SHORTHAND VERSION OF THE HOMILY OF MSGR. DIEGO MONROY PONCE; GENERAL AND EPISCOPAL VICAR OF GUADALUPE, RECTOR OF THE SANCTUARY
FOR THE XXXI ORDINARY SUNDAY.

                                                                                                                                    November 4th of 2007

My dear brothers and sisters, once again I have the joy to greet you all from the little house of the Tepeyac, and I send you all the prayer of all us.

My dear brothers, in this Eucharist I invite you to bless and give thanks with praises to the Lord, our God who has taken care of everybody with great mercy, who has given us His Son Jesus Christ in order to give us the eternal life through Him.

Dear brothers and sisters, God does not see like us, the human being, and we do not know how to see like He sees; nevertheless, the word that God gives us this Sunday, invites us to try to see with His eyes, especially to the others. What different would be our world and our reality if we see with the same eyes of God, with the eyes of the Lord Jesus. One author says: “we can see well only with the heart, the essential thing is invisible for the eyes”.

Very often we see unavoidably towards one side, we can not see the surroundings, for that reason we can not discover the great variety of possibilities and wonderful richness that all people have. For example, if we just put attention in the love of Jesus for the poor people, we are going to suppose that He despises the rich ones, and we make a mistake when we take this attitude that is just an ideology. My brothers, the Christian faith does not have anything to do with the ideologies that with wrong reasons, they tray to justify some attitudes or interests that are totally alien to the Gospel. Jesus loves also the rich ones; the last Sunday we saw that Jesus does not make exception of people, everybody has a lot of value to Him. The rich ones has the same value as the poor ones for whom He gave his life on the cross, His mercy makes everybody the same people, poor and rich ones, we are sinners and Jesus knows that everyone has his own resistances to let himself be loved and redeemed. For that reason He gives everybody the opportunity, and he always takes advantage to show us His interest for us, what a blessing to have this condition with us! 

God loves us, God are interested in us through the sweet and calm face of our little girl and little mother Holy Mary of Guadalupe, and God walks beside us, and through this permanent and constant presence of this sweet Lady, He has been with us throughout 475 years. Look my brothers, it is the case of the public and rich sinner Zacchaeus who discovered a different and happy way to live when he interchanged glances with Jesus. When Zacchaeus knew that Jesus was going to pass by his way, he went ahead in order to see him, and when he was exposed to the condemnatory glances of everybody, he was glanced by Jesus in a different way, who invited him to go down from the tree in order to be received in his house, nobody, my dear brothers, sees like Jesus. May we one day see, feel, act, think, pray, forgive like Jesus, if it happens, our world would change. 

My dear brothers, nobody sees like Jesus, only He knows what is true in the heart of each person, for that reason He only knew how to look inside of that man, the deep and sincere desire of a different life. Jesus perceived it and He showed it in a loving glance, in His merciful glance, and the dialogue was made, a dialogue of honest, sincere glances which were free from repression.

My dear brothers and sisters, we know (because of Jesus) that Jesus does not love the poor people because of being poor people, he does not reject either to the rich ones only because of the fact of being it, in both cases He expect an open attitude to let themselves be redeemed. There are poor people that are very arrogant, and there are some unhappy people until the level of denying of all possibility of love.

My dear brothers and sisters, the important thing is to let ourselves be loved by that unique God’s love which changes life in order to lead it by the good way, by the way of the Christian and eternal faith.

In the reading from today we listened to how in a large prayer the author of the book of the wisdom of Solomon, says to God, and may we say to Him the same thing: “You have mercy to everybody, because you are powerful and you ignore the sins of men in order to they regret them. You are friend of life, correct little by little the ones that fall, remind their sins in order to they go away from the evil and also to believe in you Lord”. 

My loved brothers and sisters, nobody only Jesus can know what happens in each of us. In the Gospel that we listened to today, God is revealed in Christ Jesus, as the omnipotent because of His mercy. With His own power He sees with certainty the necessity of being loved, and also the fullness that there is in each one of us, but we do not have this capacity. Saint Luke says: “Everybody murmured” and there we are, all the ones that from our short and myopic glance, judge the others and we deny all possibility of change for those ones that we have classified as sinners. Who are we to do this? The last Sunday Jesus repeated it.   

We not only have to stop our impetuses to make judgments against the others, we also have to obey what God says in the Gospel, He invites all us to be poor and share what we are and have, as a sign of a true conversion. If the conversion does not arrive at the pockets we will not really have made a change. This is what happened to Zacchaeus when he realized that he was loved and forgiven, He wanted to love and to forgive the others too.

My dear brothers, It is truth that God loves the poor people, but not only because of the fact of being it, but also because of the fact of feeling the necessity of God and also because leaving all material security, they put in Him all the hopes, and it is the true sense and the highest value of poverty.

Dear brothers and sisters, in the evangelical teaching from today we have described the salvation process: the Lord leads and look at us; we interpret that glance as a sweet and merciful glance to us; we discover ourselves before that glance; we feel alive, we recognize that we are sinners; we move to the conversion. Then we leave the false securities. All these things lead us to God and we believe totally in Him in order to be brothers of everybody. This is what God Father expects from each one of us to redeem ourselves. 

My dear brothers and sisters, may our little girl and little mother, Holy Mary of Guadalupe, model of a quick and generous answer, accompanies us in this salvation process, and May she every day reaches from God His mercy for each one of us.

May She, this sweet lady of heaven, as missionary and perfect disciple of Christ, advises the new ways of an encounter with those ones that go to other ways that are not the ways of God.  

Amen