L'Angolo di Girolamo Savonarola: Catholic homiletics in lean times

"LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF"? IMPOSSIBLE TO BE, IF NOT BEFORE YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE AND WHO IS YOUR NEIGHBOR

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In this season of clerical flattery no more demeanor and retaining, unfortunately we can set about hearing from the pulpits of our churches that next to love as ourselves is the refugee, the migrant and the poor. The boldest preachers will add “the different” e “diversity” …

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Author
Ariel S. Levi di Gualdo

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San Gregorio monastery in Rome, greek mosaic bearing the motto γνῶθι σαυτόν (know yourself)

This XXXI Sunday in Ordinary Time gives us a Blessed Mark the Evangelist picture in which Christ the Lord shows us the great commandment: «[…] “You shall love your neighbor as yourself”. There is no other commandment greater than these " [texts of the liturgy of the word, WHO].

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On the pediment of the ancient Temple of Apollo at Delphi It is engraved with the maximum γνῶθι σαυτόν, in Latin Know yourself, translated into Italian: know yourself. This phrase is taken in the work Prometheus Bound Aeschylus, which recommends Ocean Prometheus:

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"I see so, Prometheus, so I want to give you the best advice, although it has already wily. You always have to know who you are, and adapt to new rules, This is because the new tyrant who now governs among the gods. If you throw words so arrogant and prickly, although his throne is much higher, Zeus can still hear, then the amount of penalties that you suffer now will seem child's play '.

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The greek original text of my translation have just reported is as follows:

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"OPD, Προμηθεῦ, Ge and admonish thee I want lῷsta, Kuiper onti poikilῳ. gignoske thyself and new ways metharmosai: TAP and new tyrant in gods. EI d herein rough and tethigmenous throws reasons, Post your although far superior thakon klyoi Zeus, that thee NDV multitude this child labors are dokein ".

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One might ask: which is no connection, between an expression taken from a passage in the nobler paganites Greek and a completely different of Christianitas taken from the living word of God's Word made flesh? Well, in common is that both the "know thyself," which is at the center of this step of the playwright Aeschylus, both "love your neighbor as yourself" who is at the center of the Holy Gospel passage of this Sunday, Expressions are two poorly understood, consequently poorly presented, worse then finally abused.

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The know yourself, It is not a simple invitation from the creator of Prometheus to know more or less deeply, but a precise invitation to this creature, over chained to a rock in the head downwards, to have the feeling of being inferior to the god Zeus. The man, to really know himself, to manage himself and then give the best of himself, It must first be aware of its objective limits, certainly not intoxicated in their real or presumed sizes. Suffice to mind in this regard that the man, Whether the political beast, the war beast, scientific or ecclesiastical beast beast, the worst of its inhumanity and hatred towards others, always it expresses and manifests itself when it falls into megalomania.

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In this season of clerical flattery no more demeanor and retaining, unfortunately we can set about hearing from the pulpits of our churches that next to love as ourselves is the refugee, the migrant and the poor. The boldest preachers will add “the different” e “diversity”, making a display of the lemmas taken from New Vocabulary Clericalese that in the latest updated edition has added many other words: from the includenza to an unspecified hospitality. The expression that a bit’ days then go for higher: "Accompanied by empathy ' [cf. WHO]. Sometimes it seems to be back to the collective of the seventies of the twentieth century, when I capelloni contestants in intellectualisms vein low market if they came out with expressions of the type: «… the dialectic synthesis ideological alternation ". What that meant is not known, but certain expressions were shot, especially everyone could tear out from them what better way non-preferred, thus giving way to a sense that there is.

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To love one's neighbor as oneself, man must know himself and know who is, by whom it was created and for what. He needs to know why, our ancestors, They have permission to sin - and by sin death - to get into the world scene, then who the man was saved and redeemed: by Christ who became new Adam, while the Blessed Virgin Mary rose to the status new Eve. In this process of knowledge, that's holy sizes and diabolical limitatezze alternate; and this alternation is generated by original sin that has stolen us to our primal sanctity, to which we can still go through the sacrifice of Christ the Lord on the cross, "The Lamb of God […] he who takes away the sin of the world!» [cf. GV 1, 29].

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To love our neighbor as ourselves, First we must first love ourselves as creatures created in the image and likeness of the living God, then you need to mirror this in the other, imprinted in which to contemplate the very image of God that one day she said: "Let's make man in our image, our likeness " [Gen 1, 26].

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Loving your neighbor means loving God's image stamped on us and then reflecting it in the other, in the next, reading those words in it the beginning of time: "Let's make man in our image, our likeness ". If we do not know ourselves, and we do not seize in ourselves the image of God, if we do not treat ourselves as the living temple of the Holy Spirit, we could never reflect this in the other, in the next, loving him this God and eternal imprinted, recognizing in it a living temple of the Holy Spirit. Failing that, we run the serious risk of falling into emotional empathy, reducing ourselves, it gives believers of Christ, a worldly philanthropists, trying to do good in the way they like it in the world. And on the day of our judgment, before the Divine Judge will discover that we have not loved, they did not know who we were, where they came from and towards what destination had to walk. While on us resonate the phrase "what reward have ye? Do not even the Gentiles?» [Mt 5, 46]. And finally: «Via, away from me, cursed, the eternal fire, Prepared for the devil and his angels " [Mt 25, 41].

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And so we will know the true and deep love of God, punishing and uses mercy [cf. Tb 13, 1-18].

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the Island of Patmos, 3 November 2018

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