Homily

Eight days have passed after Christmas and the liturgy presents to us the beginning of the Gospel of John as to let us continue the celebration of the mystery of Christmas. We should not have only the memory of an important event that belongs to the past. A mystic of the seventeenth century said: "If Christ was born a thousand times in Bethlehem, but not in your heart, you would be lost forever." Christmas is a mystery that must be experienced by believers. In fact, the birth of Jesus interrogates us again and must indeed continue to question us. It is sufficient to look at ourselves and at the world around us to realize that there is a widespread need for a rebirth. It is not possible to continue without a change, without a deep interior renewal. However, when we still believe that it is impossible to change things, it is as if we are taken by a freezing resignation, and it is even more difficult to change the hearts of men and women. The Gospel of Christmas tells us again that it is possible to revive.
The liturgy invites us to be open by listening to the first page of the Gospel of John at beginning of this new solar year. "In the beginning was the Word." "In the beginning," means "the foundation," the origin, the source of life. The Church invites us to put the evangelical word at the beginning of this year. To share the Gospel means to be born again. If there is no Gospel at the foundation of our days, our efforts will be vain because we will be deprived of the light that came into the world. We must grow with the Gospel, day after day, reading through it, page after page, in order to listen to the Word of God and put it into practice. Through this diligence, we become contemporaries of the Gospel. The Sundays will help us in this journey together with the Lord. We will follow him in the Epiphany, in his baptism, in his growth in Nazareth, in his mission to the towns and villages of his homeland, in his passion, and in his death and resurrection. From Christmas onwards, the Word, the Gospel word, must become flesh in our lives, -a word that becomes true in our day. Through this word, in fact, God fulfils his work - his history of salvation in us and in the world. Salvation is not an inexpressible idea. In fact, God appears to us with the intelligibility of his word and he asks us to make it visible in our lives, our works, and our behaviour. The Word of God is not abstract. It must manifest itself in the reality of our lives. We could say that the evangelical word demands to be seen, it must become flesh, real life, visible, and able to be experienced. It was not by chance that the shepherds exclaimed: "Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us" (Lk 2:15).
That word, which existed from the beginning of time, became flesh as a child that night. The word "flesh," in addition to indicating visibility and concreteness, denotes the fragility of a man, and shows his weakness. This is the law of Incarnation that becomes the way of the rebirth of all of us. How could we become children of God? The evangelist writes: "But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God." We become children of God by accepting the Gospel. We grow by manifesting, in the poverty and in the modesty of our existence, that the Gospel pages become the flesh of our living