“I am the way, the truth and the life”: words that only one person in the world could and did pronounce. Christ is the way and the destination of the journey. As the eternal Word of the Father, he is the truth and the life; as the Word-made-flesh, he is the way.
We had the opportunity to contemplate Christ as Life, commenting on his words: “I am the bread of life;” and as Truth, commenting on his other words: “I am the light of the world.” Let us now focus on Christ the Way. After having contemplated Christ as a gift, we have the opportunity to contemplate him as a model. “Since,” writes Kierkegaard, “the Middle Ages had increasingly gone astray in accentuating the side of Christ as a model, Luther accentuated the other side, stating that he is a gift and that is up to faith to accept it.” But now, added the same author, we must also insist on Christ as the model, if we do not want the doctrine on faith to turn into a fig leaf that covers the most anti-Christian omissions.
Jesus continues to say to those he meets – that is, to us, at this moment – what he said to the apostles and to those he met during his earthly life: “Come after me,” or “Follow me!” The following (in Greek, akolouthia) of Christ is a boundless theme. The most beloved and most read book in the Church, after the Bible, namely The Imitation of Christ, was written about it. We limit ourselves to speaking since we need to move on to some practical applications, always of a spiritual and personal nature, the goal we set ourselves in these meditations.
The theme of following Christ occupies an important place in the Fourth Gospel. Following Jesus is almost a synonym for believing in him. Believing, however, is an attitude of the mind and will; the image of a “way” highlights an important aspect of believing, which is “walking,” that is, the dynamism that must characterize the life of the Christian and the repercussion that faith must have on the conduct of life. “Following” – unlike “believing” and “loving” –not only indicates a particular attitude of the mind and heart, but outlines a life program for the disciple. It implies a total sharing: of the way of life, of the destiny, and of the mission of the Lord.
* * *
With the emphasis given to the episode of the washing of the feet, John wanted to underline a specific priority in the following Christ, that of service (Jn 13:12-15). But I am not going to talk about service. I dedicated the final sermon of last Lent to that theme and there is no need to repeat myself. After all, I am the least qualified to talk about service, since in my life I have almost exclusively devoted myself to “the service of the Word” which, however important, is also relatively easy and more rewarding than many other services in the Church.
I would rather like to talk about what characterizes the following of Christ and distinguishes it from any other type of following. It is common to say of an artist, a philosopher, a man of letters, that he trained at the school of this or that renowned master. Even of us religious it is said that we were trained at the school, some of Benedict, some of Dominic, some of Francis of Assisi, some of Ignatius of Loyola, and some of other men or women. But there is an essential difference between this following and that of Christ. It is expressed, as could not be done better, by the words of John himself, at the end of the Prologue of his Gospel: “The law was given through Moses, grace and truth came through Jesus Christ” (Jn 1:17).
For us religious this means: the rule was given to us through our founder, but the grace and strength to put it into practice comes to us only from Jesus Christ. For us and for all Christians alike, that word of John also means something even more radical: the Gospel was given to us by the earthly Jesus, but the ability to observe it and put it into practice comes to us only from the risen Christ and his Spirit!
In this regard, Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote words that on the lips of a doctor less authoritative than him would leave us perplexed. Commenting on the Pauline saying “The letter kills, the Spirit gives life” (2 Cor 3.6), he writes:
By letter we mean every written law that remains outside of man, even the moral precepts contained in the Gospel; therefore even the letter of the Gospel would kill, if the grace of faith that heals were not added within it.
Shortly before, he had explicitly said that “the grace that heals us” is nothing other than “the same grace of the Holy Spirit that it is given to believers.” Saint Augustine understood this from personal experience and therefore invented his extraordinary prayer: “Lord, you command me to be chaste. Well, give me what you command me and then command me what you want.”
This is why so much of Jesus’ speeches at the Last Supper have as their object the Paraclete whom he would send upon the apostles. Let’s remember some of his promises in this regard:
I have much more to tell you, but you cannot bear it now. But when he comes, the Spirit of truth, he will guide you to all truth. He will not speak on his own, but he will speak what he hears, and will declare to you the things that are coming. He will glorify me, because he will take from what is mine and declare it to you (Jn 16:12-14).

