Memory and Reconciliation – Back to the path of justice and peace

This year, Monday February 3, Feast of Saints Simeon and Anna, occurred immediately after the week of the unity in which we pray God to gather in peace and communion the disciples of Christ progressively divided from each other over the centuries. However, let us remember that the first separation in the history of the new-born Church took place inside the same people of Israel, between the first Jewish disciples of Jesus and the other Jews who did not believe that Jesus was the expected Messiah. The Saint James Vicariate organized an evening of prayer, this year, with the Word of God, to return to the source of our Christian faith and implore the Lord to renew us all in our faithfulness to His Covenant made with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and sealed in Christ, the High Priest of the new and eternal covenant, a prayer that can lead us to the paths of justice and peace. The evening took place on February 3, evening, and here are the words of the Vicar at the opening of that evening:

“I begin by thanking you for coming to pray with us on this evening that is important to us. It is indeed the feast of Saints Simeon and Anna, the two old people who welcomed the baby Jesus in the Temple, 40 days after his birth, and who are the patrons of our parish in Jerusalem. St Luke tells us that Simeon, after seeing Jesus, carrying him in his arms and rejoicing, he blessed God and prophesied saying that this child will be "a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and glory for your people Israel". We know that Jesus really became a light for the nations of the world. People from all over the world have come, and continue to come, from paganism to the faith in the one God through Jesus. On the other hand, the prophecy about Jesus as "glory for his people Israel" has been subject to many obstacles over the centuries.

Indeed, for us Christians, Jesus, as a son of Israel, is a glory for his people in the eyes of the whole world. In the same time, the vast majority of the Jewish people, from the beginning, and over the centuries, have not seen him as the glory of their people. It is true that some Jews believed in him, like the first apostles, like the faithful of the primitive Church among whom many were Jews, and like the relatively few Jews who came to the faith of Christ over the centuries, some of them being among us. Nevertheless, the majority of the Jewish people did not believe that Jesus is the expected Messiah. This is why the old man Simeon told Mary that a sword would pierce her soul, because she was destined to feel, in a particular way, the division within her people, between those who would believe in Jesus as a Messiah, and those who wouldn’t believe in Him.

When we prepared this evening, we wanted it to be close to the week of prayer for Christian unity, which ended yesterday, because I still remember a statement that I heard from Cardinal Lustiger telling that the divisions in the Church of Christ, which have been numerous over the centuries, and still are, have their origin, in a certain way, in the first division that took place in the 1st century of the Christian era, and occurred within the Jewish people.

Tonight we want to have an evening of memory and reconciliation: memory of the common biblical sources of our faith – common to Jews and Christians, even if both do not necessarily understand the texts in the same way; and reconciliation by asking God to heal the wounds and sufferings that we inflicted on others, apparently because of Christ but, in reality, at odds with his message.

And in the same way we do not come together, during the Week of Unity, in order to judge each other's faith and opinions, but simply to pray together, also tonight, we are not here to judge each other's faith and opinions, but simply to implore God's mercy on us all, and ask Him to guide us on the paths of justice, peace, reconciliation and friendship.”