On those dwelling in a land overshadowed by death light has arisen

7 JANUARY (Mt 4,12-17.23-25)

Today, Jesus begins his mission of salvation on our earth. He calls his people to conversion. This is a strong word. Who must get converted is a people that already believes in the true God and Lord, and already possesses the true Word of God. So far conversion has been an invitation to a moral change. It was asked to leave the way of sin and follow the road of obedience and listening to the Lord, to enter his commandments, to live the Law of the Covenant stipulated at Sinai.

With Jesus, conversion means radical change of the very faith, of the truth of God and man. It means entering the ultimate, final, complete and perfect Word that God makes resonate with men through his Faithful Servant. The moral meaning of conversion is a consequence, not its end or its essence. We can convince ourselves of it by reading the Gospel according to John.

Jesus answered and said to them, “Stop murmuring among yourselves. No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draw him, and I will raise him on the last day. It is written in the prophets: ‘They shall all be taught by God.’ Everyone who listens to my Father and learns from him comes to me. Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father. Amen, amen, I say to you, whoever believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the desert, but they died; this is the bread that comes down from heaven so that one may eat it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.” The Jews quarreled among themselves, saying, “How can this man give us (his) flesh to eat?” Jesus said to them, “Amen, amen, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him. Just as the living Father sent me and I have life because of the Father, so also the one who feeds on me will have life because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven. Unlike your ancestors who ate and still died, whoever eats this bread will live forever.” As a result of this, many (of) his disciples returned to their former way of life and no longer accompanied him. Jesus then said to the Twelve, “Do you also want to leave?” Simon Peter answered him, “Master, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and are convinced that you are the Holy One of God.” (Cf. Jn,43-59).

The entire mental, spiritual, religious structure, of faith, of traditions and customs, all the Old Testament is called to a real Easter. It must get out of that sort of “spiritual and religious slavery” of the Law of Moses; cross the sea of our humanity and enter the true freedom of the children of God which is all in the Word of Jesus.

When he heard that John had been arrested, he withdrew to Galilee. He left Nazareth and went to live in Capernaum by the sea, in the region of Zebulun and Naphtali, that what had been said through Isaiah the prophet might be fulfilled: “Land of Zebulun and land of Naphtali, the way to the sea, beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles, the people who sit in darkness have seen a great light, on those dwelling in a land overshadowed by death light has arisen.” From that time on, Jesus began to preach and say, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” He went around all of Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom, and curing every disease and illness among the people. His fame spread to all of Syria, and they brought to him all who were sick with various diseases and racked with pain, those who were possessed, lunatics, and paralytics, and he cured them. And great crowds from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, and Judea, and from beyond the Jordan followed him.

The conversion requested by Jesus is a real change of faith. One leaves the old faith in the God of the fathers and enters the full truth of the God of Jesus Christ. To use a fashionable word of today: it is not a matter of ” restyling “; that is, of taking the religion of the fathers and giving it an new external look. Neither is it a matter of a “make-up”, a “maquillage”; that is, an external embellishment, a liberation from every superstructure that along the course of the centuries has settled on it encrusting it. Instead, it is a matter of a conversion of true passage from the Old Covenant to the New, from Moses to Jesus Christ, from the Word of God to the Word of Christ the Lord. One enters a new world.

Virgin Mary, Mother of the Redemption, Angels and Saints give us this conversion.