Christ is risen!

“If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation”.
(2 Cor 5:17)

Dear brothers and sisters,

Every Lenten season leads us into a climate of conversion. Conversion is first and foremost a change of direction and it makes us start to think again about our life of faith. What direction should we take? In what way can we ‘come to our senses’, which would allow us to reassume our journey towards the Father who is waiting for us? (cf. Lk 15:17). We cannot answer these questions if we do not first of all have our finishing-line firmly in place.

Our finishing-line is Passover, and in order to understand what Passover is, we need to return to the roots of the feast: the exodus of the Israelites. Passover is God’s passing through, coming to set his own people free, the people who have cried out to him. Therefore it is a coming out of Egypt towards the desert and the passing through of a sea would have been impossible for the Israelites to do by themselves.

In this there are some points which I believe are important for us as Koinonia John the Baptist.

1. Passover begins with the death of the first-born in the land of Egypt, of both men and animals (cf. Ex 12). The Lord passes through to confirm his own people and to judge Egypt which had kept the Hebrews in slavery. From this point on, the feast would mark the beginning of the year.

God judges, that is, God saves and sets his own people, who are consecrated to him, free from their oppressors and from oppression. This is the Lord’s work, and he is the one who chooses the methods and the times of our liberation. Sometimes the methods he uses are so strong that we are able to affirm that we are loved and protected by His love.

Our starting point is that of accepting the fact that we have been set free thanks to the death and resurrection of Jesus. Our liberation is a concrete gift which is possible to put into practice in our daily lives.

“I have been freed by Jesus’ sacrifice and in his name I am free” should be our proclamation of faith which begins our day and illuminates all our situations. It should come first before doing anything else as it is the beginning and source of our journey in faith.

2. Immediately afterwards the Hebrew people began journeying towards freedom. To journey towards freedom is to journey towards the promised land, trusting that the Lord will open a road in the desert where before there was nothing (cf. Ex 13-14). The journeying of the Hebrew people was the sign that effectively they were already free. All that remained was to conquer and receive the land that God had prepared for them in place of Egypt. The sign that this was a reality was the miraculous passage through the Red Sea: God opens up a new road.

We have received the Spirit of the Risen Jesus which drives us to journey onwards to an even greater victory and to life to the full. In this journey there are insurmountable obstacles but not unconquerable ones. If they are there it is for confirming to us that freedom is much more of a reality than the obstacles.
The characteristic of a brother or sister of faith is to run without halting and without turning back.

Concretely speaking, besides the classic commitments that the church suggests, namely prayer, fasting and almsgiving, and those which your own reality will indicate to you, as a Federation of all Koinonia Associations spread throughout the various continents, let us strengthen ourselves in these two points set out above. Proclaim our liberation every day and persevere in our journey by participating punctually and constantly in every community meeting.

A person who is a new creation is one who remains in Christ through the proclamation of faith and by binding himself to the brothers and sisters in his community.

With the hope that the next Passover will become the feastday of our freedom.

Plzen – Valcha, 17th February 2012

Fr. Alvaro Grammatica
     General Pastor