Sunday Vigil
Memorial of Porrajamos, the massacre of the Roma and Sinti people by the Nazis during the Second World War. Memorial of blessed Ceferino Gimenéz Malla, a Gitano martyr killed in Spain in 1936. We remember Yaguine and Fodé, two boys 15 and 14 years old from Guinea Conakry, who died because of cold in 1999 while they were trying to fly to Europe, where they dreamt to study, hidden in the cargo hold of an airplane.
Reading of the Word of God
Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia
Whoever lives and believes in me
will never die.
Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia
Leviticus 25,1.8-17
Yahweh spoke to Moses on Mount Sinai and said: "You will count seven weeks of years -- seven times seven years, that is to say a period of seven weeks of years, forty-nine years. And on the tenth day of the seventh month you will sound the trumpet; on the Day of Expiation you will sound the trumpet throughout the land. You will declare this fiftieth year to be sacred and proclaim the liberation of all the country's inhabitants. You will keep this as a jubilee: each of you will return to his ancestral property, each to his own clan. This fiftieth year will be a jubilee year for you; in it you will not sow, you will not harvest the grain that has come up on its own or in it gather grapes from your untrimmed vine. The jubilee will be a holy thing for you; during it you will eat whatever the fields produce. "In this year of jubilee, each of you will return to his ancestral property. If you buy land from, or sell land to, your fellow-countryman, neither of you may exploit the other. In buying from your fellow-countryman, you will take account of the number of years since the jubilee; the sale-price he fixes for you will depend on the number of productive years still to run. The greater the number of years, the higher the price you will ask for it; the fewer the number of years, the greater the reduction; for what he is selling you is a certain number of harvests. So you will not exploit one another, but fear your God, for I am Yahweh your God.
Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia
If you believe, you will see the glory of God,
thus says the Lord.
Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia
This passage from the book of Leviticus reports the institution of the "jubilee": every fifty years you had to give rest to the land - "ye shall not sow, nor reap nor harvest" - and the portion of the land that belonged to the owners had to be given back to them. The sound of a horn (this is the meaning of the word jubilee) began this extraordinary year in which the order upset by the work of exploitation of people over other people was re-established. This practice showed that people are not the absolute masters of the earth. With the Jubilee all the injustices and abuses against the land and other people that in the meantime the strongest had perpetrated against the weakest, were nullified. Thus, radical equality among all, that universal fraternity which God wanted as we are all his children, were restored. The deep reason for such a long celebration connected to the memory of the liberation from slavery in Egypt and the entrance into the promised land. The land was a gift of God, not an achievement of the people, much less of any single group or individual. Every fiftieth year, through the directions set forth in this page of Leviticus, the believers of Israel were to rediscover the primacy of God and fraternity among all of them. It is in the wake of this ancient tradition that even in the Church a 'holy year', a 'jubilee', is celebrated every 25 years, like the one we are living in this particular year to rediscover the gift of God's grace and mercy manifested with Jesus. Jesus himself, in his first sermon in Nazareth, after reading the page of Isaiah where a year of grace is proclaimed, said, "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing" (Lk 4:21).