Homiletics of the Fathers of The Island of Patmos

HISTORY AND GOSPEL. THOSE WHO DO NOT BELIEVE IN GOD AND MAKE HIM ALWAYS END UP BELIEVING IN EVERYTHING

How many times do we priests and theologians, especially after the advent of the various ones Da Vinci Codes, but above all gods social media on which anyone can have a podium to dissect and spread the greatest absurdities, we heard ourselves say: «You are not the right narrator about Jesus Christ and the Madonna, given that she had other children, so much so that the Gospel itself clearly speaks of brothers and sisters?».

Author
Ariel S. Levi di Gualdo

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In a few days will be remembered with all the rhetoric of the case the fall of the Bastille (14 July 1789). When certain historical events are transformed into legends, the fantastic replaces the real, forgetting how the French Revolution marked the largest and most violent bloodbath of modernity. However, if legend replaces history, the bucolic image of a people crying out for freedom arises, equality, brotherhood gives life to the great Age of Enlightenment.

What connection runs between the page of the Holy Gospel of this one Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time and certain pages of history? Let us first read the pericope of this Gospel:

"During that time, Jesus came to his homeland and his disciples followed him. Saturday arrived, he began teaching in the synagogue. And many, listening, they were amazed and said: “Where do these things come from?? And what wisdom was given to him? And the wonders like those performed by his hands? This is not the carpenter, Mary's son, Giacomo's brother, of Jesus, of Judas and Simon? And his sisters, they don't stay here with us?”. And it was a source of scandal for them. But Jesus said to them: “A prophet is not despised except in his own country, among his relatives and in his home”. And there he could not perform any miracles, but he only laid his hands on a few sick people and healed them. And he marveled at their unbelief. Jesus walked through the surrounding villages, teaching" (MC 6, 1-6).

The incarnation of the Word of God and the announcement of the Gospel they enter into the history of humanity, of which I am part. Without perspective and historical knowledge it is not possible to understand the Christological event of Jesus, true God and true man, therefore the great mysteries of faith, nor will it be possible to distinguish the true from the false and understand why certain falsehoods came to life in the form of so-called black legends.

The revolution it was not made by the people, which was exploited, used and abused on that and other historical occasions; it was the nobility who did it, especially the classes of the new bourgeoisie. Like this, after having cut off the head of a King who, for better or for worse, came from a thousand-year-old dynasty, events forced the French to place the imperial crown on the head of a Corsica corporal born into a family of Italian origin; who, moreover, put it on his head himself, after having taken it out of the hands of the Supreme Pontiff Pius VII, forced, for political reasons and for the sake of peace to lend himself as an extra to the egocentric drama staged in the cathedral of Notrê Dame on 2 December 1804, before ending up captured in Rome in 1809 and moved into exile in Fontainebleau until 1815. Napoleon had already previously had the Supreme Pontiff Pius VI captured, deported to Valence-sur-Rhône 1798, where he died in 1799.

In the space of just ten years, between the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century, two Supreme Pontiffs were captured and deported into exile. They are pages of our modern history, but yet, if we exchange a few words with the general public, we will discover that certain events are unknown to the masses, including our Catholic faithful. Which is more than understandable, if we consider that in recent days the final exams have concluded with the promotion of students who affirmed that the Divine Comedy was written by Giuseppe Garibaldi and that Rome was founded by Christopher Columbus.

Before, during and after the Revolution a destructive fury was unleashed towards everything that was Christian and sacred. Religiosity was relegated to a set of irrational superstitious rites used by priests on their conjuring tables to keep the people in awe. Entire religious structures were looted and an extraordinary heritage of art and culture was irreparably lost with heads severed under the Jacobin revolutionary fury.

The results of everything this they did not take long to make themselves heard and in the years immediately following that event there was a large increase in illiterates in France, of superstitions and esoteric practices as never seen before. In fact, when man ceases to believe in God and rejects him, sometimes in a mocking way, others even violent, he then ends up believing in everything. Something of which the Revolution was an eloquent and tragic paradigm in our modernity.

