A joyful and welcome greeting to everyone in this ideal radio assembly of ours to weave threads of joyful communion of faith and feelings in being next to Joseph and listening like a mysterious echo to the noble feelings and also the discomfort of a young man in love who hears himself narrated from a mysterious messenger the future events of his life.
In these four weeks (for the Ambrosians it is 6 weeks) the Holy Spirit prepares our soul to welcome Jesus who was born in Bethlehem.
Just as when we prepare for a trip, the eve of departure is alive with novelties and expectations, so Pope Francis invited us last Sunday «to emerge from a resigned and routine way of living, fueling hopes and dreams for a new future».
The future which always has a different texture and colors is always "new", it resembles that of Giuseppe; that after the dream his life was changed. This original fatherhood places at the center of his life this divine creature that the Father, creator of heaven and earth, entrusted to him to regenerate the entire world.
In recent days I have come across the pages of a diary in which the author, Francois Varillon, describes in slightly fictionalized tones the birth of his vocation to the priesthood and religious life.
Variollon writes: «How powerful are the nocturnal sensations, invincible and fruitful. It would seem that, in the hour in which the sun makes its light paler to let, for a certain time, reign the darkness that evokes the limits of nature and the human being, vanish and everything expands to reach the infinite ».
Joseph, awakened from a sleep, did not have an exhaustive perception of the impact that that "delegated paternity" would have had on the world. Perhaps he had a veiled intuition that he had been chosen for a love to be shared between Joseph, his young wife and by the Holy Spirit. The project had its roots in eternity when God redesigned planet earth, destined Mary to enter the world without the consequences of the fracture caused by Eve in the Garden of Eden, the earthly paradise. That love of being eternal and collaborative became heroic for Joseph and still illuminates us as a splendid model of love. Only a love that makes itself a free gift, without pretensions of reciprocation, becomes the building block for a better world.
The anxious wait of Mary and Joseph who brought the future of a renewed world was lived in confident expectation: they had believed in the Word of God and could not be disappointed. Truly these holy spouses "strengthen our hope in the promises of their Son Jesus, to make us experience that, through the turmoil of history, God always remains faithful and also uses human errors to demonstrate his mercy".
Parents' prayer and children 1st part and musical section
A beatitude that Jesus gives to Saint Joseph as well as to his caring and lovable presence next to Jesus, we also find this beatitude underlined in the words of the evangelist Saint Matthew. To the question that the disciples asked Jesus about his way of speaking to people with parables, Jesus replied: «It is given to you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to others it is not given and so Jesus continues. Blessed are your eyes because they see and your ears that hear. Truly I say to you that many prophets and righteous people desired to see what you see and did not see it, listen to what you hear and did not hear it."
Saint Joseph is not only among the happy recipients of the beatitude pronounced by Jesus, he is the "just one" who was given the privilege, in an absolutely privileged way, of knowing the mysteries of the Kingdom, of seeing and hearing the expected people, and the only one to feel called by him dad, "abba", the same name that Jesus uses to call the Father of heaven.
Saint Bernard uses a beautiful expression in this regard: «The Lord found Joseph according to his heart and confided to him with complete certainty the most mysterious and sacred secret of his heart. He revealed to him the obscurities and secrets of his wisdom, granting him to know the mystery unknown to all the princes and powerful people of this world. What many kings and prophets desired to see and did not see, was granted to him, Joseph, who not only saw and heard it, but carried him, guided him in his steps, embraced him, kissed him, fed him and watched over him ».
We are faced with a divine plan that places the figure of Joseph in his true light with regard to Jesus and the Church itself, entrusting him in the divine plan of human salvation not only with an important role in the lineage of King David, but with an extraordinary dignity.
Giuseppe participated with attention and love in Mary's pregnancy, he was at her side with dedication. Many artists in their paintings have also depicted Saint Joseph in the house of his cousin Elizabeth, when future humanity, represented by John the Baptist who rejoices in his mother's womb at the closeness of the messiah still in Mary's womb.
At Christmas in the fragility of a child's flesh "the invisible God made himself visible".
Like all children, children of humanity, Jesus also needed to feel surrounded by love and assisted by hard-working hands that helped this divine visibility to manifest itself to the world.
