Homily by Father Emmanuel Schwab

2rd Sunday During the Year – Year B

1st reading: 1 Samuel 3, 3b-10.19

Psalm: 39 (40), 2abc.4ab, 7-8a, 8b-9, 10cd.11cd

2rd reading: 1 Corinthians 6, 13c-15a. 17-20

Gospel: John 1, 35-42

Click here to download and print the text

“Speak, Lord your servant listen.”.

We can hear this instruction from Eli the priest to Samuel for ourselves. It’s about listening to the word of God. But where does this word resonate? First in creation. If you reread the first chapter of Genesis, the one we hear as the first reading in the Easter Vigil, you will often hear: “And God said…and it was.”. It is by his word that God creates all things. Saint John will take up this vision in his Gospel, since the Gospel begins precisely with these words: “In the beginning was the Word.” (Jn 1,1:XNUMX), the word, in Greek the Logos. And by this word, by this Logos, everything was created (v.3). The first visible word is the world in which we live: the entire universe which tells us something about its Creator. And we can take this understanding further: each of us is created directly by God through the meeting of our parents, and each of us is a word of God. Each of us can say: I am a word of God, a word that God gives to the world. And I am a word in the very condition in which I came into the world. My body, in its concrete masculine or feminine reality, is a word of God which speaks of my vocation.

By having evacuated God from the horizon, our society has at the same time evacuated the possibility of deciphering the meaning of things, so much so that being man or woman no longer has any meaning for many... Only what makes sense is what I decide. And it's madness. We are witnesses that this world has a meaning that it is not a question of giving it, but that it is a question of deciphering, because this world, creation as it is, is a word of God and that the word of God is sound. Paul, in this finale of chapter 6 of the first Letter to the Corinthians, reminds us of the spiritual significance of our body, especially since, through his death and resurrection and the gift of the Holy Spirit, the Lord Jesus has given us redeemed; we belong to him. And only belonging to God through Jesus can make us truly free. Belonging to ourselves makes us slaves to our passions. Acquiring self-control from our dependence on God is another thing: it is the path to freedom. "Your bodies are the members of the Christ.” Through baptism we become members of the Body of Christ even in our own body. So Paul can remind us : “The body is not for debauchery, it is for the Lord, and the Lord is for the body.” And the Lord took care to institute, in different ways, what we call the sacraments of the Church, which are all actions that touch our body. Because the spiritual life of a man is not the same as that of an angel: the spiritual life of a man is played out in his body. The offering of our life is played out in our body. Charity is lived in our body because it is by putting ourselves in the concrete service of our neighbor with our two arms, our two legs and our hands that we live the truth of charity. It’s not by having beautiful thoughts or feelings. Our body, our entire being is a word of God.

But we have just celebrated Christmas and this word of God that we have to listen to, we have contemplated the fact that she became flesh : “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (Jn 1,14:XNUMX). It is Jesus who is entirely the word of God. It is therefore not only a question of listening to Jesus as one would listen to a teacher of wisdom, but it is a question of contemplating Jesus. And this is why the Gospels do not only give us, and perhaps not firstly, Jesus' speeches, but they show us Jesus coming and going, meeting people, touching them, sitting down, eating , sleep, live… live our lives as men! And it is the whole life of the Lord which teaches us the mystery of God and the mystery of man. Indeed, if we want to see who a man is in his perfection, we must look at Jesus, because he is without sin and therefore his humanity is more accomplished than ours. Jesus himself is a word of God.

And then if we conform our life to the Gospel, if we seek by the grace of the Holy Spirit to “please Jesus” – to use an expression dear to Saint Thérèse –, to “do the will of God” to take another constant concern for Saint Thérèse, if in this way, little by little, beyond the consciousness that we have, our lives conform more and more to the Gospel, then we ourselves become more and more an enlightening word from God for our brothers.

The Gospel is not just writings in a book. The Gospel must also become a decipherable human life. It is about us becoming walking Gospels so that those around us, by seeing us, discover what the life of God is, the life of Christ, what love and service is. It is not in any way a question of making ourselves an example or a spectacle: it is a question of being what God makes us, of really being that. And if we truly become what God gives us the grace to be through the gift of his Holy Spirit and the ability he gives us to convert to the Gospel, then the Gospel will become visible in our lives.

I started by saying that creation itself is a word from God, and it is the first word to listen to. And we can have the idea that those who do not know God, who say that there is no God, are because they have not looked closely at this world. This is the idea in which Thérèse lived for 22 years of her life, until she was given the painful grace of discovering something else. This is what happened to her at Easter at the beginning of the Paschal Season of the year 1896, just after she began to see the first signs of tuberculosis. She tells us this — it’s in manuscript C:

I then enjoyed a faith so lively, so clear, that the thought of Heaven was all my happiness, I could not [5v°] believe that there were impious people who did not have faith. I believed that they were speaking against their thinking by denying the existence of Heaven, the beautiful Heaven where God Himself would like to be their eternal reward.

In the joyous days of Easter, Jesus made me feel that there are truly souls who do not have faith, who through the abuse of graces lose this precious treasure, the source of the only pure and true joys. He allowed my soul to be invaded by the thickest darkness and the thought of Heaven, so sweet to me, to become nothing more than a subject of combat and torment...

And Thérèse tries to explain to Mother Marie de Gonzague, to whom she writes this, what is happening inside herself. It is not at all that she is losing her faith, but what obviously nourished her intelligence is as if taken away from her.

A little further on, she writes this:

[…] the King of the homeland with the bright sun came to live thirty-three years [6r°] in the land of darkness;

This is a way of repeating what the evangelist says in his Prologue: The light came into the darkness and the darkness did not stop it (Jn 1,5)

Alas! the darkness did not understand that this Divine King was the light of the world...

But Lord, your child has understood your divine light, she asks you for forgiveness for her brothers, she agrees to eat the bread of sorrow for as long as you wish and does not want to get up from this table filled with bitterness where eat the poor sinners before the day you have marked… But also cannot she say in her name, in the name of her brothers: Have mercy on us Lord, for we are poor sinners!… Oh! Lord, send us away justified... May all those who are not enlightened by the luminous torch of Faith see it shine at last... O Jesus, if the table soiled by them must be purified by a soul who loves you, I want well eat the bread of trial alone there until it pleases you to introduce me into your luminous kingdom. The only grace I ask of you is to never be offended!… Well brothers and sisters, the world in which we live has seriously lost the sense of God, the vision of God, the perception of God. And we accumulate more and more senseless things. What the Lord asks of us is not to take refuge in some fortress: what the Lord asks of us is to share the lives of our contemporaries as they are, to love them, to be with them, but to stand among them in faith, continuing to love Jesus, in such a way that our lives can give a taste for discovering this sweet Savior, in such a way that through us the Gospel continues to be announced, even in the thickest darkness.

Amen