Homily

17.11.2001

Br. Giacomo Bini

At the end of this Plenary Council, the Eucharist being celebrated wishes to express, first of all, our thanks to the Lord for the grace of the fraternal experience of these days, for the help of His Spirit, for the commitment of all in the search for the way to live our Franciscan vocation projected towards the future.

The Gospel page that we have heard proclaimed makes us exclaim with St. Francis: "Let us begin, brothers, to serve the Lord Our God, because up to now we have done little" (LMj 14,1). Indeed, the Gospel proposes the experience of the Poverello with the lepers, the experience of meeting with the lowest, with the poorest. Poverty was for Francis, with a disconcerting clarity and conviction, the place of the epiphany of God, of the encounter with Jesus of Nazareth, humble and totally given over into the hands of men. Francis, right to the end, wished to be faithful to the gospel "foolishness" and to follow Christ without hesitation or compromise. Poverty is, for the Poverello, the consequence of a transforming encounter and the condition for a gratuitous and disinterested service, to the very depths.

If we wish to be brothers of Francis, we too are asked to make poverty the privileged epiphany of God today. It is to accept and choose the way of total expropriation as a place and space of meeting with the Lord and with the poor.

All the Franciscan Fraternity in the entire world is called on to become, in its being and in its doing, the epiphany of God, a manifestation of Him, a martyrdom, a witness to His loving presence among men in this our world. Epiphany and martyrdom: to become a "readable" sign, understandable, with an authentic, gospel life, with our actions and with our more significant structures.

The concrete way to meet with others, with the poor, are suggested by three verbs used in the gospel parable, typically Franciscan verbs: "Visit... come to... serve...". Which signify: go towards the other, to the marginalized, the needy, without waiting for them to come to us; to be able to see and meet Jesus in these poor presences; to place ourselves at the service of all, excluding all forms of interest, of power, of control and domination.

This is the choice of Francis, a choice that is an indication of the way for us also. Only in this way can the Fraternity become possible, with that form of Christian Fraternity that St. Paul describes in the first reading. Adam and Eve had wanted to take on divine nature, "to become like gods", and they were discovered "naked", weak, defenseless. Christ, on the contrary, distributes generously the treasure of His divine nature and, because of this, He is exalted by the Father. This is the way of Christ and of Francis: expropriating self, forgetting self in order to open one’s eyes to the necessities and needs of the other.

We have experienced some of this Fraternity during these days in which we were preoccupied with the way to live and express our vocation in this world in which the Lord has put us. Together, today, while this experience is coming to an end, let us ask the Lord to give us the same passion that guided us during these days, the same interest in the good of the brothers, the same joy that we experienced in asking ourselves about our identity and mission.