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

Sunday, May 13 th. of 2007

ARE NECESSARY THE TEMPLES?

My dear brothers: the end of the Easter approaches already. We still have two more weeks in which we will continue listening the Word that congregated to us around this luminous mystery of the Easter. Let us ask our Father God may He does not allow us to pass, through this time of grace, without paying attention. And may He makes us to discover, in the light of his Spirit, the depth and the richness of this mystery in order to put it over anything that, although it is important and significant, it is not the center in the Christian faith. May His Spirit helps us to differentiate the depth of the essential from the peripheral or secondary thing.

This Sunday, the topic continues, but it gives us new elements to live this experience of God’s love between us and with Him. “if someone loves me, he will keep himself faithful to my word”. It says to us today.

Continuing with the teaching of the past Sunday, we can understand that today Jesus says to us that if we observe his commandments, specially the first commandment of his: the one about love, over any other religious practice we can deserve that Him and His father make in us their dwelling, the place where they can live.

My dear brothers, may the reflection, from today, helps us to grow in the certainty that living in love it is the necessary condition to be true believers, true disciples of Jesus and authentic children of God, and to achieve that, Jesus promises the gift of His Spirit to us who will make that we are maturing in His word and, when we are maturing in its understanding, we will recreate ourselves in it in such a way that this word will be as ours as his, and for that reason we will be with Him in intimate communion of love. His interests will be ours; we will love like He loves.

The departure point is to believe in Jesus as our redeemer, by the God’s love that He has revealed to us, in the same love that he showed us when He died for us. According to the teachings of Saint John, to believe this it is fundamental to give to the Spirit the opportunity to start and to keep in us a process of increasing and more and more mature knowledge about the mystery of God and our relation with God and with the world.

But in our religious practice of Christian believers there are other things that it is important to understand, not like valid in themselves, but necessary ones in the measurement of our human necessities and in the way that they come from and express the faith in Jesus. My brothers, I talk about the great amount of religious expressions that, if they are not understood in their right dimension of valid signs, and until certain point, anthropologically necessary, they can supplant, and also with a good intention, the authentic faith from which we have been talking, with the risk of living faith incoherently.

This is the thing that the primitive Church, as the first reading narrates to us in the Acts of the Apostles, had to solve in an environment of communion moved by the charity, it means, by love. For the heads of the primitive Church it was outside discussion – and in this way they taught and decreed it- that the circumcision was not important to save themselves, but only the faith in Jesus Christ and the abstention of some practices that could provoke ambiguities in the expression of faith.

In the Christian practice, it means, in the moral one exists the problem that some conducts and practices try to occupy the first place in life lessening the mature and responsible faith. And the worst thing is that in some moments some pastors are who have not understand their functions, and they disorient to the faithful through recommending and sometimes until demanding or prohibiting the faithful from practices that every authentic, mature and responsible believer must assume in faith.

Jesus has given us His peace. The peace that makes us free, happy and able to assume responsibilities without fears and anguishes: “do not be afraid, may your heart does not be disturbed, He says to us. And Saint John, in his first letter, teaches us: “we can approach Him with confidence... because we fulfill his commandments and we do what He likes” (1Jn 3, 21-22). The peace of Christ consists: in a harmony that comes from the communion and syntony with Him. The peace of Jesus is derived from faith. From the faith that means to stay in this will, it means, it is obedience and love. This peace that He gives us, it is not absence of wars and conflicts. It is not the result of political agreements.

Some authorities in the Church, that have not matured, they impose loads on the consciences of whom, also immature, they wait for somebody that says to them what they must to do. And according to them, they are peacefully. But peace, in its most biblical and theological dimension, it is development and happiness like the one that a child experience when he leaves himself in his father who is happy for his integral development, so, we can recognize that the peace that Jesus gives us does not liberate us from the risk among faith and hope. It does not exempt to us of the compromise of doing of this world something new. The Jesus´s peace does not liberate us from the suffering, but it allows us to take it with sense and joy.

Brothers, His peace is experience of the merciful presence of God that takes care of us for our good, not to watch us and to punish to us, but to take care with the love that just He has for us, in such a way that if our conscience condemns to us, God is bigger than our conscience, and He knows all the things (1Jn 3, 20). That’s why Jesus indicates that the peace does not coexist with fear, because in love, there is no place for fear (1 Jn 4, 18).

Let us ask ourselves: how much does we radiate as Church this light to the world? With what attitudes we are brave witnesses of the peace transforming the unjust atmospheres, of lie and hatred in places of truth, comprehension, dialogue, understanding and listening?

Every Eucharist is enriching to us with the peace of Christ in order to we receive in the gratitude His word and we allow that the Spirit teaches us and it makes us every day more mature in faith and in love. May His Spirit makes us braver in the testimony that the world is waiting for us.

Let us ask to our little girl and sweet mother that she intercedes for the Pope Benedict XVI that today he inaugurates the Fifth General Conference of the Episcopate of Latin America and the Caribbean and also for the bishops from this continent who will meet these weeks in Brazil, may the Lord grants to them His Spirit and they are docile to His inspirations in favor of our Church, according to the will of God.

Amen.