If Jesus is “the Way” (in Greek, odòs), the Holy Spirit is “the Guide” (in Greek, odegòs, or odegìa). This is how Saint Gregory of Nyssa already defined him, and this is how the Latin Church invokes him in the Veni Creator. Together, the two verses “Ductore sic te praevio – vitemus omne noxium,” mean in fact, “with you as our guide (ductor), we will avoid all evil.”
* * *
Among the various functions that Jesus attributes to the Paraclete in his work on our behalf, the one we want to focus on is that of Prompter: “The Advocate, the holy Spirit that the Father will send in my name—he will teach you everything and remind you of all that I told you” (14:26). “He will remind you”: the Latin Vulgate translated with ipse suggeret vobis: he will suggest to you.
The prompter, in the theatre, is hidden inside a pit invisible to the audience: just like the Holy Spirit who illuminates everything while remaining invisible and, so to speak, behind the scenes. The prompter pronounces the words in a low voice so as not to be heard by the audience, and the Spirit also speaks “in a low voice,” softly. Unlike human prompters, however, he does not speak to the ears, but to the heart; he does not mechanically suggest the words of the Gospel, as if from a script, but explains them, adapts them, applies them to situations.
We are talking, of course, about the “inspirations of the Spirit,” the so-called “good inspirations.” Fidelity to inspirations is the shortest and surest path to holiness. We do not know from the start what the concrete sanctity that God wants from each of us is. Only God knows it and reveals it to us as the journey continues. It is therefore not enough to have a clear program of perfection and then gradually implement it. There is no identical model of perfection for everyone. God doesn’t make saints in series, he doesn’t like cloning. Every saint is an unprecedented invention of the Spirit. God can ask of one the opposite of what he asks of another. It follows that to achieve holiness, a person cannot limit himself or herself to following general rules that apply to everyone. They must also understand what God asks of them, and only of them.
Now what God wants that is different and particular for each one can be discovered through the events of life, the word of Scripture, and the guidance of a spiritual director, but the main and ordinary means are the inspirations of grace. These are internal solicitations of the Spirit in the depths of the heart through which God not only makes known what he desires from us, but gives the necessary strength, and often also the joy, to accomplish it, if the person consents.
Let’s think about what would have happened if Mother Teresa of Calcutta had persisted in observing the canonical rules in force in religious institutes at the time. Until the age of 36, she was a nun in a religious congregation; she was faithful to her vocation and dedicated to her work, but nothing suggested anything extraordinary in her. It was during a train journey from Calcutta to Darjeeling for her annual spiritual retreat that the life-changing event occurred. The Holy Spirit “whispered” a clear invitation in her heart’s ear: Leave your order and your previous life, and place yourself at my disposal for a work that I will show to you. Among Mother Teresa’s religious daughters, September 10, 1946 continues to be remembered as “Inspiration Day.”
When it comes to important decisions for oneself or others, inspiration must be submitted and confirmed by authority, or by one’s spiritual father. In fact, this is what Mother Teresa did. You expose yourself to danger if you rely solely on your own personal inspiration.
Good inspirations have something in common with biblical inspiration, apart, of course, from the authority and scope which are essentially different. “God said to Abraham …”, “The Lord spoke to Moses.” This speaking of the Lord was not, from the point of view of phenomenology, something different from what happens in the inspirations of grace. The voice of God, even on Sinai, did not resonate outside, but inside the heart in the form of clarity, of impulses, originating from the Holy Spirit. The Ten Commandments were not engraved by the finger of God on stone tablets (it is difficult for us to even imagine that!), but on the heart of Moses who then engraved them on stone tablets. “Human beings moved by the Holy Spirit spoke under the influence of God” (2 Pt 1:21); they were the ones speaking, but moved by the Holy Spirit; they repeated with their mouths what they heard in their hearts. God, says the prophet Jeremiah, writes his law in their hearts (Jer 31:33).
Every loyalty to an inspiration is rewarded by increasingly frequent and stronger inspirations. It is as if the soul were training to achieve an ever clearer perception of God’s will and greater ease in carrying it out.
* * *
The most delicate problem regarding inspirations has always been that of discerning those that come from the Spirit of God from those that come from the spirit of the world, from one’s own passions, or from the evil spirit. The theme of the discernment of spirits has undergone a notable evolution over the centuries. Originally it was understood as the charism that served to distinguish – among the words, prayers and prophecies pronounced in the assembly – which ones came from the Spirit of God and which ones did not. In its community exercise, the charism of prophecy must be accompanied, for the Apostle, by that of the discernment of spirits: “to one prophecy [is given], to another discernment of spirits” (1 Cor 12:10).
