Fourth Sunday of Easter
Listen the voice of the Lord
My sheep hear my voice; I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish. No one can take them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one can take them out of the Father’s hand. The Father and I are one.” Jn 10,27-30
When by the morning time the people get out from their house and go by the subway, the youngsters to go to attend the school and the adults to be present at their work, they seem a flock which relocates from one place to another of the city. During the day we experience the same events, we are fed by the same food, we are reached by the same information which the newspapers and the television transmit to us and by night time we go back, being tired, to the fold to recover somehow, ready to resume, by the next day, a working day similar to the previous one. This is the drama of the universe, not only of the man: ““One generation passes and another comes, but the world forever stays. The sun rises and the sun goes down; then it presses on to the place where it rises. Blowing now toward the south, then toward the north, the wind turns again and again, resuming its rounds. All rivers go to the sea, yet never does the sea become full. To the place where they go, the rivers keep on going. All speech is labored; there is nothing man can say. The eye is not satisfied with seeing nor is the ear filled with hearing. What has been, that will be; what has been done, that will be done. Nothing is new under the sun” (Eccl 1,4-9). Giacomo Leopardi who, as a pessimist, had nothing to envy to Qoèlet, although admiring the scene of the moon by night time, cannot avoid to exclaim: “Are you not tired to go again on the always eternal ways? Are you not bored, do you still desire to admire these valleys?” Is it possible to transform the sequence of the days, apparently equal and tedious, in an always new adventure, despite to make the same things? It is, and the today gospel teaches us the way to be able to do it. It is necessary not only to look to the pages of the newspaper and to switch on the television, but to listen the voice of the Lord, which by every day reaches us, even if the main road is the one of the Holy Scriptures: “I know my sheep ……and they follow me”. Give us, Lord, the capability to be able to grasp, in the apparent tediousness of the days, your voice which whispers to our heart new sentiments and makes us admiring the same scenarios with an always different spirit: the downs, the sunsets, the wind and the mountains, the sequence of the seasons, the persons who go in hurry with their thoughts and their dreams. Give us, Lord, the capacity to recognize you in the persons every day encountered along our way. Give us, Lord, the awareness to be able to live an eternal life such that no one can take away us from your hand. Give us the capability to believe that you and the Father are one only thing, such that, following you during our days, eventually we can happily return to the port from which one day we sailed out.