Gospels of these Sundays. Every Sunday of Lent is a celebration of Christ's resurrection. So that also this penitential season, these 40 days, this image of our earthly life is punctured again with the glory of the resurrection as a sign that enthroning risen Christ is with us in this tribulation of these forty days. And therefore the glory of Holy Thursday and that of Good Friday is already foreshadowed in these forty days. They prepare us to the moment where we as repentant sinners see the Lord at our feet telling us and saying, if I don't wash your feet, you have no part in me.

[01:05]

And looking forward to Good Friday, where Christ on the cross turns to the repentant thief and says, today you will be with me in paradise. Now, my dear friends, I say this for your sake, I say this not as an explanation of a theory, as an interesting thesis, but as a life-giving truth, because I know, as every priest does, I know only too well the barrier that so frequently keeps you away and makes you hesitant to accept the doctrine of the church here in fruition, of the presence of Christ's glory in our own life. The obstacle which tells you that these thoughts may be unrealistic is the realization

[02:23]

painful realization that you are indeed not yet there, because you don't feel you have good reason to rejoice in the glorified Christ and to celebrate the church year as a wedding feast, as long as you feel beset on all sides by temptations. as long as you are bent low under the heavy burden of sickness, bodily and mentally, as long as you feel like helpless victims of all kinds of depressions and sadness, weighed down by laziness, discouraged by timidity, disturbed by sensitivities, irritabilities, impatience, and the endless recurrence of the same faults. There seems to be neither reason nor room for rejoicing, for fruition.

[03:28]

But, my dear friends, trust the Church. She is realistic. And in these penitential seasons, especially in that of Lent, she shows a tremendous knowledge of human nature. But at the same time also, an even deeper knowledge, may I say, of the power of the resurrection, of the endless patience of God's love and its infinite generosity. which has paid the price for us, the Son of God made man who died for us on the cross. The Church sees sin not in the light of the devil, of the accuser, the Satan, but in the light of Christ's love for us.

[04:42]

That really, Christ's saving love for us, that is the essence of the church. And for this reason we call the church our mother. The church is for us the heavenly Jerusalem, realized already here on this earth. This beautiful and consoling truth that the Church is the Immaculate Bride of Christ already here on earth, that is brought into our realization in the feast of the dedication of the Church. Right at the intuit of the mass of the dedication of a Church, the very essence of the church is revealed to us as the place where God dwells, the place which is the gate of heaven.

[06:00]

We repeat the words of Jacob, which he spoke when, under the desolation of exile, weighed down, by the vague feeling of his guilt. Fleeing his father's house, he faces the strangeness and the enmity of a foreign country. Tired unto death, he puts his head upon the stone. That stone is God's unshakable love for him, the faithfulness of God, the loyalty to his covenant. And there, sleeping on this stone, he has this vision that he at the very place where he sleeps, desolate, depressed,

[07:07]

The ladder is put down from heaven and touches the ground, firmly is established on the ground, and constitutes a bridge between him in his desolation and God in his glorious love for him. He sees the ladder and angels ascending and descending. So he is not alone. He is at home in his exile. Therefore he exclaims, Terrible is full of awe is this place. This is the house of God and the gate of heaven, and I did not know it. This happy surprise is also our surprise.

[08:10]

We as wanderers here on earth, we are placed by God's mercy there where the ladder reaches from heaven and is firmly established here upon our ground, and that is, that ladder is the Son of God made man. He is the God with us. That is the essence of the Church, God with us. And that also is explained in the Epistle. There we see the heavenly Jerusalem descending from heaven, descending just as God's love for us descends and seeks us and finds us where we are in order to console us, in order to be with us in tribulation.

[09:16]

This heavenly Jerusalem, the Church, therefore, is not the accomplishment of human effort and human virtue, but it is a gift which descends from God, that means from heaven, adorned as a bride for the bridegroom, ready for the feast. And the voice explains it, behold the tabernacle of God with men. This vision of the apocalypse fulfills, as it were, the vision that Jacob had in the beginning when he, for the first time, built the house of God. And who is the God? of this new Jerusalem.

