Its meaning was hidden from them so that they should not understand it

27 SEPTEMBER (Lk 9,43b-45)

Jesus reveals to his disciples the truth about the mission that awaits him. There is a future that must be accomplished for Him. It is not of triumph, of earthly glory, of victory against enemies and of humiliation of peoples and nations. Instead it is a future of delivery in the hands of men. He will be delivered into the hands of the Gentiles by his own people.

This is one delivery to death and not certainly to life. Before Jesus, confessed by Peter as the Christ of God, open wide the doors of betrayal and denial on the part of his people. This is his future, this is his truth that he must live in its entirety. It is the reversal of thoughts, ideas, imaginations and every representation made ​​so far on the Lord’s Messiah. He was thought by all great, victorious, triumphant and liberator from the bondage in which they were forced to live.

The Lord’s people has always been liberated by people aroused by God and made ​​strong by Him. It suffices to read the First and Second Books of Maccabees and we can have an slight idea of what every child of Israel expected from the Messiah. The Anointed of the Lord was to them a new David, a new Judas Maccabeus, a new powerful character, supremely powerful in order to give liberation and salvation. The people of God would not have known slavery with him any more. It would have been eternally free.

These expectations of liberation vanish with a single sentence of the Lord Jesus: “Put these words well your minds: The Son of Man is about to be delivered into the hands of men.” It is as if Jesus says: all your hopes are false. You are building on the quicksand of fantasy, imagination and of the purest invention. You are elaborating thoughts that do not belong to God and are not his revelation. I am the truth of the Messiah. Every word on me must be read and understood by my history. Wait for events and you will know who a true Messiah of God is.

What Jesus proclaims really requires the denial of ourselves. He asks us to annul our thoughts. To start from what we have so far denied, removed from the mind and heart. The journey with God is a full leaving, abandoning, not certainly external things, but just those internal ones that are our minds and our hearts, our expectations and our hopes. They are the imaginations of a future written by us, but never thought by God.

And all were astonished by the majesty of God. While they were all amazed at his every deed, he said to his disciples, “Pay attention to what I am telling you. The Son of Man is to be handed over to men.” But they did not understand this saying; its meaning was hidden from them so that they should not understand it, and they were afraid to ask him about this saying.

The disciples remain without any understanding. It is as if in a moment a destructive hurricane had passed on them. The future of Christ is for them so mysterious that they do not grasp the meaning. It is out of their minds. It is alien to their hearts. Jesus lives in another world that does not belong to them. Between these two worlds there is an infinite distance. They are irreconcilable. None can adapt to the other. But it is the disciples who have to leave their world to enter with the mind, body, soul, spirit into the world of Jesus, which is apparently a world of human defeat and of deep humiliation. It is the world in which our world might never enter.

In the world of Jesus one enters only by conversion and abandonment of what we are, acquiring what we are not. Stripping ourselves of our ephemeral truths and acquiring the eternal truths. Leaving our foolish and unwise words and accepting the Word of Jesus, the one that is of eternal life. Denying ourselves and following only the Lord Jesus, walking behind him, we too, to our cross. The ways of God and those men are opposed and irreconcilable. Who wants to be a disciple of the Lord must never follow his thoughts and pursue them. Jesus Christ is the only light, the only path on which to turn our feet. He is the only Word of eternal life.

Virgin Mary, Mother of the Redemption, Angels and Saints introduce us into this truth.