In the revolutionary period, followed by the Napoleonic one, in order to eradicate religiosity and religious sentiment from populations, an army of pseudo-scholars began to make critical studies on the Holy Scriptures, with the well-known results that arrogant ignorant people can produce: misunderstand due to partial or often total lack of knowledge. The circulation of many black anti-Christian and anti-Catholic legends dates back to those years, with which the intention was to unmask the falsehoods of priests and the Church.. Therefore, if on the one hand there were self-styled scholars who, regardless of the existence of detailed Jewish and Roman historical sources, claimed that Jesus Christ had never existed and that his was an invented figure, on the other hand there were those who attempted to use the Gospels themselves to spread sensational falsehoods, one of these was that he had brothers and sisters, other than the immaculate conception of Mary! Everything - they affirmed in triumphal tones - was witnessed by the Gospels themselves, although the clerical scoundrel has always worked to keep people in the darkness of ignorance and hide these inconvenient truths, before the guillotines operating twenty-four hours a day finally brought the lights of reason, because anyone who didn't think according to the light of certain lights had their head cut off in the square.

How many times do we priests and theologians, especially after the advent of the various ones Da Vinci Codes, but above all gods social media on which anyone can have a podium to dissect and spread the greatest absurdities, we heard ourselves say:

«You are not the right narrator about Jesus Christ and the Madonna, given that she had other children, so much so that the Gospel itself clearly speaks of brothers and sisters".

Those who know the Hebrew language and the culture of ancient Judea, within which Jesus was born, he knows that in that world the concept of belonging to a family or a tribe was so strong that everyone was part of it: cousin, Uncle, Grandchild, brother-in-law … was regarded as a “brother/sister” of all other members and indicated as such. In the culture and language of the time there were no terms to indicate cousins ​​of the various degrees. Therefore, John the Baptist, son of Zechariah and Elizabeth, who was Jesus' maternal cousin, can be referred to as brother.

Faced with this explanation some objected that Elizabeth is indicated as Mary's cousin. Yup, but in tradition and in piety popular, not in the historical chronicles of the Holy Gospels which entrust the story of the "visitation" to the Blessed Evangelist Luke (LC 1,39-56). Therefore, say that Jesus had brothers and sisters, it does not at all indicate offspring brought into the world by the same mother, with all due respect to the various bloggers who ensure that they reveal those terrible truths kept hidden by the Church for 2000 year old, that is, that Mary's son had other brothers and sisters. All this proves that when man stops believing in God and rejects him, sometimes in a mocking way, others even violent, he then ends up believing everything and everyone, by the authors of the phantoms Codes down to the last anonymous blogger who publishes bursts of nonsense on the Internet.

There was no shortage of self-styled scholars either and needless to say discoverers and spreaders of truths kept hidden by priests and the Church, who pointed out that Jesus was also referred to as “Firstborn”, proof and proof that he would be the first but not the only child. In this case, as well as Jewish culture, Egyptian archeology also comes to us: in an ancient tomb the commemorative inscription of a deceased woman who had «died during childbirth giving birth to her first-born son» was discovered. If she had died giving birth to her firstborn, it is evident that she was unable to give birth to any other second child. It was perhaps an inscription with an absurd and meaningless clarification? No, the clarification was sensible and primogeniture was indicated because the first born benefited from rights and as many duties, including the authority he would then inherit from his parents. It is the first born who is entitled to the title and authority transmitted to him by the parent.

As well as people who reject God they then end up believing in everything, until they fall into superstition and occultism, this page of the Holy Gospel also depicts those who only believe in the superficial things their eyes see, without the ability to go further to see more deeply with the eyes of the soul. Everything is summarized in these sentences:

«“Where do these things come from?? And what wisdom was given to him? And the wonders like those performed by his hands? This is not the carpenter, Mary's son, Giacomo's brother, of Jesus, of Judas and Simon? And his sisters, they don't stay here with us?”. And it was a source of scandal for them." (MC 6, 1-6).

