Brothers and sisters

May the Lord give you peace!

I am truly very happy to celebrate the Eucharist with you, on this beautiful day because we are receiving a new priest, who will serve our communities in northern Cyprus.

And the liturgy of this Sunday invites us to reflect on a theme of great importance in our journey of faith which is the reflection on eternal life… Jesus invites you and me. He calls us to look, to see, to go beyond material things…

It would be nice to give a title to the Sunday liturgy of today. To help us not to forget what the Lord wants to change in our hearts! Yes, we are here, in church, we come to Mass because we want God to enter our hearts, our lives, and transform us…

The passage of today’s Gospel speaks to us of this rich, beautiful and energetic boy who is looking for a treasure. And Jesus gazes at this boy and  he is loved by Jesus, as we all desire: to be loved. Yes, brothers and sisters, we all want to be loved… Even in the first reading we heard from the book of Wisdom. It speaks to us of a treasure that is worth more than gold and silver. This is why I like to call this Sunday “TRUE TREASURE Sunday”. But what is the TRUE TREASURE that we have discovered today? Is the treasure that the book of Wisdom tells us about, the only thing that is truly valuable in life? That treasure that the rich young man could not accept (because it was free), and therefore he went away sad?

The TREASURE for us is the Love of God! His being always with us, His love until death on the cross. His friendship, His care and attention, His caresses, His Word, His Body (Eucharist), His gaze full of compassion!

But the incredible thing is that this TREASURE cannot be bought with money… it cannot be bought with appearance, it cannot be bought with power, it cannot be bought with intelligence alone… but with love and loving.

Jesus asks to have a special place in our hearts, He wants to be the most precious thing we have! And to do this He asks us every day not to think only of ourselves… but to see, to look at the needs of our brothers… to those who need us, our time, our smile, our help, and not to think only about money…

Brothers and sisters, we all really want to be happy. We all want to live…. We all really want to be loved and love. Well, Jesus tells us that if we want to be happy now and always, that we want to have eternal life, it is necessary to give up everything that can separate us from God… especially selfishness… indifference…  Saint Teresa of Calcutta said: indifference is worse than sin….

Of course, it is not easy to understand and live these words of Jesus, especially because we live in a world and in a society where the economy has become the absolute value… and money, an authentic idol. And for money, wars are waged that destroy humanity. Indeed, there is an ever-increasing belief that the rich are happy and the poor are wretched. (But it is not true!)

Precisely for this reason the word of God invites us to ask for the gift of the spirit of “wisdom”, which reveals to us the true meaning of things and teaches us where the “true” wealth is found, which is certainly not in gold, silver, or bank accounts that we can possess, but in loving others, and sharing what we are and what we have.

And to conclude, let us ask the Lord for the grace to seek eternal life, like this young man of whom the Gospel speaks, but to seek it like Peter and the apostles, who were capable of giving up everything in order to possess Jesus, his Gospel and his Kingdom… and to begin today… amen!