FINISHED
PALINSESTO
Reading of the Word of God
Praise to you, o Lord, King of eternal glory
This is the Gospel of the poor,
liberation for the imprisoned,
sight for the blind,
freedom for the oppressed.
Praise to you, o Lord, King of eternal glory
Leviticus 19,1-2.11-18
Yahweh spoke to Moses and said: 'Speak to the whole community of Israelites and say: "Be holy, for I, Yahweh your God, am holy. "You will not steal, nor deal deceitfully or fraudulently with your fellow-citizen. You will not swear by my name with intent to deceive and thus profane the name of your God. I am Yahweh. You will not exploit or rob your fellow. You will not keep back the labourer's wage until next morning. You will not curse the dumb or put an obstacle in the way of the blind, but will fear your God. I am Yahweh. "You will not be unjust in administering justice. You will neither be partial to the poor nor overawed by the great, but will administer justice to your fellow-citizen justly. You will not go about slandering your own family, nor will you put your neighbour's life in jeopardy. I am Yahweh. You will not harbour hatred for your brother. You will reprove your fellow-countryman firmly and thus avoid burdening yourself with a sin. You will not exact vengeance on, or bear any sort of grudge against, the members of your race, but will love your neighbour as yourself. I am Yahweh.
Praise to you, o Lord, King of eternal glory
The Son of Man came to serve,
whoever wants to be great
should become servant of all.
Praise to you, o Lord, King of eternal glory
This passage of Leviticus is bookended by two commands that cap a sort of Decalogue: "Be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy," and "Love your neighbour as yourself." God and neighbour are connected by the Word of God, in the double commandment of love for God and neighbours. Holiness is the very condition of God. That is, he is other, separate from us, transcendent, but not enclosed inside his own existence, rather God asks us to participate in his very life. "Be holy," he tells us, that is: "Do not be afraid to take part in my very way of being, in my perfection." Love for our neighbour fulfils the exhortation to holiness. Within these two invitations, the author reports some commandments that trace the way to become holy: do not oppress your neighbour nor take their goods, pay the worker, do not curse the deaf, do not hinder the blind, judge with justice in court, do not slander and do not contribute to the death of another person (this refers, perhaps, to the possibility of condemning someone with false testimony, as happened for example to Naboth in 1 Kings 21), do not harbour hate, do not take revenge, do not harbour rancour. The commandments that the book of Leviticus reports still speak to today's world. They help us to reflect on those concrete behaviours that prevent us from following the way of holiness. The Lord by asking us to love our neighbour as ourselves, shows that he does not ask an impossible measure and makes a very effective comparison: if we loved others as we love ourselves, our lives would be very different and the world way more peaceful.
Prayer is the heart of the life of the Community of Sant'Egidio and is its absolute priority. At the end of the day, every the Community of Sant'Egidio, large or small, gathers around the Lord to listen to his Word. The Word of God and the prayer are, in fact, the very basis of the whole life of the Community. The disciples cannot do other than remain at the feet of Jesus, as did Mary of Bethany, to receive his love and learn his ways (Phil. 2:5).
So every evening, when the Community returns to the feet of the Lord, it repeats the words of the anonymous disciple: " Lord, teach us how to pray". Jesus, Master of prayer, continues to answer: "When you pray, say: Abba, Father". It is not a simple exhortation, it is much more. With these words Jesus lets the disciples participate in his own relationship with the Father. Therefore in prayer, the fact of being children of the Father who is in heaven, comes before the words we may say. So praying is above all a way of being! That is to say we are children who turn with faith to the Father, certain that they will be heard.
Jesus teaches us to call God "Our Father". And not simply "Father" or "My Father". Disciples, even when they pray on their own, are never isolated nor they are orphans; they are always members of the Lord's family.
In praying together, beside the mystery of being children of God, there is also the mystery of brotherhood, as the Father of the Church said: "You cannot have God as father without having the church as mother". When praying together, the Holy Spirit assembles the disciples in the upper room together with Mary, the Lord's mother, so that they may direct their gaze towards the Lord's face and learn from Him the secret of his Heart.
The Communities of Sant'Egidio all over the world gather in the various places of prayer and lay before the Lord the hopes and the sufferings of the tired, exhausted crowds of which the Gospel speaks ( Mat. 9: 3-7 ), In these ancient crowds we can see the huge masses of the modern cities, the millions of refugees who continue to flee their countries, the poor, relegated to the very fringe of life and all those who are waiting for someone to take care of them. Praying together includes the cry, the invocation, the aspiration, the desire for peace, the healing and salvation of the men and women of this world. Prayer is never in vain; it rises ceaselessly to the Lord so that anguish is turned into hope, tears into joy, despair into happiness, and solitude into communion. May the Kingdom of God come soon among people!
For the sick, in memory of the dead, for peace