These are typical questions of those who close every possibility of dialogue and encounter with the new that God has always reserved for us with the phrase: «It has always been done this way!». This matters to the petty little minds of yesterday and today, It's not about "doing well" but "It's always been done this way". This attitude prevents us from grasping and immersing ourselves in the dimension of the extraordinary, of the transcendent and the metaphysical hidden in the appearance of the ordinary. For this reason "he could not perform any miracles there", because at the basis of each of its signs there is the miracle of the faith of man who realizes them through the free exercise of his own will, which is the supreme gift of God. It is not by chance, miracles performed, Jesus dismissed the people he healed with the sentence: "We ', your faith has saved you ". Because that was the real miracle: the miracle of faith that is born from openness to Christ and that heals us from leprosy and the blindness of that sin that makes us cripples, if not worse: living dead.

The phrase "A prophet is not despised except in his own country" it is a paradigm that goes beyond the geographical dimension of Nazareth, birthplace of Jesus, whose homeland is the whole world, of which he is the light. This is the same world that did not recognize him and did not welcome him, as narrated in the Prologue to the Gospel of Blessed John the Evangelist:

He was in the world,

and the world was made through him,

yet the world did not recognize him.

He came among his people,

but his people did not welcome him.

But to those who welcomed him,

gave power to become children of God:

to those who believe in his name,

which do not give blood,

nor from a desire for meat,

nor by the will of man,

but they were begotten by God.

And the Word became flesh

and he dwelt among us;

and we saw his glory,

glory as of the only begotten of the Father,

full of grace and truth (GV 1, 10-14).

From this one should understand that the Holy Gospel is a harmonious text from which it is not possible to extrapolate half sentences and then manipulate them into saying what the Holy Scripture does not say. The Holy Gospel is not a dead letter but a living Word of God inserted into the history of man in which the Word of God made man was born into this world. And Jesus Christ was such an extraordinary historical phenomenon that today the calendar divides the years of historical eras indicating them as: before Christ and after Christ. It is very dangerous not to know or eliminate the historical element from the two thousand year old Christian experience, thus opening the doors to ignorance and running the serious risk of not having any experience of faith, falling, if everything goes well, in the most squalid fideism.

In the 14th century we had a giant like San Bernardino of Siena who did not hesitate to hurl thunder and lightning against the gullible who venerated the relic of the ampoule containing the milk of the Blessed Virgin Mary:

"It is who you want, I say you do not like these things to God these. Like milk from the Virgin Mary. Or women, where you are? And likewise you, able men, vedestene mai? You know you should be showing for relics: v'aviate not faith […] Maybe she was a cow the Virgin Mary, she had her milk lassato, how loose the beasts, you lassano mugnare? I have this opinion: that is, she had so much milk, neither more nor less, enough that Bochina Jesu Christ blessed " (San Bernardino of Siena – Hypocrite devotions, in: Baldi. Novels and moral examples of S. Bernardino of Siena, Florence, 1916).

Today, however, we have a self-styled Gospa who has been speaking banalities for forty years to a small group of shrewd entrepreneurs who play at being seers. E, while everything is happening, in our equestrian circus we no longer have even the shadow of a San Bernardino of Siena ready to throw thunder and lightning towards the simple naive, but above all against those who feel authorized to deceive them. What if a San Bernardino da Siena capable of shouting the truth existed among us, at best we would accuse him of being aggressive and divisive, because after all... «it has always been done this way!». Just as if Christ had come to this world to please and please Him, rather than to fight it:

«Do not think that I have come to bring peace on Earth; have not come to bring peace, but a sword " (Mt 10, 34).

The pericope of this Sunday's Holy Gospel it contains much more than you might imagine, on the lines and behind the lines. Because of this, at the end of reading, we say: "God's word", and we give thanks to God!

From the island of Patmos, 6 July 2024

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