In the next few days in front of the nativity scene, which we are starting to think about and build in our home - and hopefully also in educational spaces - because a child being born is always an announcement of joy for everyone and never a reason for dispute or division. A child being born is always a flowering of life that blossoms to cheer and fill the future with living hope.
On this journey to Bethlehem we Christians discover that our flesh is oriented towards God and we feel an elective affinity being born within us that satisfies our nostalgia for the infinite.
With the birth of Jesus, God grafted a divine fragment into our flesh which guides our instinct to favor the desire for good and the desire to know God more and more and love him.
With her "yes" to the archangel Gabriel, Mary allowed God to come and live in her virginal flesh and thus "the Creator of heaven and earth became a creature", sowing immortality in every human creature.
Joseph, the husband of Mary and the legal father of Jesus, after the dismay, understood and accepted God's plan, collaborated with availability and trust, to make this mystery of a "God" who is a traveling companion and source mature. of light along the paths of human life.
“The experience of managing a new being in a woman's body is one of the strongest images of a developing life.” In this phase it is possible to sense and feel the growing presence of a human creature developing in the mysterious shell of a woman's womb.
In trembling and trusting silence, Saint Joseph shared the time of her pregnancy with Mary, until the shell of that hidden mystery opened and a cry broke the silence of the night and the angels became messengers of joy to the humble. Those inhabitants of the suburbs, the shepherds, objects of contempt for their humble work, sense that there is something new in the air: God, the invisible has become visible. For this reason the angels at night sing "the glory of God in the highest heaven and, on earth, (proclaim) peace to the men whom God loves".
On that night, the shepherds move towards the new center of gravity of the life of the spirit, established in that poor cave that houses Jesus.
In that suburb of Bethlehem the exclusive and prototype event of the nativity scene in human history was celebrated: God becomes flesh and hides in human flesh. Saint Francis understands the depth of this event and in Greccio wishes to celebrate Christmas with living people.
Francis of Assisi, by kissing the leper, began that extraordinary and revolutionary adventure of a humanity that transported God into our daily history. «Jesus, the Word from eternity it was already God, he became even more God, becoming a child born of a woman like all of us."
The poor sensed that presence and their poverty, shared with that Child, became the main road: it tore up in advance the path of the beatitudes, of evangelical solidarity and sharing. Since that night at the end of December with the movement of shepherds bringing gifts to the Child, feeding a hungry child has become a pressing appeal not to be forgotten.
We cannot forget that the only possibility we are given to see and host God in our lives, other than the birth of a child, in a concrete way, are "the eyes of the men and women who, here on earth, reflect the image of a living God." Let us not forget that our neighbor is the only image of God available on earth that our eyes can contemplate.
Pause Prayer: Music “You come down from the stars only music”
In front of the nativity scene:
Here I am in front of the Nativity Scene!
Jesus, I too discreetly slipped in among the shepherds; each with his gift and I bring my amazement of a God who is small and defenseless like a little child.
With your birth, Jesus, he gave me everything, and I would like myself.
What does I have to offer you beyond amazement?
I have nothing except this symbolic candle that I have shaped during all the days of the year that is now about to end.
Pope Francis lit a candle on Sunday and invited Christians to light a candle to express solidarity with children who, like Jesus, live in solitude and poverty.
Of course, Jesus, I offer you this candle even if it is crooked, shrunken and a little shabby: it resembles my life, in fact it is really me!
It doesn't matter whether she is beautiful, attractive or simply white.
I know I want to give everything. And with this desire in your soul, Jesus, you welcome me and smile at me.
This candle represents my own life. I could have kept my existence aside, far from the Nativity scene in which Jesus was born for me too.
Many times selfishly I have kept it well ordered and preserved intact, enclosed within the custody of quiet living.
But sealed in a box my life would have dried up and lost all meaning. I would have lost my vocation and the many surroundings to do good.
Jesus, you fueled my flame and helped keep me lit and alive to cultivate my ideals.
Before you, Jesus, who makes you humble, in this joy the meaning of my life and nothing else I desire than to be lit, because only when I burn in serving out of love do I feel next to you, poor among the poor.
The echo of your word that says: «Whoever loses his life because of me,
he will find her again" makes my selfishness pale and I find myself regenerated and able
finally spreading light and warmth for everyone's joy.
