First Reading: Acts 16: 22-34
Psalm 138
Gospel: John 16: 5-11

The Spirit is the great protagonist of these weeks, waiting for Pentecost which we will celebrate in a few Sundays. The apostles are lost, confused. How can they go on without the Lord, how can they face the huge task of announcing the Gospel if he is no longer there? Jesus does not think so, he calls them back, scolds them: the Paraclete will come to lead his Church. Sometimes we too complain about the alleged absence of the Lord. He is not absent, far from him, He is forever present thanks to the work of the Spirit. If we feel his absence, perhaps, we must take up our prayers and intensify the invocation of the Spirit! If faith becomes our effort, intellectual conjecture, good cultural habit then we will always feel the presence of the Lord as a vague memory of the past. The Spirit, on the other hand, makes Jesus our contemporary and helps us to understand that sin consists in not recognizing Him as a manifestation of the Father, that the justice of God consists in the salvation of every man and that the evil one is now defeated. The Spirit blows heavily on us!

Of course it's not easy. It is not easy to believe, to be witnesses, to be credible, to be serious disciples. Not just a few times a year or in our churches that become reassuring nests. Of course, you are right: we are living in times when being Christian requires tempering, in which no one applauds if we live the values of the gospel seriously. In hard times the Lord asks for strong, motivated and determined Christians. Peaceful and pacified but not yielding or approved to the fierce logic of the world. The Spirit supports us in the fight against the darkness and evil that we carry within us and that we see around us. And it is the Spirit who opens the inner gaze, which allows men, us, to see the sin that is the rejection of Christ, and to recognize Jesus as the envoy in the world and to read the unfolding of mercy in the affairs of the world of God. It takes faith, and a lot, to see in the intricate and bloody human affair the tenderness of God and only the Spirit allows us to trace the true meaning of the unfolding of history.

Let us invoke the gift of the Paraclete with faith, and blessed day.
Abba Meskel