The Pope remembers Bethlehem on Christmas Eve, where Jesus "continues to be rejected by the losing logic of war"

ROMA, 24 Dic. (EUROPA PRESS) -

Pope Francis once again recalled tonight the conflict in the Middle East during the homily he delivered at the celebration of Midnight Mass in St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican, the first of the liturgical rites in what is his eleventh Christmas. in the Vatican.

"Our heart tonight is in Bethlehem, where the Prince of Peace continues to be rejected by the losing logic of war with the roar of weapons that also today prevents him from finding an inn in the world," he said.

On the other hand, the Pontiff asked those present in which God they believe: "In the God of the incarnation? Or the God of benefit? Yes, because there is a risk of living Christmas with a pagan idea of ​​God, like if he were a powerful master who is in heaven, a God who marries himself with power, with worldly success and with the idolatry of consumerism," he warned.

In this sense, he has warned that "the false image of a distant and irritable God" who behaves well with the good and gets angry with the bad always returns, "useful only to solve problems and to remove evils."

Given this, he pointed out that God does not use the "magic wand", "he is not the commercial God at all and right now." "He does not save us by pressing a button, but rather he approaches to change reality from within. And yet, how deeply rooted in us is the worldly idea of ​​a distant and controlling God, rigid and powerful, who helps his own to impose themselves on us." the others. But that is not the case, he assured.

Francis stressed that God was born for everyone and asked to look "at the living and true God." "To Him, who revolutionizes history by inhabiting it; to Him, who respects us to the point of allowing us to reject it; to Him, who erases sin by taking it upon himself; who does not remove pain, but transforms it; who does not eliminate problems of our lives, but it gives our lives a hope greater than the problems," he described.

For the Pontiff, this is the "astonishment" of Christmas, not a mixture of "sweet affections" and "worldly consolations" but the "unheard-of tenderness" of God, who saves the world by becoming incarnate.

And he has insisted that for God each man "is not a number, but a face." "Why do you remain in the prison of your sadness? Like the shepherds who left their flocks, leave the enclosure of your melancholies and embrace the tenderness of the child God", he has exhorted.

Francis has asked himself who looks to Christ in "a world that is always busy and indifferent." Thus, he has emphasized that it is the time of adoration and has asked to rediscover it.

QUOTE FROM J.R.R TOLKIEN

"Because to worship is not to waste time, but to allow God to dwell in our time (...) to collaborate with the work of God that, like ferment, changes the world," he said to remember the phrase that "a great storyteller of adventures epics", he wrote to his son, in reference to J.R.R Tolkien: "I open to you the only great thing of loving the south of the Earth."

Finally, he stated that tonight "love changes History" and asked God that men believe in the power of his love, "a power so different from the power of the world."