Now, albeit slowly, I am learning to understand why I exist and I would like, as you did in Nazareth, when you learned the craft of human living, for this reason I wish to offer my life to light many torches to illuminate and warm the world with the light of joy and the warmth of love.
We know that Advent is a time of hope and desire. We await with trepidation the manifestation of the Lord and the liturgy of the church wishes to increase the desire for an ever more intimate knowledge, to reawaken the love for an ever closer knowledge of the Lord. A knowledge similar to a spring of water that wishes to become a river and thus enter the sea to give life and fertility.
Jesus said this to his contemporaries who were waiting for the messiah: "Blessed are the eyes that see what you see." He said this to his disciples, but he also repeats this beatitude for today's ecclesial community and wants to instill in us the desire to open our eyes, to open them wide onto the panorama of the world as well as into the eyes of our neighbors in need to recognize Jesus, the Son of God who favors making himself known in the flesh of the poor.
At this point in our reflections, we cannot hide the fact that too much insistence on the spirituality of the incarnation could contain some element of misunderstanding.
Indeed, there may be many ways of interpreting the incarnation and even of insisting one way on the incarnation.
Even if God, in the flesh of Adam and Eve, dreamed of a world of justice, brotherhood, joy in human relationships and communion between future people. But that wonderful dream immediately envy stole the nobility of the soul of these feelings.
Jesus came in the flesh to redeem it from within, recovering the dignity of being children, which had remained buried in the depths of a nostalgia for a loving communion lost with sin.
Jesus wanted to pay the bill of our ransom, making it pass through the feelings of his soul until he reached the cross and thus expressed his adherence to the love of God as a perfect gift. He crucified the sins of men, tearing up the sheet of debts and thus breaking down the separation wall.
We must never forget that the incarnation had the purpose of crucifying in the flesh the desires contrary to love, justice, loyalty, abuse, indifference and hatred.
And Jesus didn't stop at the incarnation and experiencing human life, he went to the cross, to transform, rehabilitate and give meaning to our uncomfortable carnal condition.
He did not come to bring us meat: meat already existed; he came to bring us the Spirit and the Spirit - says Saint Paul - must serve us to give value to the works of the flesh. "The spirit of the Lord will rest upon him - says Isaiah - a spirit of wisdom and intelligence, a spirit of counsel and fortitude, a spirit of knowledge and fear of the Lord": what we expect from Jesus is that he give us the Spirit of him.
And yet we must seek the meaning of the incarnation, we must join Christ in this movement of incarnation, which accepts the flesh. He accepts it as a means of solidarity, in humility and poverty. Jesus became flesh, because he wanted to be in solidarity with us, to be a companion with us in this earthly exodus to reach the promised land of paradise.
It is he who will free the poor who cries out and the miserable who cannot find help and who pushes us to have pity on the weak and the poor, as we read in the psalm, in correspondence with the words of Isaiah: «He will judge the poor with justice and make decisions fair to the oppressed of the country."
The Son of God who makes us know the Father is the man Jesus, who made himself similar to his brothers, who made himself passive in order to be able to understand them. And so he warns us against a false spiritualization. We are easily tempted to deny the flesh, because it is opposed to a certain pride of the spirit; we would like to live only in a spiritual way, but Jesus, coming among us, did not accept this false way of living in the spirit. He took our human condition in his humility, he took a body capable of suffering, he came among the little ones and the poor.
And this is how he revealed God to us, not with signs in the sky as the Pharisees asked, but with kindness towards the sick, with the patient care to explain things to less open-minded minds, with simplicity, with the pleasure of remaining with us to show us the love of the Father. He guides us to be sincerely interested in everything that is human life, not to find in it the satisfaction of our selfishness, but instead a means of communion with others.
"Blessed are the eyes that see what you see." Jesus had to say it because people were not expecting demonstrations of this type. People were waiting for a glorious Messiah, and instead here is a humble, simple Messiah, completely similar to other men, who manifests the goodness of God, the generous love of God.
On this eve of the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, we ask the Virgin Mary to help us understand more the mystery of the Incarnation, to distance us from false interpretations and to put us on the true path of humble, concrete love, as she experienced it by living for her Son Jesus, guiding him to fit into human society in the small village of Nazareth, educating him in a very human and at the same time very divine way.
Thus we too, thanks to the incarnation, will be able to receive the Spirit of Christ and communicate it to the world.