ones that see that their economic or political interests are affected.

In the second reading from today, the author of the letter to the Hebrews, continuing with the exhortation to keep ourselves in the practice of faith like the patriarchs of the Old Testament, he indicates us which the attitude of the Christian must be: detaching oneself from all the things that impede a permanent race with the fixed eyes in Jesus, the only and true one model of the Christian life in faith.

The author says that with Him we just can continue without losing the spirit until giving our own blood (like Him), if it were necessary in order to be faithful witnesses of love and of justice.

Jesus embraced spiritedly the end of his life because of fulfilling the mission for which he came to this world, what is our salvation, through the fire of the purifying and vivifying Spirit. In order to achieve it, we know that He will have to pass through the sufferings of the cross. He knows also that his action has came dividing the people, and that it always will be like this (even after His death) in the church, in the Christian families, in everywhere, because he has been put as a sign of contradiction according to the warnings of the prophet Simeon to Mary, His mother in the day of His presentation in the temple. It is not different with the true Christians, because their actions, and words, like the ones of Jesus and of Jeremiah, will collide with the ways to see, to be, and to act of those who resist the truth and love of God.

Then, my brothers, if we want to live in authentic peace, which is the one that Jesus gives us, we have to start, as soon as possible, to wage the war against the hatred, lie, pride... of our surroundings and maybe in ourselves. The Latin people said: if you want peace, you have to prepare war. 

May our little girl, and little mother, Holy Mary of Guadalupe, that not only united our Indian and Spanish grandparents who were enemies, but also we were born from them as a nation, and as Church, in the protection of the very sweet Lady, She reaches the grace of being worthy witnesses of her Son in justice, love and peace.

Amen.