Church of Jesus Christ of the Universe

by Mauro

24.08.2024
(translated audio)

XX Week of Ordinary Time – Year II
Saint Bartholomew, Apostle
Rev 21: 9-14; Ps 144; Jn 1: 45-51

In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

The grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God the Father and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all.

We celebrate the feast of Saint Bartholomew the Apostle. We celebrate, like every Saturday, the resurrection vigil and, like every Saturday, what we experience every day. We bring our entire day to the Holy Mass, the passages we have made, those we have failed to make – because there are also those, I at least almost always have those -, but we recognize them as obligatory passages, passages of freedom, passages of life. On Saturday, to all this is added: it is a resurrection vigil, it is a memorial. It is a memorial every day, but Saturday acquires a special grace. That is why we always offer it according to the intentions of Mary Most Holy and offer ourselves for Her intentions.

We have sung “Il tuo nome salva”¹, we celebrate the Eucharist, and yet, I will say it later, what is it that we always miss that we do not feel saved and that in the Eucharist we do not receive all the power of the Risen Lord? There is a limit, there is something, there is a veil, I do not know what it is. We know that the Mass – the Eucharist, the Holy Mass, the Sacrifice – is the only thing that saves the world. We have the opportunity to participate in the salvation of the world. We get, rightly, involved in many difficult situations: one who is sick, one who has a pain. And from a situation where the Lord Jesus is saving the world, do we get involved in the same way? I also mean emotionally.

We are affected by so many things; but Jesus Christ, who once again is willing – He would – to go up on the cross for us, leaves us quite indifferent. I believe this is the trouble of the world.

So let us present ourselves with those situations that lead us away from the center of life. The center of life is this. Everything that leads us away from this, for me is sin; everything that leads us away from this leads us to survive, not to live; everything that leads us away from this is the cause of all our evils, because this should be the place where we let go of all these evils in order to go out resurrected. If that does not happen, it is not Jesus’ fault.

So let us get ready.

O Mother, You have shown us the way, You have shown us life, You have explained to us far and wide what You want from us, You have explained to us what life is; You have even taken it upon yourself to give us all the directions, from “God exists” onwards, for the centenary of your apparitions in Fatima². You explained everything. We cannot say that we do not know, that we lack the light, or we lack to know what we must do.

Once again I wish to place in your Heart all those steps of resurrection that, it is not that we cannot do them, we do not want to do them; all that we do not let go, all that we hold, what we hold within us and also around us; all the life that we want to guide, and we do not let God guide it, therefore we do not rise. Help us also today to let go of a part of our way of thinking, of our ideas, of a part of our strength.

And may God Almighty have mercy on us, on this humanity, forgive us all our sins and lead us to eternal life.

With the Gospel’s reading of this Sunday³, the 21st, the Capernaum discourse concludes. That discourse where Jesus clearly expresses the Eucharist: eating His Body and drinking His Blood. Some said, “It is a hard discourse. Who can understand it?” It was a discourse that challenged even His disciples, even those who were following Him, to the point that He even turns to the Twelve and says, “Do you want to go too?” He was already putting the dimension of the Eucharist at the center; He was already saying what we are saying: the Eucharist is the only thing – Jesus Christ, because He is in the Eucharist, in the Eucharistic Sacrifice – that can save the world.

If we look throughout history, there has always been a war against Mary Most Holy and against the Eucharist – with more force, with less force, let us speak of us now. There has always been an attempt to diminish the figure of Mary Most Holy, the figure of the Eucharist, to the point that there are Christians who celebrate the Last Supper, but who do not believe in the dimension of the Eucharist.

I think that (we must be honest too) we have to ask, pray and celebrate in a worthy manner to obtain the grace to understand the gift we have. Saint Francis said: “I understood with what love God loved me and from that moment my life changed”⁴, and this applies to each one of us. However, we cannot understand that love without the Eucharist. We can contemplate it, we can penetrate it with prayer, but to feel that love, to be transformed by love in the Beloved, to be all overturned, in the positive sense, this requires the Eucharist, because without the strength and grace that receiving Communion, that celebrating the Eucharist gives us, we cannot make it. It is impossible for man, but nothing is impossible for God⁵.

