HOMILY PRONOUNCED BY MONS. DIEGO MONROY
PONCE; GENERAL AND EPISCOPAL VICAR OF GUADALUPE, RECTOR OF THE SANCTUARY.
II SUNDAY OF EASTER
Sunday, April 15th of 2007
CHRIST LIVES! THIS IS OUR FAITH
My
dear brothers and sisters:
May the peace of the Risen Lord Jesus
covers our hearts!
The resurrection of Jesus Christ has
been for us a new birth. All the years, the Eater makes us revive the
most decisive of our faith: first that Jesus, who was dead by love,
lives now for ever; and second that we united to Him, also have begun
a new life.
A morning was not enough. Nor a supper.
Not even one week. And for many, all the life is not enough today. It
is certain, that the mysterious fact of the resurrection is something
very difficult to understand, and for the same reason, to accept it
as something true. But it has been like this from the beginning. Jesus
had to be with his apostles and his disciples 40 days to make them
assimilate his new way to be, his presence, more mysterious than the
one before his death and that many did not accept either. The disciples,
that before had followed him were (in certain way) prepared, although
in the passion they dissapeared. We could say that Jesus, once he raised,
he reunited to his group of scandalized disciples.
Today, we want to value and to thank
for our faith. We have received it, not as much by reasoning, but by
transmition; and we know that it is a gift. It was God who opened the
eyes of our soul, in order to see him.
“Happy those who believe without seeing”.
We can not get faith by rational or physical proofs. It wouldn´t be
faith. There are not philosophical arguments or of laboratory that can
reach to God. But faith is not irrational, it is not an absurd to believe.
The faith also has its reasons and its “visions”. The believer does
not see God, but sees His signs and footsteps. The believer sees with
the heart. “happy those who have their heart clean because they will
see God”.
Who accepts the resurrection is doing
it by faith. This is the only way of being involved in that mystery.
And we can affirm that just by letting us be involved, we can believe
it. It is not something that can be seen from outside. The resurrection
is something that solves many questions that by nature the man asks
himself. But it belongs to the divine field that has much to do with
the human, with the deeply human thing, according to the original plan
of God.
Because the man has thirst of immortality,
of the infinite, of the permanence, although he naturally does not
know how get them. If he accepts it, it has to be from that it had been
revealed to him. It has been granted to him as a gift of the Eternal
one. That happened to the disciples that could not leave from their
perplexity and confusion. Jesus had to explain it to them, as He explained
all his doctrine before his death, although for already three times,
he had announced this moment of his passion, death and resurrection.
Today, this mystery has been revealed
in Christ to us. That´s why it is intemately united to His person in
whom we have to believe, it means, we have to accept by the risk of
faith. Jesus called to Thomas to faith: don´t be incredulous, but believing!,
it is not about seeing or touching to believe, because that is not faith.
It is about taking the risk of accepting what is announced. Faith is
like this: it makes us see and experience what we believe. That´s why
the correction to the apostle Thomas is strong. But it is filled of
merciful affability.
The disciples believed and announced
what they had seen. First they communicated it to Thomas and after the
second accasion (according to the Gospel of Saint John) Jesus who was
sent by the Father, He sent them with the gift of the Holy Spirit.
“As the Father has sent me...” Jesus
says. The disciple is invited to let himself mold according to Jesus,
in the same way that He has let himself molded according to the Father.
What defines Jesus is the mission of “being an envoy”. His disciples
and the church also will be defined by the mission that He gives them.
The evangelizing mission and the Gospel get meaning with the beatitudes
that the risen Christ directs to the believers: “blessed are those who
believe”, it means, the purpose of evangelizing is that those that do
not know Jesus, by knowing Him they are happy, but they are happy in
faith.
The book of the acts, that we just
listened in the first reading, says to us, of a very summary way, how
the primitive ecclesiastical community was from the beginning a community
that meets in a place already defined to listen the word of the apostles.
But we also can see that a great number of men and women approaches,
it was increasing the number of believers to such point that they brought
all kind of sick people to be cured.
My brothers, thus the apostles continue
the mission of Jesus of an almost complete way, even more, they have
the powers that He had when he passed through this world doing good
and curing all kinds of illness.
We can observe that from the beginning
of the Church, as Jesus, the disciples also announced faith and they
invited to accept it and their words were endorsed by the testimony.
Just like this, today as before, we can invite others to believe. And
many won´t believe if we do not give testimony with our own lifes.
It is in the Eucharist where we live
the experience of faith of that Jesus lives between us. This unique
experience (from every Sunday) can not stay in the intimate thing of
our being. As the apostles, with Thomas and then with all the Jews and
pagans, we have to leave, as envoys to the world, to the family, to
the work, to the world of the culture and of the policy, to announce
that it is possible a new way of relating us and to be happy; that Christ
lives and walks next to every one of us and with the Church; today,
he simpathizes with us through every one, of all and each one of the
sick people, of the sad people, of the marginalized ones and despised
ones by a consumerist world and very superficial.
In this task, our little girl and sweet
mother of Guadalupe (The first missioner) accompanies to us affectionately
and very close to us.
AMEN.
