Monday of the Thirty-First Week in Ordinary Time
The merrymaking with the poor people
Then he said to the host who invited him, “When you hold a lunch or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or your wealthy neighbors, in case they may invite you back and you have repayment. Rather, when you hold a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind; blessed indeed will you be because of their inability to repay you. For you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.” Lk 14,12-14
Jesus announced today a relatively unknown bliss, that one of the selflessness: “When you hold a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind; blessed indeed will you be because of their inability to repay you”. I think that in the world there is nothing more precious than a poor man who thanks you with a smile because he has nothing more to give. However, when we speak of the poor, we think of every man, because everyone has his own poverty. But the gospel teaches that Jesus lives in the humans. Combining these two truths, we can say that the Lord lives in our poverty. The person who, in the life, has the grace to meet the Lord in the man, is as if he would go to pray at the temple: it is the announcement which also Paul gives us: “for the temple of God, which you are, is holy” (1 Cor 3,17). We know that there are men with whom it is difficult to recognize it with the naked eye, it is needed the microscope of the faith, but there are two kinds of people in which God is recognizable immediately: they are the saints and the poors. We have been lucky because we have met both. Indeed, it seems to me that the saints have been the ones to help us to meet him in the poors. To mention only those who are now in the paradise, let’s think about father Cipriano Ricotti, father Tomaso Beck, father Francesco Caniato, father Arturo Quario, father Robert Corretti and others who have taught us much more than to meet the Lord in the poors: we have been taught to meet every man in his poverty. We can invite to dinner a rich man, a well-established and famous person, it is enough just to invite him in his poverty. We ask to the Lord that, in some cases, he grants us the grace to be able to announce, if not by the words, at least by the facts: “I am happy to meet you, because you are poor like me and the Lord is with you”. We can invite anyone to dinner with this spirit, because the poverty lives in everyone. And if we do it, we will receive not only our reward “at the resurrection of the righteous” but even before, in the joy and the peace of the heart.