Reading of the Word of God
Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia
This is the Gospel of the poor,
liberation for the imprisoned,
sight for the blind,
freedom for the oppressed.
Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia
Amos 8,4-6.9-12
Listen to this, you who crush the needy and reduce the oppressed to nothing, you who say, 'When will New Moon be over so that we can sell our corn, and Sabbath, so that we can market our wheat? Then, we can make the bushel-measure smaller and the shekel-weight bigger, by fraudulently tampering with the scales. We can buy up the weak for silver and the poor for a pair of sandals, and even get a price for the sweepings of the wheat.' 'On that Day- declares the Lord Yahweh- I shall make the sun go down at noon and darken the earth in broad daylight. I shall turn your festivals into mourning and all your singing into lamentation; I shall make you all wear sacking round your waists and have all your heads shaved. I shall make it like the mourning for an only child, and it will end like the bitterest of days. 'The days are coming- declares the Lord Yahweh- when I shall send a famine on the country, not hunger for food, not thirst for water, but famine for hearing Yahweh's word. People will stagger from sea to sea, will wander from the north to the east, searching for Yahweh's word, but will not find it.
Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia
The Son of Man came to serve,
whoever wants to be great
should become servant of all.
Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia
This passage is part of the last section of the book of Amos (chapters 7-9), which presents five visions of divine punishment, a punishment which is first threatened and then carried out. In the context of the fourth vision, concerning a basket of mature fruit (8:1-3), the prophet announces the end of Israel, which has now reached maturity. The Word of God lets us read history in depth; it makes us see beyond our superficiality, beyond our external criteria. By listening to the Lord, the prophet participates in God’s vision for history. And he is called to communicate it to the people to whom the Lord sends him. In this passage, Amos sees the end of a society that was built on wealth and satiation, but did not know how to carry out justice or love the poor. Its inevitable, ruinous, and painful end is caused by these injustices. The rejection of the Word of God, which the prophets never stop proclaiming, always leads to destruction. We could say that is not God who inflicts the destructive punishment, but it is the very corruption of the society that leads to its collapse. The inhabitants of Samaria, the capital of the Kingdom of Israel, were willing to do anything to increase their wealth. Any means of enrichment became lawful. And corruption became normal. Even the festivals ("the new moon") and the Sabbath, times consecrated to the Lord, had become opportunities to make money, in complete indifference for the poor and with the only goal of accumulating goods for oneself. The prophetic word admonishes us so that we will not give in to the trickery of wealth, which easily leads us to forget God and despise the poor. The Lord is not interested in men and women who come to him in the rituals of worship but live satiated and without love. The "day of Lord," described with apocalyptic imagery (the darkening of the sun, shadows on the earth) will be terrible: feasts will change into mourning, songs into lamentation, luxurious clothing into sackcloth, and proud heads into shaved scalps. They will even experience the most bitter pain: the mourning for the death of an only son, the extinction of the family. It is important to reflect on the fact that this scenario of death comes with the extinction of the Word of God: people will hunger for the Word of God to find relief, but prophecy will be extinct and bread will not be able to be found. It is an urgent warning for us to accept the grace of preaching while available.
Prayer is the heart of the life of the Community of Sant'Egidio and is its absolute priority. At the end of the day, every the Community of Sant'Egidio, large or small, gathers around the Lord to listen to his Word. The Word of God and the prayer are, in fact, the very basis of the whole life of the Community. The disciples cannot do other than remain at the feet of Jesus, as did Mary of Bethany, to receive his love and learn his ways (Phil. 2:5).
So every evening, when the Community returns to the feet of the Lord, it repeats the words of the anonymous disciple: " Lord, teach us how to pray". Jesus, Master of prayer, continues to answer: "When you pray, say: Abba, Father". It is not a simple exhortation, it is much more. With these words Jesus lets the disciples participate in his own relationship with the Father. Therefore in prayer, the fact of being children of the Father who is in heaven, comes before the words we may say. So praying is above all a way of being! That is to say we are children who turn with faith to the Father, certain that they will be heard.
Jesus teaches us to call God "Our Father". And not simply "Father" or "My Father". Disciples, even when they pray on their own, are never isolated nor they are orphans; they are always members of the Lord's family.
In praying together, beside the mystery of being children of God, there is also the mystery of brotherhood, as the Father of the Church said: "You cannot have God as father without having the church as mother". When praying together, the Holy Spirit assembles the disciples in the upper room together with Mary, the Lord's mother, so that they may direct their gaze towards the Lord's face and learn from Him the secret of his Heart.
The Communities of Sant'Egidio all over the world gather in the various places of prayer and lay before the Lord the hopes and the sufferings of the tired, exhausted crowds of which the Gospel speaks ( Mat. 9: 3-7 ), In these ancient crowds we can see the huge masses of the modern cities, the millions of refugees who continue to flee their countries, the poor, relegated to the very fringe of life and all those who are waiting for someone to take care of them. Praying together includes the cry, the invocation, the aspiration, the desire for peace, the healing and salvation of the men and women of this world. Prayer is never in vain; it rises ceaselessly to the Lord so that anguish is turned into hope, tears into joy, despair into happiness, and solitude into communion. May the Kingdom of God come soon among people!
For the sick, in memory of the dead, for peace
