Homily | 5 September 2025

HOMILY CGO 2025
Friday, September 5
Col 1:15-20; Psalm 99:2-5; Lc 5:33-39

"Is there anything of which one can say, 'Look, this is new'?" (Qo 1:10). The first thing on which Qohelet focuses his attention in this surprising, perhaps today almost incomprehensible judgment, is the power of the gaze. He says, "Look." There are eyes, there are moments, even eras that pour their gaze completely into the past. Others never look up, drawn by an irresistible presentism. And there are those who turn irrevocably toward the future.

When it is the past that completely absorbs our gaze, we can fall into the worship of a supposed perfection already achieved, as if everything that needs to be thought had already been thought, everything that can be created had already been created, everything that can be offered had already been offered; it is then that the salt that we are for the world becomes a statue (cf. Gn 19:16). At other times, we fall into a kind of worship of the mustard seed, to which is denied any possibility of growth; this, of course, can happen even when we return to the sources if the return (or the nature of the source) is not well understood.
We have abundant experience of a gaze fixed on the present, subjugated as we often are by the anguish of the moment, the assault of unforeseen events, the urgencies.

When, finally, our gaze is directed exclusively toward tomorrow, we are overcome by a feverish Adamic feeling that leads us to arrogantly believe that everything must be invented anew, that everything that preceded us must be thrown into the dustbin of history, that only we have finally come to understand; and thus we fall to our knees in idolatry of novelty. None of these perspectives is complete.

I would say that our world, which travels at breakneck speed, alternates between St. Paul's "let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die," (1 Cor 15, 32) trying to grasp a fleeting moment, and the eager expectation of the new.

But -Qohelet wondered- is there anything that can truly be said to be new, when we see that novelty vanishes the moment it comes into existence, pulverized by a wheel of novelties that never stops turning? The answer is yes, there is a beauty that is always ancient and always new: Jesus Christ. Only He can be and is eternally new, the radical and permanent novelty, the measure of all novelty.

On the day of his conversion, Augustine's eyes fell on this exhortation of St. Paul: "Put on the Lord Jesus Christ" (Rom 13:14). Jesus Christ is, therefore, the new cloak of the parable. But sometimes we want to cut it to our size, or we tear it, attacking unity in faith and charity, or we use as patches the parts that suit us best, discarding those with a rougher texture. Worse still is when we go hunting for bargains in search of novelties that are not the eternal novelty, because, after all, the new cloak that is Christ is still a bloodstained cloak.
The Order must find the courage to go where it has never gone before, to face what it has never faced before, to take paths it before has never taken. On this journey through a rapidly evolving landscape, May Christ not become old to us; may we, wherever we are and whatever we do, never offer anyone the counterfeit product of a Christianity without Christ; that everything we do, hope for, and decide, we may do, hope for, and decide for Christ, with Him, and in Him; because if we do not do it for Christ, then we will do it for ourselves and we will have already received our reward (Mt 6:2); if we do not do it with Christ, we will labor in vain because without me you can do nothing (Jn 15:5); if we do not do it in Christ, we will do it in our own little corners and unity will not be possible, even if consensus reigns.

In our programs, projects, and actions, Jesus Christ must truly be before all things (Col 1:17), and in Him, who is the same yesterday, today, and forever (Heb 13:8), we must remain. Because—as we know very well—“whoever lives in Christ is a new creation” (2 Cor 5:17), in whom a new heart beats. I will give you a new heart, says the Lord, and place a new spirit within you (Ezek 36:26). Our heart is the wineskin of the Gospel, and into it the Lord pours the new wine of his love, which ferments into the wine of salvation and fills us with joy and hope.

The sure gaze is the hopeful gaze, because it is a broad gaze that encompasses the past (for He loved us first (1 Jn 4, 19)), takes charge of the present, and opens it to a future that is not a conquest of our own strength, but an expectation of what is not in our hands and only the one who makes all things new (Rev 21:5) can grant.

As we pray today for vocations, we rekindle our hope. Each call from the Lord is a completely new call that demands a new response. May we, through our way of living and being Augustinians, be a provocation to those whom God calls. We know that we do not have all the answers, as the Pope told us in the Mass of the Holy Spirit. We do not need so much. It is enough for us, as it was enough for Cardinal St. John Henry Newman , who taught us so much about understanding what newness means within the Church, that the Lord help us to take the most important step: the next one.

Fr. Javier Pérez Barba, OSA