[10:18]

The epistle of the Feast of the Dedication gives us the name. His name is Deus Comais, God with them. That will be the God for all the inhabitants of the heavenly Jerusalem. That is his name, God with them. Just as Jacob in the vision at Bethel had expressed the very essence of that God who appeared to him there as the Lord is with me. So it is this Lord who is with us, who is the Lord of the church, and he tells us, Behold, I make all things new. He is the God of hope.

[11:21]

He is the God of future. He is the God of future and eternal happiness. In the gospel, we see the God with us in action, as it were. There is Zachary, a small man by stature, and a publican, a sinner, he hears that Christ is coming, descending to Jericho, and he rushes in order to see him. He wants to add to his statue. He climbs the tree. But then the God with us, our Lord Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son, passes by, sees him there on the tree, and says, Come down, Zachary, descend.

[12:22]

This day I want to stay in your house. And when all the others saw that and he heard that, they murmured, saying that he was gone to be a guest with a man that was a sinner. But our Lord, the God with us, says, This day is salvation. Come to this house. For the Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which was lost. Here we have the whole essence of the Church as our mother and as the place of our rest. Here we can breathe freely into the infinite love of God for us. Another feast in which this glorious essence of the communion of saints of the Church here on earth as well as in heaven comes to our full realization is the Feast of All Saints.

[13:39]

In the readings of this Feast, in the Epistle and the Gospel, we see three scenes. One, the first one in the Gospel, is the proclamation of the presence of the Kingdom of God here on earth, which is made by Christ, on the mountain of the Beatitudes. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Then we have a second scene, which is the first part of the Epistle. There we see the angel of the Lord ascending from the east, having in his hand the seal of the living God and signing the servants of God with this sign on their foreheads.

[15:09]

That seems to me is the picture of the sacramental Mysterium of the Church. Or better, no, let us not put it this way. The angel rising from the east, who signs the foreheads of the servants of God with the seal of the living God, represents the sacramental mystery of the Church. The priesthood, the bishop, who in the power of the sacraments seals through baptism, confirmation, the sacrament of penance of the Holy Eucharist, extreme unction, the foreheads of the servants of God. But it is not only the sacramental mysterium, but also the reality of life.

[16:17]

The foreheads of the servants of God are signed with the sign of the cross, through obedience to God's will, in their humility, all these virtues which constitute the poor in spirit. After this, the Prophet has a new vision. He sees a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations and tribes and peoples and tongues, standing before the throne and in sight of the Lamb, clothed with white robes and palms in their hands. And they cry with a loud voice, saying, Salvation to our God, who sitteth upon the throne, and to the Lamb. the communion of saints in its completion, the kingdom of God fully realized.

[17:21]

The whole reality of sanctity stands before our eyes because it is the mystery of sanctity to be gathered in the unity of charity around the throne, That means those who are gathered together in charity are the servants of God, bound to him through obedience. They are in the sight of the Lamb, faith in the redeeming, sacrificial, selfless love that appeared in Christ. And they prostrate themselves, surrendering all personal glory to the glory of God, and singing the hymn because they rejoice in blessedness and the freedom of the spirit they have entered the state of fruition and the whole church and the feast of all saints takes part in this blessed state

[18:32]

The most shining example of that sanctity which the Church possesses through the victory of Christ on the cross is the martyr. His life ends in the complete identification with Christ's battle and victory. Not I live, but Christ lives in me. That is, the reality of the martyr, and the accent in this sentence is on Christ lives in me. His death is the passing over the limits of our self-centred existence into that of the resurrection, into the life of the resurrection. The very death of the martyr is transfigured actually by the final glory which is already at work in him, visibly, in his courage and in his joy. The life of the martyr is not the exact imitation of the historical Christ, not a reproduction of the complete self-abnegation of Christ on the cross through his willpower,

[19:57]

But the martyr's battle has already been won in Christ. The martyr believes in that victory, acts in the power of that victory, which he has participated in sacramentally, through baptism and the Eucharist. The beautiful example of Saint Felicitas, who, when she was suffering in birth pangs in the prison and cried, the guard came and mocked at her and said, if you cry now, what will happen to you when the wild beasts will assail

[20:46]

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