We recently celebrated the Mass of Thanksgiving with which the National Eucharistic Congress (Guatemala) had its most numerous, visible and participatory manifestation. This Eucharistic celebration was preceded by a procession with the Blessed Sacrament through some streets of our city. The reason for these celebrations was to give thanks for the 500th anniversary of the beginning of evangelization and the presence of Jesus the Eucharist in our country. Today concludes the Congress with the celebration of the Sunday Holy Mass in each of the churches of the country.
By pure coincidence, this Sunday’s second reading is the thanksgiving with which St. Paul begins his letter to the Ephesians. It is a joyful thanksgiving that the apostle raises to God for the gift of faith, because God’s love has overflowed to offer his salvation to all the peoples of the world. It is a thanksgiving that we can appropriate to give thanks for the gift of Jesus Christ and the gospel, his death and resurrection that reconcile us with God.
Praise and blessing is directed to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. For He is the origin of everything, from Him proceeds the initiative of salvation and its fulfillment and completion. He has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual and heavenly good. Full salvation has been given to us in Christ. There is no need to look for another, there is no need to complete it with another; there is no other. This saving design of the Father is at the very origin of creation, for when he created the world, the Father had our salvation in mind: He chose us in Christ, before creating the world, to be holy and blameless in his sight, through love. He created us to be holy, to belong to him and to find the meaning and value of our life in his love for us.
The Father’s saving plan was to make us his children. He determined, because He willed it, that through Jesus Christ we should be His children. We are children of God by faith and baptism. Through faith and baptism we receive grace, we receive divine life in our being through the gift of the Holy Spirit, we are born into the life of God as an adoption, as a grace. When we are born into this world, marked by sin and human disobedience, we are born deprived of God. Through faith and baptism our darkness is illuminated in order to attain a firm and lasting life in God. We are children of God united to the true Son, Jesus Christ. Constituted in this dignity, we will then be able to fulfill our vocation: that we may praise and glorify the grace with which she has favored us through her beloved Son. The deepest and most enduring purpose and goal of our life is precisely that: to praise and glorify the grace of God’s love for us.
Through Christ, through his blood, we have received redemption, the forgiveness of sins. After creation, this is the first saving work of Christ on our behalf. He died on the cross and thus took our sins upon himself and thus enabled us to freely receive reconciliation from God. Our freedom, which on the one hand constitutes our dignity, is also the means of our downfall. Because we often do not know how to choose well or decide well. We ruin ourselves, our family and society. We need to mend, to heal, to repair the failures of our freedom. God does that with his forgiveness and grace. In this way God’s plan was fulfilled, that we and all things might find fullness and meaning in Christ: this is the plan that he had planned to bring about through Christ, when the fullness of time would come: to make all things, things in heaven and things on earth, have Christ as their head.
With Christ we are also heirs. Since 500 years ago, when the Gospel arrived in our lands, it began to enlighten those who welcomed it. There were a multitude of Franciscan, Dominican and Mercedarian friars who for two centuries dedicated their intelligence, their courage, their fatigue and sometimes their blood to transmitting the Gospel. They learned the languages of the main towns of Guatemala, adapted the Latin alphabet to be able to write in those languages and wrote catechisms and doctrines. They recognized that the inhabitants of these lands, unknown to them until then, were people created in the image and likeness of God, who were also called to share in the salvation of Christ and to reach fulfillment in God. Those missionaries wanted to share with the inhabitants of these lands the most precious spiritual treasure they had: faith and the hope of eternal salvation. For this we were destined: to be a continual praise of his glory. From those beginnings to the present, believers have gone through many historical vicissitudes. We have lived through times of splendor of the faith, when the sanctity of Brother Pedro de San José Betancur flourished; We have lived through times of persecution and harassment, as when Blessed Encarnación Rosal was expelled from Quetzaltenango and we have lived through times when the faith cost blood, as in the second half of the 20th century, when Blessed José María Gran and companions martyred in Quiché, seven of whom were lay people, Blessed Tulio Maruzzo and Blessed Obdulio Arroyo, one a priest and the other a layman in Izabal, and Blessed Stanley Rother, pastor of Santiago Atitlán, gave their lives.
In Christ, you too, continues St. Paul, after hearing the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation and after believing, have been marked with the promised Holy Spirit. Faith and salvation have come down to us, the present generation of Christians. The Holy Spirit is God Himself dwelling in our hearts. It is the guarantee of our inheritance, that is, the foretaste and advance of the life that we will share with God in fullness in heaven. But the wealth we enjoy now is also a commitment to the future. It is up to us to pass on faith and salvation to the next generation. Our times are difficult, because we live enclosed within a horizon in which the only things that seem to count are the things of this world. Let us raise our eyes and dare to look beyond, to heaven where God dwells. Let us have the audacity to make God the foundation of our hope and let us act in this world enlightened by the gospel and the promises of God that open up our future.