Twenty-fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time (Homily)
September 12, 2021 5:30 pm · Sergio Muñoz Fita
May the Lord give you his peace
Dear Brothers and Sisters in the Lord,
I send you all greetings from my parents' home in Spain. Since I left the parish, the Lord has granted me peaceful days in a quiet, secluded place, close to nature. I was here for my mother's birthday at the beginning of September - something that has not happened for a long time - and that was a great gift for her. I have also been able to go hiking in the mountains several times, and the solitude of those days has helped me prepare for the great journey I am about to start.
If the winds of Providence are favorable to me, tomorrow I should travel to Florence from Madrid. In a little more than two hours, the Iberia plane will drop me off at the Amerigo Vespucci airport in the Florentine city and from there I will walk my first 6 miles to the house of the Baptistine Sisters, which will be my residence until Wednesday, September 15th. On that day, the feast of Our Lady of Sorrows, I will commence my journey to Rome.
Especially during the celebration of Holy Mass, I will pray for all of you. I am struck by the infinite love that the Lord has shown us in the gift of the Eucharist: He is in that tiny white host! The sacrifice that Jesus proclaims today to his disciples in the Gospel of the Mass, which was then future for them, is present for us in the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar. The totality of the mystery of Christ is enclosed for love of us in that living bread come down from heaven. Is this not a thought to become lost in?
The nuns who will welcome me in Florence have adopted as the motto of their religious family the words of their patron saint, John the Baptist: “parate viam Domini, prepare the way of the Lord”. I can think of no better advice for me as I set out to undo the nearly 560 miles of distance that separate me from the final goal. I know that it will be a time of grace, silence, sacrifice, prayer, and discernment, and I pray to the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary to truly leave the path of my soul prepared so that the Lord may come to me, if He wants to grant me that grace.
Preparing the way also means accepting the Lord's words this Sunday: "Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me." This is the marvelous paradox of Christianity as taught and lived by Jesus: we must lose our life in order to find it, we must die in order to live, we must suffer with Christ in order to rejoice eternally with him.
Dear brothers and sisters, how many times have we heard this page of Sacred Scripture? When will we begin to love God? St. Bonaventure tells us that shortly before he died, St. Francis used to repeat to his friars these words: "My brothers, we must begin to serve God our Lord. Up to now, we have done very little.”
Let us not be like Peter and flee from the mystery of the cross when it knocks at our door. Let us know how to see, in our pain, the Jesus who loves us so much. On Tuesday, Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, let us remember with gratitude the price God paid to save us. Let us be converted and let our faith become life in our works, in a holy life so that, as the psalm says, we may one day walk in the presence of the Lord, in the land of the living.
I send you all my love and my poor blessing.
May the Lord bless you and protect you. May he have mercy on you. May he show you his favor and grant you his peace.
May God bless you,
Fr Sergio