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Liturgy of the Sunday
Word of god every day

Liturgy of the Sunday

Twentieth Sunday of Ordinary Time
Memorial of Saint Maximilian Kobe, a priest martyr for love, who accepted death in the concentration camp of Auschwitz to save the life of another man.
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Libretto DEL GIORNO
Liturgy of the Sunday
Sunday, August 14

Homily

In the Gospel of this Sunday, there is an urgency that the Lord wants to communicate to us: the urgent need to proclaim to all that the Kingdom of God is among us. This is what has moved Jesus from the beginning of his preaching. He said to the crowds he met, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near." It was the essence of his preaching and his pastoral action. Jesus brought to earth the fire of the love of God. It was not a theory, it was not a proposal, and it was not a new ideology. It was a fire burning inside his own heart first and that drove him to go about "all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues, and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and curing every disease and every sickness" (Mt 9:35). This fire has a name: compassion. Matthew writes in the following verse, "When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd" (Mt 9:36). The compassion of Jesus is an aching, almost distressed longing that he cannot keep for himself. So much so that he sighs, "And how I wish it were already kindled."
Unfortunately today, this urgency, which even urged Jesus, is many times held, obscured, even suffocated. It is obscured by the climate of violence that seems to prevail in the world, both in the East and in the West. It is crushed by the many wars in many countries of the world, which continue to generate sadness and death. Sometimes it is also constrained by the very disciples when they evade the invitation of the Lord and follow their own priorities and let their interests, habits and concerns lead them away. It is easy to resign to the present, to remain shut up in our own little world and to make a stingy resignation prevail. How often we hear: you cannot do anything! This is how the world has moved ever so! I am now an adult and I can not change! And so on. But the Lord comes back, once again, in our midst and repeats, "I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!" Yes, let us be involved in this passion, let us burn with this fire, we will see immediately the pettiness of our passions and the greed of our hearts. Unfortunately, the only fire that burns in us is the foolish love for ourselves that the Fathers called filautìa. The love of Jesus is of a different nature. It is a sweet and shocking love, which makes us forget ourselves and allows the interest for the poor to prevail. To explain it, in no uncertain terms, Jesus says, "Do you think I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division..."
Unlikely would we put these words on to Jesus’ lips, but the Gospel is different from our way of thinking. Jesus’ statement about the use of sword rather than peace articulates that he did not come to defend our self-centredness, but uphold the love for others. Jesus did not come to defend the peace of the greedy rich man who did not see even the hungry poor Lazarus in front of his door; Jesus did not come to defend the self-centredness of the priest and the Levite who, while seeing the half dead man along the road, passed on. This is not peace, but avarice, meanness, insensitivity, sin. Peace cannot exist without a strong and passionate love. Jesus, in fact, only after having experienced the drama of passion, which was anything but peace and quiet, said to his disciples, "Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you." The peace of the Lord is not on the level of a reassuring intimacy. The Gospel peace is in connecting our heart to God’s. Yes, peace is the passion that drives us to lay down our lives for others. In this sense, peace divides. Gospel peace has divided, in a certain way, the very life of Jesus when, as a boy, he left mom and dad to stay in the temple: "Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?" he said to his anxious parents who "rightly" scolded him. Gospel peace divided him from Nazareth to go into the wilderness of John the Baptist. Gospel peace divided from the disciples in Capernaum when he spoke about the bread and then, addressing the twelve said, "Do you also wish to go away?" and it divided him from the Peter when he wanted to move Jesus away from his path: "Get behind me, Satan." Gospel peace divided him from the scribes and from the Pharisees. The Gospel divided him from the love for himself in his agony in Gethsemane: "Not my will but yours be done." Jesus teaches that peace is listening to the Father. For us, peace is in following the Gospel. The countless martyrs of the twentieth century and those of the beginning of this millennium show it to us. In contemplating them we can apply to us the words of the Letter to the Hebrews: "Since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us looking to Jesus" (12:1). All of them have received in their hearts the fire of God that divided them from their earthly life. The martyrs remind us that Gospel love is to give one’s life for the Lord and for others. True, there is a heroic sense in the Gospel. And we need to rediscover it. So it becomes like a burning fire. It is a sort of biblical law. It is what happened to the prophet Jeremiah, who was thrown in jail so that he did not disturb with his words the stingy tranquillity of the Israelites. The Lord came to give us the fire of love. If we let it burn in our hearts, the world will change. And its heat allows us to glimpse the new time of God.
Prayer in the Day of the Lord

WORD OF GOD EVERY DAY: THE CALENDAR

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!

WORD OF GOD EVERY DAY: THE CALENDAR