Twenty First Sunday of the Year A - 24 August 2014

Even today Jesus asks us Christians the same question  he one day put his disciples: “and you, who do you say I am?” He does not ask us only so as to have us declare what  we think about his mysterious identity, but also so that we make up our minds about our relationship with him. What answer can we give him from within our communities? Have we come to know Jesus increasingly better, or do we have him “eternally depicted in our usual old boring sketches”? Are we living communities, seeking always to place Jesus in the centre of our lives and our activities, or do we live stagnated in routine and mediocrity? Do we love Jesus passionately or has he become for us a worn out personality whom we keep on invoking while indifference and only occasional remembrance keep growing in our hearts? Do people who come into contact with our communities feel the force and attractiveness he has for us?

Do we feel ourselves disciples of Jesus? Are we learning to live life the way he lived it in the midst of modern

society, or do we allow ourselves to be dragged along by any tempting slogan that catches our fancy? It is the same to us to live any way we please, or have we turned our community into a school to learn to live like Jesus?

Are we learning to regard life the way Jesus looked at it? Do our communities regard the needy and excluded sectors of society with compassion and responsibility, or do we enclose ourselves in our festivities, indifferent to the suffering of the most underprivileged and forgotten: those that were always the beloved of Jesus? Are we following Jesus by collaborating with him in the humanizing project of the Father, or do we continue to think that the most important task of Christianity is to be worried exclusively about our salvation? Are we convinced that the way to follow Jesus is to live each day making life more human and happy for all?

Do we live Sundays as Christians by celebrating the resurrection of Jesus, or do we organize our weekends

devoid of any Christian meaning? Have we learnt to find Jesus in the silence of our hearts, or do we feel our faith dying out, drowned in the noise and the emptiness there is within us?

Do we believe in the Risen Jesus who journeys with us full of life? Do we live in our communities being filled

with the peace he left his followers as a legacy? Do we believe that Jesus loves us with an endless love? Do we believe in his power to renew us? Do we have it in us to become witnesses of the mystery of hope we carry in our hearts?