Benedictine Sister Angelini led the participants of the Synod of Bishops in reflection on October 15, with the theme “A place where the Church, together in unity, is involved in the missionary mission”. The nun pointed out, in order to find a place for evangelization in human relationships, not “following the trend of the media”, “empty compliance with norms” and blindly following the culture of “appearance”. All this will not stop the hunger of young people, it will only kill them.
(Vatican News Network)For Jesus, any place where a person is hungry and shows “hunger” is the best “place” for missionary work; it is necessary to dig the place for relationship in people so that the gospel can be preached in the truth. Benedictine sister Maria Ignazia Angelini emphasized this point by leading the participants of the Synod in a reflection on the morning of October 15 in the Paul VI Hall of the Vatican. The third part of the “Working Documents” of the General Assembly deals with “place”, so the subject of the reflection is “the place where the missionary mission of the Church is fulfilled together”.
The gospel moves forward after crossing a threshold
The Church is rooted in a specific place, environment and culture, which “stimulated from the beginning a sense of urgency in the first Christian communities”. Sister Angelini explains, in fact, “when it comes to the place in which they live, paradoxically Christians see themselves as ‘outsiders who have settled here'”.
When one thinks of the places where Christians first lived: Jerusalem, Samaria, Antioch, Joppa, Caesarea, Philippi, and Ephesus, a basic dialectic seems to emerge immediately: if the church the place is always a special gathering place and time The journey of the gospel in the world is to cross one threshold after another, without stopping at all, and without going into any “sacred harmony” with the cultural environment of the times. “
The scope of the network
On the morning of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, the phrase “He is not here” (see: Mt 28:6, Mk 16:6, Luke 24:6) indicated that “the call of the gospel is always going to – out ” From the very beginning, this call “gave a sense of joy and led the Church, which she received from the apostles, to make the choice to “go out”. -apostles first in the Last Supper Room, and then they walked out of the Supper Room, out of the temple, and out of Cornelius’s house.
The Church is rooted in “wherever there are people”, with a dynamic element of the Paschal mystery. With the words “He is not here,” the Church overcomes “the idea of staying standing in one place, even the most holy places,” and thus weaves “net of relationship spaces” through the transfer of energy.
Jesus loves feasts
But, the nun asked, in this network, which is the line and which is the node? To answer this question, the nun referred to two aspects of “feasts”: one is the prophetic prophecy of Isaiah in the introduction to the “Working Book”, that is, a universal feast ( cf. Is 25:6-8); else it is recorded in the Gospel of that day that Jesus was present at the party that was invited by the Pharisees (see: Luke 11: 37-41).
Putting these two ceremonies together, they present a “strong contrast” between the two: “God prepared a ceremony to open the future in an “unspecified place”; Jesus, the Son of God, accepted the hypocrite’s invitation and risked a new one. starting at the appropriate place. Jesus “enjoyed a feast”, from Matthew’s call (cf. Mt 9-13) to the Last Supper: for him, the human table “was a meeting place on the way, a place of adventure for truth “, and he even went so far as to collect the manner and style of the person sitting at the table, “recording the accusations one by one.”
Application mining relation space
The nun went on to say that the dinner table is a “strong symbolic place”. Although the preaching urges people to start a journey, they must stop to rest and quench their hunger and thirst on the journey. There, you have to dig deep into space to build relationships with others, whether they are friends or enemies, saints or sinners.
Returning to the banquet comparison, Jesus used the banquet as the place for “my true desire to eat at your table.” The holy historian Luke, who always writes about the gentle side of Jesus, describes Jesus at this feast as “violent and rude, showing that he expected the status quo to break it, to reawaken his conscience and reject culture and religious system completely. “
The feast of grace
In addition, Jesus also proposed a “new feast based on grace” at this feast. He said: As long as you give what is in your cup and plate, everything will be clean for you.
This gospel story invites everyone to enter “a place where other members of the church are going to convert together”. If Jesus condemned duplicity, he was also strongly against duplicity, public and private double dealing, and personal and corporate double standards. The nun said that “general ignorance” has arisen from this, which makes it difficult for the preaching of the Gospel to take root in today’s living environment.
New look inside
Sister Angelini emphasized that in order to find a place for evangelization in relationships, we do not need to “follow the trends of the media”, “empty compliance with norms” and follow the culture of “appearance”. All this will not eliminate to the hunger of young people, he will only kill them.
God’s style is seen in these two feasts in the Book of Isaiah and the Gospel of Luke, “strongly urging us to begin the journey of walking together” and recommending “gathering rules” that are different from the world secular For Jesus, the first gathering place is “the regenerated interior.” Mainstream culture despises that place, but it is a “good place to feast with fellow believers” and a place where we can meet people in truth.
Sister Angelini concluded by asking everyone to rediscover the vitality of these places.
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2024-10-16 12:38:00
