CongregaTion
For the Clergy
Theme for the World
Day of Prayer
for the
Sanctification of Priests
(Jn 15:15)
- 23 June 2006 -
Solemnity of the
Sacred Heart of Jesus
CHRISM MASS IN SAINT PETER'S BASILICA
HOMILY OF HIS
HOLINESS BENEDICT XVI
Holy Thursday, 13 April 2006
Dear Brothers in the Episcopate
and in the Priesthood,
Dear Brothers and Sisters,
Holy Thursday is
the day on which the Lord gave the Twelve the priestly task of celebrating, in
the bread and the wine, the Sacrament of his Body and Blood until he comes
again. The paschal lamb and all the sacrifices of the Old Covenant are replaced
by the gift of his Body and his Blood, the gift of himself. Thus, the new
worship was based on the fact that, in the first place, God makes a gift to us,
and, filled with this gift, we become his: creation returns to the
Creator. So it is that the priesthood also became something new: it was
no longer a question of lineage but of discovering oneself in the mystery of
Jesus Christ. He is always the One who gives, who draws us to himself. He alone
can say: "This is my Body... this is my Blood". The mystery of
the priesthood of the Church lies in the fact that we, miserable human beings,
by virtue of the Sacrament, can speak with his "I":
in persona Christi. He wishes to exercise his priesthood
through us. On Holy Thursday, we remember in a special way this moving mystery,
which moves us anew in every celebration of the Sacrament. So that daily life
will not dull what is great and mysterious, we need this specific
commemoration, we need to return to that hour in which he placed his hands upon
us and made us share in this mystery.
Let us reflect once
again on the signs in which the Sacrament has been given to us. At the centre is
the very ancient rite of the imposition of hands, with which he took possession
of me, saying to me: "You belong to me". However, in saying
this he also said: "You are under the protection of my hands. You
are under the protection of my heart. You are kept safely in the palm of my
hands, and this is precisely how you find yourself in the immensity of my love.
Stay in my hands, and give me yours".
Then let us
remember that our hands were anointed with oil, which is the sign of the Holy
Spirit and his power. Why one's hands? The human hand is the instrument of
human action, it is the symbol of the human capacity to face the world,
precisely to "take it in hand". The Lord has laid his hands upon us
and he now wants our hands so that they may become his own in the world. He no
longer wants them to be instruments for taking things, people or the world for
ourselves, to reduce them to being our possession, but instead, by putting
ourselves at the service of his love, they can pass on his divine touch. He wants
our hands to be instruments of service, hence, an expression of the mission of
the whole person who vouches for him and brings him to men and women. If human
hands symbolically represent human faculties and, in general, skill as power to
dispose of the world, then anointed hands must be a sign of the human capacity
for giving, for creativity in shaping the world with love. It is for this
reason, of course, that we are in need of the Holy Spirit. In the Old
Testament, anointing is the sign of being taken into service: the king,
the prophet, the priest, each does and gives more than what derives from
himself alone. In a certain way, he is emptied of himself, so as to serve by
making himself available to One who is greater than he. If, in today's Gospel,
Jesus presents himself as God's Anointed One, the Christ, then this itself
means that he is acting for the Father's mission and in unity with the Holy
Spirit. He is thereby giving the world a new kingship, a new priesthood, a new
way of being a prophet who does not seek himself but lives for the One with a
view to whom the world was created. Today, let us once again put our hands at
his disposal and pray to him to take us by the hand, again and again,
and lead us.
In the sacramental
gesture of the imposition of hands by the Bishop, it was the Lord himself who
laid his hands upon us. This sacramental sign sums up an entire existential
process. Once, like the first disciples, we encountered the Lord and heard his
words: "Follow me!" Perhaps, to start with, we followed him
somewhat hesitantly, looking back and wondering if this really was the road for
us. And at some point on the journey, we may have had the same experience as
Peter after the miraculous catch; in other words, we may have been frightened
by its size, by the size of the task and by the inadequacy of our own poor
selves, so that we wanted to turn back. "Depart from me, for I am a sinful
man, O Lord" (Lk 5: 8). Then, however, with great
kindness, he took us by the hand, he drew us to himself
and said to us: "Do not fear! I am
with you. I will not abandon you, do not leave me!". And more than
just once, the same thing that happened to Peter may have happened to us:
while he was walking on the water towards the Lord, he suddenly realized that
the water was not holding him up and that he was beginning to sink. And like
Peter we cried, "Lord, save me!" (Mt 14: 30). Seeing the
elements raging on all sides, how could we get through the roaring, foaming
waters of the past century, of the past millennium? But then we looked towards
him... and he grasped us by the hand and gave us a new "specific
weight": the lightness that derives from faith and draws us upwards.
