March 12, 2026
III Thursday of Lent
Fr. Emanuele Gelmi
The Lord give you peace. I am Fr. Emanuele Gelmi, a Friar Minor of the Porziuncola. Jesus is decisively on His way toward Jerusalem.
On this journey He meets His people, performs actions, recounts His encounter with the Father, and proclaims the Gospel of the Kingdom. Recently Jesus multiplied the loaves and the fish, a symbol of the Eucharist. He was transfigured before some of His disciples, showing His glory, the fact that He is the Son of God.
And recently He entrusted to His disciples the prayer of the "Our Father". In this simple and intimate prayer, Jesus shows us how to enter into relationship with the Father, calling Him Daddy, Abba.
This deep, simple, intimate, true relationship truly shows us the face of God. Not a judging God, a bad God, a God who controls us or who wants our harm, but a benevolent God, who always wants our good, who supports us, who shows us the way.
This prayer is the best way to enter into relationship with God the Father and to obtain His Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the opposite of the spirit of the devil. The spirit of the demon makes us deaf to the word of God and therefore also mute, like the person whom Jesus meets in today's Gospel.
It is the only way to be healed and to listen to the voice of God through Jesus Christ and His Spirit. How then can we listen to the word of the Lord Jesus? The only way is to open our heart to His presence. Too often our heart is a hardened heart, and the only thing that hardens our heart is sin.
Sin is the denial of God, it is something that blocks our life, that makes our heart like a stone, unable to beat and therefore unable to make us alive. We must rediscover the amazement of that crowd that today we see in the Gospel. The crowd is amazed by the action of Jesus, it wants to meet Him.
Certainly, perhaps it wants to meet Him because He performs many miracles, they perhaps have things to ask of Him. However, it has an open heart, certainly imperfect, sinful, but open. And this creates a bridge between them and the Lord Jesus.
And there the Spirit of God can act, can enter into the life of those people to help them. The only alternative is precisely to listen to the Lord Jesus. If the crowd had an imperfect but open heart, the Pharisees, the scribes who test Jesus instead have a closed heart.
They have closed it because they think they are self sufficient, they think they have understood everything about God and that therefore no one else can add anything to their understanding of God. With this closed heart, with this hard heart, the Lord cannot work.
So the first action is to recognize that we need God, to open our heart, to convert. Precisely the invitation of this Lent. Otherwise, if we do not listen to the voice of God, we confuse His presence with the presence of the devil.
And then we discredit the Lord, we accuse Him of being the demon, the devil who deceives us. And so we blaspheme against the Holy Spirit because we confuse Him with the spirit of the world, with the spirit of the evil one.
We must bring clarity into our heart, we must purify ourselves. Here is the invitation of this Lent. "Convert".
So let us go very simply to confess, recognizing that we are sinners and in need of God. Let us ask the Lord, "forgive me, I am here before you, I need you".
I cannot live alone. There is no middle way, we cannot keep our foot in two shoes. That is why Jesus at the end of this Gospel says, either you are with me or against me.
Francis understood this very well. After a life lived in comfort, more than twenty years, in which he was called the king of parties, Saint Francis of Assisi decides with great humility to change his path. He does so following some encounters with the lepers, with the crucifix of San Damiano.
He will no longer follow the spirit of the world, but the Holy Spirit of God. And so the invitation for this Lent is precisely this. Let us follow the Lord Jesus by opening our heart to the action of His Spirit.
Our life will be transformed for the better, making us live an intense life of goodness. And so peace and good from the land of Francis.
