Reading of the Word of God
Praise to you, o Lord, King of eternal glory
The Spirit of the Lord is upon you.
The child you shall bear will be holy.
Praise to you, o Lord, King of eternal glory
1 Corinthians 6, 1-11
Is one of you with a complaint against another so brazen as to seek judgement from sinners and not from God's holy people?
Do you not realise that the holy people of God are to be the judges of the world? And if the world is to be judged by you, are you not competent for petty cases?
Do you not realise that we shall be the judges of angels?-then quite certainly over matters of this life.
But when you have matters of this life to be judged, you bring them before those who are of no account in the Church!
I say this to make you ashamed of yourselves. Can it really be that it is impossible to find in the community one sensible person capable of deciding questions between brothers,
and that this is why brother goes to law against brother, and that before unbelievers?
No; it is a fault in you, by itself, that one of you should go to law against another at all: why do you not prefer to suffer injustice, why not prefer to be defrauded?
And here you are, doing the injustice and the defrauding, and to your own brothers.
Do you not realise that people who do evil will never inherit the kingdom of God? Make no mistake -- the sexually immoral, idolaters, adulterers, the self-indulgent, sodomites,
thieves, misers, drunkards, slanderers and swindlers, none of these will inherit the kingdom of God.
Some of you used to be of that kind: but you have been washed clean, you have been sanctified, and you have been justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and through the Spirit of our God.
Praise to you, o Lord, King of eternal glory
Look down, O Lord, on your servants.
Be it unto us according to your word.
Praise to you, o Lord, King of eternal glory
The apostle has such high regard for the community that he thinks it is shameful for them to go to pagan courts to resolve any eventual internal disputes. Paul does not want to condemn the pagan courts, which he actually holds in some regard, as can be seen in the Letter to the Romans (13:1-3). He wants to prevent members of the community from going outside to resolve the disputes that arise within the community. It is already a grave matter for there to be disputes among believers. But if they should arise, they should be dealt with in the spirit of the fraternity of the family of God, with the help of those who are wise within the community. What the apostle says elsewhere should not be forgotten: “Do not let the sun go down on your anger,” a reminder that we all need to be reborn each day. He insists that his readers learn to bear the wrongs that might be committed against them. How often we let petty feelings prevail instead, which chip away at our fraternity! This is why Paul reminds the Christians of Corinth about the sadness in which they lived before they came into the community. But, he tells them, “You were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified,” and thus the Corinthians have become new creatures. This is why they can no longer live according to the criteria and the habits of the world out of which they were saved; that would mean denying the newness of the life that was generously and freely given.
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
