Solemnity of Our Lady Queen of Palestine
Homily of H. B. Pierbattista Card. Pizzaballa
Deir Rafat – October 29th 2023
Dear Brothers and Sisters,
First of all, I greet all of you. Today we are a small number. It is a small gathering. It is the first time since the turmoil, since the war started, we meet as Diocese, as community.
It is significant that the first time we meet as community, as Church, is because of the Blessed Virgin Mary. As usual only the mothers can gather the family, the community. I have to say that I am a little bit surprised about the numbers. We expected less people. I also greet those who are following us through the media and thank you to the Christian Media Center.
Today, as we said, we will reconsecrate our Church, our Diocese and our land to the Holy Virgin, Queen of Palestine. We did this several times. Usually, we do this in very difficult moments in the life of our community. Definitely, this is one of the most difficult moments in our recent history.
To entrust: “to reconsecrate” means “to entrust”. This is an important act. Because when you entrust, you give trust. In this moment when this evil is flooding us and making us turn in on ourselves, we need to entrust and to go outside of ourselves. To deliver to God through the Holy Virgin Mary all that we have in our hearts. Not to keep everything inside.
All the readings speak of Salvation. The “big salvation”: the salvation that we receive from God through Christ. In this moment, when we think of salvation, we think of salvation from a specific situation that we are living in. We want to be saved from all this horrible situation of war, of bombs, of the hatred that is weighing our hearts down.
This is rightly so. We want to be saved from all this. We want this to finish as soon as possible, but we should not separate the “two salvations”. Salvation we are talking about is not just what we’ll experience at the end of our life and at the end of the world. Salvation is also our own salvation. Jesus is saving us from ourselves, from where we are, from our sin, from the sinful personal situation where we find ourselves.
If we experience this salvation, we can look also to our situation which we are living today with a new and different perspective. The perspective is different because the last word does not come from what we are living in this moment, but from the reality of salvation that touched us, through Jesus. So, we have to pray for this salvation: that this situation shall finish as soon as possible, but also to be able to look at what we are living now with the eyes of a saved person. If you are a saved person, you still believe in hope. The word trust is not an empty word.
The second point is that we have heard a part of the Magnificat.
The Magnificat may be summarized in one word: “overturned”. What is up goes down, the powers are humiliated. The humble ones shall be raised. I have my own immediate interpretation of this, but I won’t tell you now.
This also teaches us that we must overturn our way of thinking. Now, the word which is leading in the world is apparently the word of the powerful. However, in the Magnificat we hear that the voice shall be the voice of the humble ones. We believe this. We are living through a moment of darkness. Because of that it is also important to keep a little bit of distance from our situation in order to be able to see what the little ones and the humble ones are doing.
I recall in this moment the Beatitude: “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth”. Which is true. It is not those who are destroying, making war, doing what we are seeing now, who will inherit the earth.
All that we are today, these places, our communities, what we are living, in all the fields – culture, arts, social life… everything we are and have - is the fruit of the humble ones who built it. Even if now we have the impression that in this world, the last word is of those who make decisions about the fate of peoples, in reality what we are today, what we think, what we feel, our experience in our families is the fruit not of those powerful ones who want to destroy, but of the humble ones and of the simple ones who, little by little and day after day, built what we are today. Those are the meek of the beatitude.
†Pierbattista Pizzaballa
Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem
