THE WORD IN ADVENT - First Tuesday
December 3, 2019: Remembering St. Francis Xavier
Isaiah 11: 1-10; Luke 10: 21-24
Talking of faith and growing in faith, in a context like India, I have wondered often, and I am sure you have too, that at school, in the neighbourhood, as children we have always grown up with so many different people, different in their faith, different in their customs etc. but always grown up as friends and neighbours, sharing lives, sharing festivities and sharing our brotherhood and sisterhood as one humanity. From where then does hatred come, if this unity and fellowship is so natural?
On the Lord's mountain, there is no hurt or harm, no killing or violence, no manipulation or deception. That is the fullness with which the Father made the whole world. The New heaven and New earth, has to be modelled on this - on the fullness of the Father. Hence it is not inventing something new, but going to the roots, a returning to the Father.
This is of course found naturally with children and those persons with a simple child-like heart. Jesus awes at these...the children and those who are children at heart: "for theirs is the Reign of God!" (Mt 19:14). Woe to those who cause these little ones to stumble, make them learn hatred and grow inhuman...(cf.Mt 18:6). To bring Good news, as Francis Xavier did, is not to brandish a brute superiority or instill a sense of inferiority and fear but sharing a sense of fullness, the fullness of the Father. It is growing to be peacemakers, children of God, persons of love... to Return to the fullness of the Father as true people of the Reign!