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Giovedì 30 Marzo 2023

Fifth Week of Lent

Word for today
The Gospel of John 8:51-59

The omnipresent

It is the omnipresent always present. It can be present subtly or in an overbearing and arrogant way, but it is always present. It is always present in our mind and, although we have learnt to justify it in the most insidious, elegant, dark, perverse, deceiving way, it is always present. It is present in the mind of both perpetrators and victims, powerful ones and subdued, rich and poor. It is an always awfully omnipresent desire and it is definitely the most punctual among all man’s desires, in every life’s occasion, even if we have learnt to cover it up with convenient circumstances and to steer it with acceptable behaviour through conventional deceits. It is always present and it is, consciously or not, the greatest desire and the one which is omnipresent in man’s mind since when he went away from God to ally with the Evil. Indeed man went away from God because Satan deceived him regarding this desire, promising that, once he refused God, man would have been able to realize that desire in complete freedom and without limitations. What is the omnipresent desire in man’s mind? The omnipresent desire in man’s mind is the desire to eliminate. Eliminating what is annoying, uncomfortable, unheard, unexpected, difficult to understand, unknown, strange, unsafe, unforeseen. This is the omnipresent desire in man’s mind. Getting rid of the enemy, the aggressor, the antagonist, the rival, the contestant, the betrayer, the cause of pain and failure, getting rid of who is more skilful, or less skilful, of the alien, the invader, the odd, the too similar. The desire for elimination may turn, time by time, into the desire of destroying, erasing, excluding, abolishing, hunting, ignoring, extirpating, liquidating, expelling, suppressing, exterminating, killing, knocking down, throwing away, slaying, slaughtering, but anyway it is always about getting rid of something. It is in this respect that man, deceived by Satan, would like to be God, to have God’s power, unlimited and uncontrolled. The one who signed a covenant with Satan has no greater and stronger desire than exercising his power in eliminating what he himself desires. Man has transformed his life in a giant mechanism of elimination. To be free of discomforts we have eliminated from our life any contact with nature, and we have made rivers, air, earth rotten. To eliminate the effort and the freedom to be ourselves we have eliminated every personal autonomy and interdependence, subduing humanity to the dominion of globalization and homologation. Governments invest the majority of their economical resources to work on new ways to kill, with the aim to eliminate the enemy. Our mind can use pretty much everything for the sake of elimination. The omnipresent desire to eliminate is always powerfully present, it was also present amongst the Jews who were discussing with Jesus, as the gospel narrates. In their discussion with Jesus the desire to eliminate was present in their mind even before their questions were, above the answers they got, beyond rationality, and it utterly substituted every kind of dialogue, communion, sharing, respect, tolerance. It is the omnipresent desire to eliminate that, in the mind of the ones who were talking with Jesus, transformed their dialogue with Him in a quarrel, their curious gaze in an inquisitive one, their questions became provocations, Jesus became a demon, words became stones. Eliminating is always the first and the sharpest of the mind’s solutions, inevitably, continuously and without appeal. What the greatest of the human desire, the desire to eliminate, needs to be fully realized is the approval of the public opinion, the protection of the law, the confirmation of the moral, the support of justice, truth and religions. That is also what happened two thousands of years ago, when Jesus’ enemies tried to kill him by lapidation, under the protection of religion, of the temple, and in the name of God. It is this incurable thirst of eliminating at every cost what it is uncomfortable, not known, unusual that make our eyes blind, our ears deaf, the Jews’ hands violent, both back then and today, in this generation. It is this insatiable thirst to get rid at every cost of what the mind cannot accept, that does not allow today’s man’s heart and intelligence to recognize in Jesus the true God and Lord, even when he proclaims to the world: Amen, amen, I say to you, before Abraham came to be, I AM. Man would like to be God to always and without limit realize the foul compulsive desire to be able to eliminate all that he does not accept or that disturbs him, this is why he signs a covenant with Satan, who exercises his dominion on creation using his destructive power, standing against God who is the Creator. It is this very desire to eliminate that does not allow the human mind to recognize in the creation even the smallest step and sparkle of God’s work and love. And it will be this raving desire to eliminate that one day will bring humanity right on the edge of extinction, of its own elimination. Purifying our thoughts from the desire to eliminate is the first step toward man’s intellectual and spiritual evolution, the way in which Jesus is willing to escort us.