With eyes wide open<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n
The first Christian communities lived through very difficult years.<\/b>\u00a0 Lost in the vast Roman Empire and in the midst of conflicts and persecutions, those Christians sought strength and encouragement by waiting for Jesus\u2019 prompt coming and by remembering his words:\u00a0 Watch; Stay awake; Keep your eyes open; Be alert.<\/p>\n
Do Jesus\u2019 calls to stay awake still mean anything to us?\u00a0 What does it mean for us Christians today to put our hope in God, living with our eyes wide open?<\/b>\u00a0 Shall we let hope in the final justice God will\u00a0secure for\u00a0the vast majority of innocent victims, who are suffering through no fault of their own, disappear definitively from our secular world?<\/p>\n
The easiest way precisely to falsify Christian hope is to expect from God our eternal salvation, while we turn our backs on the suffering in our world right now. \u00a0Someday we will have to recognize our blindness before Jesus our Judge:<\/b>\u00a0 When did we see you hungry or thirsty, a stranger or naked, sick or in jail, and we did not help you? \u00a0This will be our last dialogue with him if we live with our eyes closed.<\/p>\n
We need to wake up and open our eyes wide. \u00a0We need to be vigilant in order to see beyond own small interests and concerns. \u00a0The Christian\u2019s hope is not an attitude of blindness, since it never forgets those who suffer.<\/b> \u00a0Christian spirituality does not consist in only looking inside, for its heart is attentive to those who are abandoned to their own fate.<\/p>\n
In our Christian communities we have to be more and more careful that the way we live in hope does not lead us to indifference or to forgetfulness of the poor. \u00a0We cannot isolate ourselves in our religion so as not to hear the cry of those who die of hunger every day.<\/b> \u00a0We are not allowed to nourish our illusion of innocence to protect our peace and quiet.<\/p>\n
The hope in God that forgets those who live on this earth without being able to hope at all, cannot such hope be considered a religious version of a certain optimism at all cost, lived out without clarity or responsibility? \u00a0Cannot the pursuit of our own eternal salvation, with our backs turned on those who suffer, be denounced as being a subtle \u201cselfishness extended to the afterlife\u201d?<\/p>\n
Probably the little sensibility there is to the immense suffering in our world is one of the most serious symptoms of today\u2019s Christianity getting old.<\/b> \u00a0When Pope Francis calls for \u201ca poorer Church of the poor,\u201d he is shouting out his most important message to us Christians in well-off countries.<\/b><\/p>\n
Jos\u00e9 Antonio Pagola<\/b><\/p>\n
December 1, 2013
\n1 Advent\u00a0 (A)
\nMatthew 24, 37-44<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"