To prove that there is a power in the Eucharist, in the living presence of Jesus in that piece of bread, we can take a very earthy example in what the apostles did after the resurrection. And here I open a parenthesis: when I speak of the Eucharist, it is perhaps what is missing, it is that passage that we should make in the Easter Triduum each week, which passes through the Sacrifice, the sacrificed Love, to the resurrection. I fear that as Christians we have stopped without resurrection, and it is from there that we lose that power, the resurrection; resurrection that is communicated to us by the Eucharist: eating His Body and drinking His Blood.

So, I was saying what happened to the apostles. They all ran away, all afraid. After three years of being with Him they all ran away. There was John, sure, but the other eleven. His word was not enough, not even that they had received the Eucharist for the first time on Holy Thursday; it was not enough to have seen Him perform miracles, nothing was enough – the love they had for Him, because they loved Him –, they had to meet Him risen. If we look at Jesus, He was frightening when He was alive; they killed Him, but they could never overcome Him, they could not overcome a dead man. The whole army of Rome, all the Jews, all the other religions, they could not win one already dead. They have not killed a dead man; they have not succeeded and they will never succeed. And the apostles, first they trembled, they ran away, and then when they met Him risen, they went to encounter death, they went to meet the lions, they went to meet everybody. Twelve ignorant people changed the world together with a dead man. Why did they do this? Because He was not dead, He had risen.

Then, if we want to leave our mark, we have to live this passage. In this passage we discover the love with which God has loved us, otherwise we will not make it. We will not make it, even if we put all our good will into it. If we do not touch the life that conquers death, we will not make it.

So, let us ask ourselves: “How will I make it? I desire it, I want it” The first thing is to do like Peter: «Lord, to whom shall we go? Only you have words of eternal life»⁶. Peter was still the one who then betrayed Him. We, too, must make that passage, not to always ask Jesus for something earthly. Let us make this passage to ask Jesus: “Lord, to whom shall we go to meet you risen? I believe but give me the courage to believe. I want to believe, but give me the strength to live united with You. I know that You are in the Eucharist, but allow me to enter into it too, to live as a Eucharistic man, who loves the Eucharist, who lives the Holy Mass”. It is a prayer, it is the only one, it is the first prayer, then will come the others, when we meet Him.

To make this passage there is one related to it. Jesus is true God and true Man. But this grace of Redemption, this grace of discovering that we, too, are children of the resurrection, children of the Father and called to rise again, is not given to us by Jesus, the Man, it is given to us by the Son of God. If I do not make the passage that Jesus, true Man, is the Son of God, who became Man to enable me to make this passage, not to become a man as I am. He became Man in order to make me God; He, the Son of God, gave me the possibility of also becoming a son of God. This is the passage connected with the one: ‘Help me to meet You risen’. First I must recognize Him like this.

If I have to deal with Jesus the man, Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus the prophet, Jesus the good politician (He is a good man, of course), we do not make this step. And here is the other scandal for many people: Jesus the Son of God! It is the Son of God who gave us this possibility, not Jesus of Nazareth. Do you understand what I mean? So, it is the Son of God who has taken upon Himself all my limitation, and He does it also today. It is the Son of God who pays that debt that I, like every man, have caused.

In this faith in the Son of God I must experience the resurrection every day, in every Holy Mass. I say I must not wait to die to be resurrected. I believe that and that gives me hope and strength that I will not die, that I will stay alive. However, that is something we must experience. To every Mass we must take something that we carry within us. I think that in the Mass that we celebrate every day, we must take what we encounter every day, what we encounter in our lives, a passage, a problem; I am not talking about those practical ones, I am talking about those that we carry within us that prevent us from living. We must go through them with Jesus, and He must go through them with us. There we will encounter His love. He must free our imprisoned spirit, bound by a thousand human burdens, by the work of the disintegrating energy that has filled us with systems, with chains, with thoughts, that have led us to confuse what is good and what is not good (we do not even know that anymore) here on this Earth, where everything is centered on this Earth.

