Commentary on the Gospel – December 4, 2025

Dear brothers and sisters,

Human life can be lived with consistency, or it can be lived lightly and irresponsibly. The lyrics of the song by Los Panchos remind us: “You only live once, you must learn to love and to live… before it slips away and leaves us crying over illusions.” This could guide our meditation today.

The first words of Jesus echo unmistakably a text from the prophet Jeremiah. The prophet saw in Israel the presence of “believers with little commitment,” who thought their religious duties were fulfilled simply because the temple stood in the holy city: “The temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord” (Jeremiah 7:4). To them, the prophet warned that what God requires is obedient faith: “If you truly change your ways and your actions…” (Jeremiah 7:5).

Probably the charming words of Jesus captivated many of His contemporaries for a time. The Gospels often speak of large crowds following Him—“from Galilee, Judea, Jerusalem, Idumea, beyond the Jordan, and from the regions of Tyre and Sidon” (Mark 3:7ff). But they also note that, at some point, people left Him, thinking His way did not match Israel’s expectations: “Many of His disciples turned back and no longer walked with Him” (John 6:66). Jesus even had to ask the Twelve: “Do you also want to leave?” And later, in Gethsemane, the sad reality came: “They all abandoned Him and fled” (Mark 14:50).

Such harsh words raise many questions. Was their following of Jesus truly motivated? Was it deeply rooted? Were the apostles simply adventurers, willing to stay with Him as long as no greater problems arose? Was their faith built only on shifting sand?

The history of the Church is both impressive and disappointing. The witness of the martyrs goes beyond human reasoning—there are thousands of them. They made Psalm 63:4 their own: “Your love is better than life.” But the opposite reality is also painful. How was it possible that most of North Africa, in the 7th–8th centuries, was swept away by the passing storm of Islam? What happened in 18th‑century France, where, starting from Christianity, came the irreligion of Voltaire, Diderot, and the Encyclopedia? And in our own time? It seems that more than half of Germany and England are no longer baptized, and churches in Spain are empty—or at best, attended mostly by Latin American immigrants. A storm of secularization has produced what 70 years ago was almost unimaginable. Did we go to Mass on Sundays only to escape daily monotony, until a “better entertainment” came along? Has television, and now other advanced media, taken the place of family prayer and religious practice? How deep are the roots of our faith convictions?

For Jeremiah, “the Word of God was like fire in his heart, burning in his bones, and he could not hold it in” (Jeremiah 20:9). Do we today have a faith strong enough to resist the latest winds?

Your brother,