Where do you remain, and with whom? Where is your joy?

The question of the two future apostles responds to a question of Jesus, who asks them: what are you looking for? (Jn 1.38). We too are asked this evening by Jesus whether we really seek him. We too respond: "yes, we want to find you, we want to stay with you, to learn from your voice the wisdom which guides and governs the world, to learn from your heart the charity which heals the wounds and makes possible unity".

"Where do you live?" is a question which makes one immediately think of a home. To stay with you, we must come to your house. The theme of the house runs the course of the Old Testament. To give a house to God was the dream of David, the realization of Salomon and the project of renewal following the exile.

The psalms remind us: The one thing I ask to the Lord, this alone I seek: to live in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to taste the sweetness of the Lord and admire his sanctuary (Psalm 26.4); Blessed is he who lives in your house: always sings your praises (Psalm 83.5); Lord, I love the house where you dwell and the place where your glory dwells (Psalm 25.8); for what joy when I said to myself: let us go to the house of the Lord (Psalm 121.1); We will quench ourselves of the goods of your house, of the holiness of your temple (Psalm 64.5).

To you as well this evening you are being given a house. This house in which you have lived these past few years is revealed in this liturgical gesture as being the house that God has assigned you forever. On  the depth with which you enter this house depends the good and happiness of your life.

To enter this house certainly means getting to know the people which make it up, recognizing the profound links that make us one body. Above all the discovery of the reasons which generated this house, the motives through which God willed and follows our story with paternal benediction.

A recent translation of the Bible translates the question of the apostles: where do you dwell? This expression brings us to a more profound consideration of the story told in the Gospel. Through the question of the dwelling, the apostles want to discover what is the secret and profound place in which Jesus lives, the place in which his heart reposes and is nourished, where he remains. At the same time this point inaugurates his public life, the long and frenetic itinerary of the journey which will bring him to the village of Judah, to Galilee and to Samaria, Jesus constantly remains near the Father. One cannot go if there is not, at the same time, a place where one remains. He came from very far away, he is the eternal Word of God that has become man, but always remaining near the Father. It is here where he would like to bring his own, it is here where he would like to bring us.

To go to the Father we must become one with him. Indeed he said: Who sees me, sees the Father (cfr. Jn 12.45). To know the Father, we must know him. To remain in the Father we must remain in Him. For this reason the Gospel of John, which opens with this revelation that Jesus makes to us of the place in which he remains, will close, in the fifteenth chapter, with an insistent reminder to remain. In seven verses the verb is repeated nine times.

We discover in this way the more profound and true meaning of our house: it does not exist to close ourselves in it, but instead to open us to always new dimensions of the life of the Father. Whoever is faithful in little will receive much. Whoever embraces the humble dimensions, which are sometimes scandalous for their weakness and poverty, of our human companionship, will be guided to experience God, to know God, He who we cannot contain and which our mind cannot measure.

This, in the end, is the truest secret of the celebration this evening: through daily and apparently banal things, we are guided towards profound and abundant joy.

I wish to each one of you to live and to renew each day this experience: within the house of men, lives the house of the Father, in which you will live forever. Amen.