If we do not live the resurrection, what kind of Christians are we? And the resurrection and the Eucharist go hand in hand. By living the resurrection, the fruits are immediate. It is not fluttering in the clouds and feeling that life always wins, this is the result that life conquers death. It means always having the feeling that there is no problem, no illness, no bad situation that will crush your life. Life has won, life wins, no one can stop it. The fact of overcoming even physical death is this certainty, but we must always experience it. Life wins. This is the Eucharist, this is going into a Mass weighed down, tired, angry, whatever you want, and winning, winning with Him. It is He who wins. I let Him win.

In this way we learn to live as children of God. And how did the Son of God live? Here, yes, I look at how He lived as a Man; it becomes right, beautiful and useful to look at Jesus of Nazareth, but after I have accepted Him as God; He was simple, joyful, and He knew how to enjoy life.

You do not want to look at Jesus? Look at the one who was most like Him on Earth: Saint Francis, the jester of God, who rejoiced in the sky, rejoiced in the wind, in water, in fire, in a flower. He rejoiced, he rejoiced in the good that came to him from nature, from his brothers. He rejoiced, and he did not end his life thinking it was not good because no one followed him, because even if the masses followed him, look that the mass was made up of a few, seven, eight. The other three hundred thousand Franciscans did not follow him. In fact, he ran away from the friars, he ran into the woods.

He rejoiced! He had an awful lot of diseases, there was not one that he did not have, and he rejoiced; he rejoiced in brother fire when they had to burn his eyes with fire, and he said to the fire: “If you can do me as little harm as possible…”, and then he rejoiced, – he REJOICED of life. Why? Was he dumb? According to the condition of the world today, he was dumb. He had met Christ.

However, we cannot live off Saint Francis, because he opened up a piece of the road, but we have to do the other piece; and, if that piece we have to do is missing, the next one will not come.

Thus, I was asking myself this morning: what is it that keeps us from living like this? What are we missing? What are we afraid of? There is something that makes us afraid. Afraid of being happy? What fear do we have? Look, what Jesus gave to Saint Francis He gives to each one of us. There is no difference in love, in graces; each one of us in his originality, of course, should be full and in that fullness be happy; even if he will not do as Francis, but he will certainly be happy in what he does: happy with what he does, happy to be, to exist, happy to live, not to survive. What do we lack? Are we afraid of the cross? I do not know.

If we were to look for the answer in a few books, we would find that everything has its origin there: in the fear of the cross, because in order to be resurrected, we have to go through the cross. And when the cross comes, we look for all solutions except the one God gives us, which is to embrace the cross. This is certainly a problem. The cross must be embraced, one must not try to escape it, no matter what it is; the lightest, the heaviest, it must be embraced.

The second answer is the little faith. I probably go to Mass, yes, I celebrate it, in my case, but do I believe? Do I believe in the Son of God? Do I join the Son of God? Do I allow Him to act freely?

I wanted to look at the dimension of the Eucharist for us, because I believe that it is a great wound for which we really need to pray for peace, and there will be no peace until this wound is healed. This wound is precisely the dimension that Christians divided over the Eucharist, over Mary Most Holy. We must not judge them, we must pray for them, offer ourselves for them, believe for them too, live Holy Mass for them too, and take advantage of our daily trials to go through it for them too.

And may Mary Most Holy help us to understand this immense gift, help us to live it and allow ourselves to be transformed, in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

O Lord, may the pledge of eternal salvation, which we received at Your table on the feast of Saint Bartholomew the Apostle, help and sustain us today and always, through Christ our Lord.

May the Lord be with you.

And may His blessing, the blessing of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, the blessing that comes out of the Eucharist, out of the living presence of Jesus, reach every man, reach every yes at conception, reach Purgatory. May it descend upon all Christians, may it descend to bring the truth about the Eucharist to all those who have never known it, have never heard of it as we have heard of it. May the blessing descend on the suffering that has arisen from it, on all those who have become victims of these sufferings, of these situations, and may it become the cause of salvation in all of them, in the name of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.