HOMILY PRONOUNCED BY MSGR. DIEGO MONROY PONCE; GENERAL AND EPISCOPAL VICAR OF GUADALUPE, RECTOR OF THE SANCTUARY.
ORDINARY XIX SUNDAY

Sunday, August 12th of 2007

TO KEEP OURSELVES IN HOPE BY THE FIDELITY IN LOVE

Brothers: this nineteenth Sunday of the ordinary time, in the prayer with the people, we have said to the Lord that the spirit of his adoptive children grows in us to be able to achieve the inheritance that He promises us.

My brothers, if we do not persevere in the expectation of what He promises us, if we live with an attachment to our small conquests, we incapacitated ourselves to try the conquests that are true and that have value. To do this, we need faith, but we have to live it in hope and the motivation has to be through love. Dear brothers, the life of the Christian elapses among promises. One time I heard that the Christians are like the ewes to which we have to make them walk ahead presenting salt in front of them.

The promise of a full and perfect life in an uncertain future makes us move in the correct direction with perseverance and with the certainty to reach it, because we know in faith that who promises us, also loves us. Our hope is based on this.

The believers live of hope that we have accepted in faith and in love. Three inseparable virtues that as a gratuitous gift of God, and they are given as a treasure that not only we have to take care of it, but also we have to increase it!. In this way we grow in the spirit of children of God.

The first reading situate us in the field of the promises as an own element of the dynamics of faith. In fact, brothers, the book of the Wisdom of Solomon which talks about the departure of the Jews from Egypt, it indicates how that night the Jews started to walk with great confidence in the promise of the promised liberation to the ancestors and that this night it got to be real. That night Israel began to exist as a free town and also as a consecrated town to God, and it marked definitively its life.

In the second reading taken from the letter to the Hebrews, the author speaks to us about faith as a force which projects the life of the Christian to the future beginning with the testimony of the faith of the ancestors, between them is the one of Abraham. The author presents the faith of this patriarch as obedience and confidence. As obedience because Abraham left, by faith, all the things that gave him security: land, richness, dominion, instead of this he took another way which was unknown; on the other hand, as confidence because he trusted in the promise that was made to him until the degree in which he surpassed the test to offer his son Isaac as a sacrifice, without having the total certainty that his descendants would reach to get what had been promised to him.

Jesus, my dear brothers, who invites us, one more time, to believe thoroughly leaving all kind of acquired securities,. His words continue the teaching, which was started the past Sunday, about the attitudes that we have to observe before the material goods. Today it insists on a very important aspect for our faith of Christian believers: the future of his coming, it can be near or distant. So that it invites us, through the use of these goods, to be able to go to the encounter of the Lord when he comes.

The good materials, my brothers, can not be impediment, but things that can facilitate the joyful encounter with the Lord who comes when we do not expect it. It is not only about his coming in the moment of our death or the last judgment, but also about the comings that He does continuously to our lives, individually and communitarianly. These presences of the Lord are unexpected and they demand that we are ready in the moments when these occur in order to that they do not happen unnoticed because of being occupied in those frivolities that do not lack in our life.

The question of Peter takes to Jesus to affirm that this is more demanding for those that have the service of the authority in the communities. Jesus says that for these people, God will demand more in the last judgment.

In the life of the church exists those who left everything to follow Jesus. In this lack of affection to the goods, it involves the whole person with his relations and all his forces. Brothers, I am not only talking about priests or monks and nuns, but also about many lays who leave their comforts and their achievements in life to serve in the kingdom of God through discreet and humble ways. They are a true stimulus for us who believe with difficulty in God in a more radical way.

That is not possible without love that we first experienced in the encounter with God who becomes in one person with us, and He stays with us in the Eucharist and in His Word. We can not take risks without the true love of God for us. For that reason to the believers, who want to grow in their quality of child of God, it is very important to contemplate and to experience permanently the love of God in a total disposition. Bothers, this facilitates, and guarantees it, our constant and devout participation in the Eucharist, at least the one from the Sunday, because in it we celebrate the faithful love of God, the only one that can make us completely happy.

May the sweet Lady of heaven, our little girl Guadalupe, who knew how to respond with absolute faith to the will of God, transmits us her disposition for our answer.

Amen.