December 19, 2025
Third Friday of Advent
Fr. Amedeo Ricco
The Lord give you peace! I am fr. Amedeo, an archaeologist of the Studium Biblicum Franciscanum in Jerusalem.
“At the time of King Herod… at the hour of incense… your prayer has been heard.”
The evangelist Luke begins his account of Jesus in this way. Immediately after the prologue, he brings us among the arcane silences and meticulous rites of the ancient Temple of Jerusalem, among countless animals sacrificed to obtain forgiveness and wafts of incense released in homage to the divine, among the whispered prayers of the poor and the last, and the pompous pride of those who consider themselves righteous. And it is within this solemn setting that he lets the painful notes be heard: “At the time of King Herod,” he says, that is, under a king imposed by human politics – that filthy, dirty business – and in a regime of violence, in which the wicked prosper and seem invincible; while “a priest, Zechariah, and his wife Elizabeth, righteous, blameless before God… had no children. She was barren and both were advanced in years.” In this paradox of a world in the hands of the wrong people, in the hands of the worst and the ruthless, in the hands of mad criminals, in a world in which good and righteous people are instead empty-handed and humiliated, right there, right there in the midst of it, the evangelist tries to show us that it is never the end, that all is not lost. On the contrary, that a renewal at the root, a new beginning, is about to be born precisely there, in that darkness, at the height of despair. The archangel Gabriel announces the Good News: “the true King, the definitive one, the Nètzer, the Shoot, the offspring descending from David, long awaited by the Jewish people and by all nations, is about to come into the world, into this very world, full of horrors, to bring you hope, to set you back on your feet.”
Zechariah, by now so accustomed to suffering, to the humiliation in that culture of not having had children, on hearing that not only will he be a father, but that he and Elizabeth will even give birth to the Forerunner of the Messiah, cannot do it, cannot believe. Not even before the Angel of the Lord. He wavers. We too live through dark nights, with no way out. Almost as if heaven were bearing down on us. And one can be sure: those nights sooner or later come for everyone. When you are afraid you will not make it, that you have reached the limit, when the kingdom of the wicked seems stronger than the Kingdom of Christ. But it is at that moment that the Gospel tells you: it is not the end, this night is only the final threshold, before the new, the unexpected, blossoms. Jesus, in short, appears on the horizon when you least expect it, when you no longer hoped. When you had resigned yourself to barrenness.
The lesson? Never despair! And above all never conform to the corrupt, the ruthless, never enter the machinery of the powerful, and always, always preserve your purity: purity of judgment, of thought, independence of spirit. Never let yourself be dirtied! Never conform! The Kingdom of heaven belongs to those who know how to protect it, with integrity, in their hearts. In the end only the Kingdom of Christ will remain. The Herods and the high priests of this world will vanish. To whom, then, do we want to give our heart? Whose do we want to be?
Come, O King, spring forth down here, O Shoot,
surprise us, come to free us from evil!
Peace to you from the Holy Land.