Then he stretched out to us the hand that sustains and carries us. He supports
us. Let us fix our gaze ever anew on him and reach out to
him. Let us allow his hand to take ours, and then we will not
sink but will serve the life that is stronger than death and the love that is
stronger than hatred. Faith in Jesus, Son of the living God, is the means
through which, time and again, we can take hold of Jesus' hand and in which he
takes our hands and guides us. One of my favourite prayers is the request that
the liturgy puts on our lips before Communion: "...never let me be
separated from you". Let us ask that we never fall away from communion
with his Body, with Christ himself, that we do not fall away from the
Eucharistic mystery. Let us ask that he will never let go of our hands....
The Lord laid his
hand upon us. He expressed the meaning of this gesture in these words:
"No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his
master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from
my Father I have made known to you" (Jn 15: 15). I no longer call you
servants but friends: in these words one could actually perceive the
institution of the priesthood. The Lord makes us his friends; he entrusts
everything to us; he entrusts himself to us, so that we can speak with he
himself - in persona Christi capitis. What trust! He has truly
delivered himself into our hands. The essential signs of priestly ordination
are basically all a manifestation of those words: the laying on of hands;
the consignment of the book - of his words that he entrusts to us; the consignment
of the chalice, with which he transmits to us his most profound and personal
mystery. The power to absolve is part of all this. It also makes us share in
his awareness of the misery of sin and of all the darkness in the world, and
places in our hands the key to reopen the door to the Father's house. I no
longer call you servants but friends. This is the profound meaning of being a
priest: becoming the friend of Jesus Christ. For this friendship we must
daily recommit ourselves. Friendship means sharing in thought and will. We must
put into practice this communion of thought with Jesus, as St Paul tells us in
his Letter to the Philippians (cf. 2: 2-5). And this communion of
thought is not a purely intellectual thing, but a sharing of sentiments
and will, hence, also of actions. This means that we should know Jesus in an
increasingly personal way, listening to him, living together with him, staying
with him. Listening to him - in lectio divina, that is, reading Sacred
Scripture in a non-academic but spiritual way; thus, we learn to encounter
Jesus present, who speaks to us. We must reason and reflect, before him and
with him, on his words and actions. The reading of Sacred Scripture is prayer,
it must be prayer - it must emerge from prayer and lead to prayer. The
Evangelists tell us that the Lord frequently withdrew - for entire nights -
"to the mountains", to pray alone. We too need these
"mountains": they are inner peaks that we must scale, the
mountain of prayer. Only in this way does the friendship develop. Only in this
way can we carry out our priestly service, only in this way can we take Christ
and his Gospel to men and women. Activism by itself can even be heroic, but in
the end external action is fruitless and loses its effectiveness unless it is
born from deep inner communion with Christ. The time we spend on this is truly
a time of pastoral activity, authentic pastoral activity. The priest must above
all be a man of prayer. The world in its frenetic activism often
loses its direction. Its action and capacities become destructive if they lack
the power of prayer, from which flow the waters of life that irrigate the arid
land.
I no longer call
you servants, but friends. The core of the priesthood is being friends of Jesus
Christ. Only in this way can we truly speak in persona Christi, even if
our inner remoteness from Christ cannot jeopardize the validity of the
Sacrament. Being a friend of Jesus, being a priest, means being a man of
prayer. In this way we recognize him and emerge from the ignorance of simple
servants. We thus learn to live, suffer and act with him and for him. Being
friends with Jesus is par excellence always friendship with his followers. We
can be friends of Jesus only in communion with the whole of Christ, with the
Head and with the Body; in the vigorous vine of the Church to which the Lord
gives life. Sacred Scripture is a living and actual Word, thanks to the Lord,
only in her. Without the living subject of the Church that embraces the ages,
more often than not the Bible would have splintered into heterogeneous writings
and would thus have become a book of the past. It is eloquent in the present
only where the "Presence" is - where Christ remains for ever
contemporary with us: in the Body of his Church.
Being a priest
means becoming an ever closer friend of Jesus Christ with the whole of our
existence. The world needs God - not just any god but the God of Jesus Christ,
the God who made himself flesh and blood, who loved us to the point of dying
for us, who rose and created within himself room for man. This God must live in
us and we in him. This is our priestly call: only in this way can our
action as priests bear fruit. I would like to end this Homily with a word on
Andrea Santoro, the priest from the Diocese of Rome who was assassinated in
Trebizond while he was praying. Cardinal Cé recounted to us during the
Spiritual Exercises what Fr Santoro said. It reads: "I am here to
dwell among these people and enable Jesus to do so by lending him my flesh....
One becomes capable of salvation only by offering one's own flesh. The evil in
the world must be borne and the pain shared, assimilating it into one's own
flesh as did Jesus". Jesus assumed our flesh; let us give him our own. In
this way he can come into the world and transform it. Amen!
Web Site: www.vatican.va