During his second journey, first Paul passed through the cities of the first journey to visit the young christian communities he had evangelized. Arrived in Troas, he dreams of a man of Macedonia who begs him to come and help him. Then he decides to cross the sea to enter Europe and arrives in Philippi. In this city he meets Lydia who will be the first person to welcome the Gospel in Europe. “The Lord opened her heart to listen to what was said by Paul”, is an expression very close to that of the anonymous biographer of St. Jerome: “…when it pleased the good God to perfectly move his heart and by holy inspiration to draw him to Himself from the occupations of the world”. Evangelization is our duty, the Church and every single Christian are missionaries by nature, our Baptism enables us to evangelize but the results of evangelization do not depend on us, on our beautiful preaching, on our witness, on the means we possess for to spread the Word of God. It is God who prepares the hearts of men and women through very personal inspirations. And men and women, solicited by the preaching and witness of Christians, in their full freedom, choose to follow Christ. Lydia, now converted together with her family, will host her missionaries at her home. Exactly like St. Jerome who, as soon as he converted, welcomes the poor into his house and feeds them. If you welcome Christ into your life, something changes. Christ contaminates you with the virtues of charity and generosity.

In today’s Gospel, the end of chapter 15 and the beginning of chapter 16, Jesus resumes speaking for the third time of Paràkletos, a Greek word that means the Advocate, the helper, the friend who assists you, the loved one who is close to you, the comforter, the Counsellor. He is the Holy Spirit that Jesus promises to his disciples and that he passes on to them as a gift, through the very gift of his life.

Jesus defines the Counsellor as the Spirit of truth. We have already heard this word “truth” when Jesus said “I am the way, the truth and the life”. The Spirit of truth is precisely the Spirit of Jesus. The spirit of a person, even in our common language, are his qualities, his life, his intelligence, his will, his affectivity, his personal characteristics. The Spirit of truth, the Spirit of Jesus is Jesus himself with all that he has said and done that he will be near and will help, he will console his disciples just when they will have to give their testimony before the courts.

Today’s Gospel returns to the theme of persecution. Jesus says to his disciples: “Whoever kills you will think he is offering service to God… because they have not known the Father, nor me”. He is preparing them for the future, for the opposition they will encounter and the risks they will run.

But what is the root of the persecution? The root is “They have not known the Father ..” Jesus is speaking of the perversion of religion, or rather of the refusal to pass from religion as a system of rules, as an ideological system to a sincere faith. The consequences can be devastating. We Christians have not been exempt from this disease. It is true that times are different but let us think of the Crusades: many people left at the cry “God wills it”, and in the name of God they killed and devastated far beyond the defense of the holy places. Think of, at the time of the Inquisition, how many people were tortured or died by fire because they were not “in line” with the doctrine of the Church and sometimes they were not wrong. Nowadays we see the brutal violence of that ideologized Islam that “in the name of God” carries out massacres. We see also Vladimir Putin, president of Russia, who justifies the invasion of Ukraine on “religious” and “moralistic” motivations by mentioning the Gospel. He is openly supported by the Kirill, the head of the Orthodox Church

The message, the proposal of Jesus is radical: it is necessary to return to the Gospel and change our image of God. It is necessary to pass from a God, in whose name one can take life, to the Father, in whose name life is always and only given.

The religious power, in the time of Jesus as in other times, wanted to maintain the image of the God who loves “order and discipline”, the image of the God who loves to be served and revered, of the God who does not care and worries of our life. Jesus warns his disciples and each of us so that we don’t create the community on this false image of God, but rather on the image of the Father who makes his love pass through ours, who bestow his forgiveness in our mutual forgiveness, who loves without expecting anything in return and asks his children to do the same.

May the Holy Spirit help us to understand, through Jesus Christ, the true image of God. Amen!