Play the video: Mass for the sixth anniversaryEarlier, in the opening greeting, I left out one detail. Among the priests who are with us is also the spiritual director of the Seminary (Mn. Pere Montagut i Piquet), and I find that significant. I don’t know whether he knew Marcos, since he was not yet spiritual director at the time, but I think this connection with the seminary is very interesting, and also the presence of some seminarians who knew Marcos.
Look, allow me to ask a question and to ask it of you too. What are we doing here? Why are we here? What is the reason that has brought us here today? Six years have now passed. We are not here only out of remembrance, which is already an important reason! To remember is to bring back into our hearts the people who were significant in our lives and who left their mark on us. But all of us who are here, six years after his death, are we here only because we remember him? Is this the only reason? I don’t think so… I really don’t think so! For this reason I suggest that at least this question be in the hearts of all of us who are here.
In truth, I too have been asking myself what I am doing here today and why you have invited me.
I did not know Marcos personally, because I have only been here in Barcelona for three years [before my episcopal ordination I was a diocesan priest in Majorca]. The first I heard of Marcos was at a retreat, shortly after his death. A retreat in Majorca, organised by the CL community. They quoted part of the homily from Marcos’s funeral [given by Mn. Yago Gallo]. It struck me deeply. I was listening to it at the retreat as a parish priest. And when the retreat ended, I said to the preacher: ‘This homily really moves me. I don’t know this young man, but what Marcos’s uncle said has impressed me.’ He said to me: ‘You know him, it’s Yago!’ I did not know that this had happened. And I spoke with Yago, because I did not know this.
What was being said at that time impressed me, and afterwards I read the book [My Story (Mi historia)] and I was struck by the story and testimony, and by a life that sought the Lord and bore witness to the Lord.
Then, now that I am in Barcelona, I am struck – and this leads me to ask this question, six years later – to see people, who have come to know each other and met one another, and who in personal conversation speak to me about Marcos, saying that the encounter with him was decisive for your encounter with the Lord. That is why I asked, ‘What are we doing here today?’ That is to say, what he lived, what Marcos lived, and what allows people today to hold him so present in their hearts, because the encounter with him, the meal with him, that email which was so significant… I think this is a fact, I think it is something we should be aware of here today.
I believe it is giving thanks for what Marcos found in the Lord, for how he lived this relationship with the Lord, and for how the Lord made use of him to reach so many people. And I think it is a very important reason to be here today, to give thanks to the Lord and to remember the Lord. And to offer the Eucharist to him, saying: ‘Lord, may [Marcos] be with you.’ Because from here he also continues to intercede for us.
I invite you to ask yourself this: above all, the reason, that is, what he found in the Lord. Listening to today’s Gospel, the calling of Levi, I invite you to ask Levi: ‘Why did you get up when the Lord looked at you and said, “Follow me”? What happened to you?’ Moreover, notice: he gets up, follows him and invites him to his house, he organises a meal with his friends – who are all tax collectors and sinners like him. Don’t tell me this isn’t very CL, is it? You lot like a good drink… Well, this is what happened: Levi invites his friends, puts on a meal and invites the Lord. The most interesting thing is not the meal but the why! What have you found in this person, in this Galilean who has come to your table, you who are a tax collector, a publican, that you should get up and say: ‘Listen, come to my house. I just don’t want my friends to miss this!’ What has happened to you? I imagine this would have been part of the conversation at home, and that his friends would have said: ‘Thank you, Levi, for inviting us to dine with this person so significant; with this person so truly a person, with this man so truly a man.’
I suggest that, as we contemplate Levi, who rises from his workbench and then invites his friends to a meal because they do not want to miss that encounter, I see here the person of Marcos, who feels drawn by the Lord and does not want his friends, those close to him who live near him, to miss this relationship.
And perhaps you too are sitting at the desk of your work, at the table of your everyday life, like Levi, and you get up and let yourself be drawn by the Lord; by the Lord who says to you: ‘Come and follow me!’ Do not keep it to yourself, but extend it to all your contemporaries, those with whom you live and work. Possibly, at that table of tax collectors and sinners who accepted Levi’s invitation, he may have done this regularly. But deep down, some were also surprised. ‘But… what is happening to Levi?’ Some perhaps did not understand; others were astonished, others were fascinated and others were deeply moved. Yes, these are the different reactions to a person who is drawn by the Lord, by the Master, and to someone who tells you: ‘You simply cannot miss this.’
I find the final point very interesting. Let us remember that there is also the circle of the grumbling Pharisees who think: ‘Who does this fellow think he is?’ And they ask the apostles and disciples: ‘How is it that your master eats with tax collectors and sinners? How can this be? Does he not see that he is making himself unclean by sitting at table with them?’ Jesus, however, is aware of this, and reminds us for whom he became incarnate: for tax collectors, sinners, the frail, the vulnerable… And for you and for me. We are members of this brotherhood! And the Lord has come to sit down and share our lives with us. This is Marcos’s condition. Christians are not perfect, but in need! And we have discovered this condition of being in need, because we need to sit at the table of the affection and tenderness of the Lord, which passes through the company and encounter of our brothers and sisters. How good it is to discover that we are in need of the Lord and of one another! The Lord has come to heal us, to embrace us and to caress this vulnerability of ours.
I will finish with the first reading. Isaiah places us before a very interesting situation: in the end, when one discovers Levi, one thinks: ‘I too want to get up, I want to follow the Lord and I do not want to remain still, at my table. I want to follow the Lord. I want to share this encounter with my friends.’ One discovers Marcos and says: ‘Listen… how do you live? How is it that you live like this? I want to live like this too!’ And how do you do this? You have to take a gamble, you have to stake your life, you have to make your move, as Isaiah says in the first reading. Step forward, give yourself to others, go forward, give yourself to the hungry and the needy. And the Lord will light your way and will make the ruins around you take on another colour. But you cannot remain seated; you have to take the risk and get up! Levi got up. Let us consider when the ‘Sabbath’ is spoken of and described as a time for the Lord. Perhaps you have to give up your plans, and no longer be the centre of attention, in order to say: ‘I want to put the Lord at the centre of my life.’ Go on, try it! Dare to begin. Get up!
Why have you come here today? Today the Church sets Levi before us; she sets Marcos before us so that you may leave this Eucharist eager to say to him: ‘Here I am, and I want to stake my life on you, and I want to live with you, and I want to organise more events to share with you and with my own.’ It is an enormous joy to have encountered the Lord in my life, and it has enlarged my heart.
May it be so.
After the final blessing
Before I say ‘you may go in peace’, I would like to share something personal. Something that also surprises me. It surprises me in the sense that I have to say: ‘What strength Marcos has!’ Look, a few days before going to speak with the Nuncio, who proposed on behalf of the Holy Father that I go to Barcelona [as bishop], I listened to an audio testimony of Marcos, which Yago invited me to listen to. It is an interesting testimony, and part of it also appears in the book My Story. Of course the book goes deeper, because what it recounts is truly impressive.
A few days later, the Nuncio proposed that I leave Majorca and go to Barcelona as auxiliary bishop. In those days of surprise I thought of Marcos and thought: ‘This young man, whose book I have read and whose testimony I have heard, may he intercede for me.’ I do not know why… Probably because the Lord willed it so… I entrusted myself to him: ‘You who know Barcelona, accompany me and help me.’ On the day of my episcopal ordination, 9 September 2017, I do not know why, but at the moment of the litany of the saints, when I was prostrate beside Bishop Sergi Gordo there at the Sagrada Família, the memory of Marcos came to me. How is it possible? What does this young man have, what does Marcos have, and what is his secret, which is not his own but the Lord’s, that after six years has brought us together here today? Let us give thanks to God and go forward with the mission of gratitude and of praying for the Church.
Machine translation. If you spot a mistake, do write to us.