The original meaning of this charism, as understood by Paul, seems to be very precise and limited. He focuses on the reception of the prophecy itself, its evaluation, by one or more members of the assembly, also endowed with a prophetic spirit. This too, however, is not done on the basis of a rational analysis, but rather of the inspiration of the Spirit himself. The sense of discerning (diakrisis) therefore oscillates between distinguishing and interpreting: distinguishing whether it was the Spirit of God who spoke or a different spirit, interpreting what the Spirit wanted to say in a concrete situation. The Apostle’s well-known recommendation refers to this same gift of discernment: “Do not quench the Spirit. Do not despise prophetic utterances. Test everything; retain what is good. Refrain from every kind of evil” (1 Thess 5:19-22).
If we must take into account the current experience of the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements, we must think that this charism consisted in the ability of the assembly, or of some people in it, to actively react to a prophetic word, a biblical quotation, or a prayer, expressing approval with the exclamation “I confirm!”, or with other small signs of the head and voice, or on the contrary, with silence and moving on to something else – indicating a negative judgment. In this way, true and false prophecy comes to be judged “by the fruits” it produces (or does not produce) as Jesus recommended (see Mt 7:16). This original meaning of the discernment of spirits, incidentally, could be very relevant today in debates and meetings, like those we are beginning to experience in the synodal dialogue.
In subsequent times, in both Eastern and Western spirituality, the charism of discernment of spirits served, above all, to discern the inspirations of the disciple by an elder (as in monasticism), and more generally to discern one’s own inspirations. This evolution is not arbitrary; it is in fact the same gift, even if applied to different subjects and contexts: the community context in the first case, the personal one in the second.
There are criteria of discernment that we could call objective. In the doctrinal field they are summarized for Paul in the recognition of Christ as Lord: “Nobody speaking by the spirit of God says, ‘Jesus be accursed.’ And no one can say, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ except by the Holy Spirit” (1 Cor 12:3). For John they are summed up in faith in Christ and in his incarnation:
Beloved, do not trust every spirit but test the spirits to see whether they belong to God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. This is how you can know the Spirit of God: every spirit that acknowledges Jesus Christ come in the flesh belongs to God, and every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus does not belong to God. This is the spirit of the anti-Christ that, as you heard, is to come, but in fact is already in the world (1 Jn 4:1-3).

In the moral field, a fundamental criterion is given by the coherence of the Spirit of God with himself. It cannot ask for something that is contrary to divine will, as expressed in Scripture, in the teaching of the Church, and in the duties of one’s state of life. A divine inspiration will never ask us to perform acts that the Church considers immoral, no matter how many specious contrary arguments the flesh is capable of suggesting in these cases; for example, that God is love and therefore everything that is done out of love is from God.
Sometimes, however, these objective criteria are not sufficient because the choice is not between good and evil, but between one good and another good, and it is a question of seeing what is the thing that God wants, in a specific circumstance. It was above all to respond to this need that Saint Ignatius of Loyola developed his doctrine on discernment.
I am almost ashamed to talk on this topic in this place…but let us say something nevertheless. Saint Ignatius invites us to observe the intentions – he calls them the “spirits” – that lay behind a choice and the reactions they provoke. We know that what comes from the Spirit of God brings with it joy, peace, tranquility, sweetness, simplicity, light. What comes from the spirit of evil, on the contrary, brings with it disturbance, agitation, restlessness, confusion, and darkness. The Apostle Paul highlights this by contrasting the fruits of the flesh (enmities, discord, jealousy, dissensions, divisions, envy) with the fruits of the Spirit which are instead “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness” (Gal 5:22).
It is true that, in practice, things are more complex. An inspiration can come from God and yet cause great disturbance. But this is not due to the inspiration which is sweet and peaceful like everything that comes from God; rather, it arises from resistance to inspiration or from the fact that it asks us for something that we are not ready to give. If the inspiration is welcomed, the heart soon finds itself in profound peace. God rewards every small victory in this field, making the soul feel his approval, which is the purest joy that exists in the world.
A field in which it is important to practice discernment – beyond that of intentions and decisions – is the field of feelings. Nothing is more insidious than love. Nature is very skillful at passing off as coming from the spirit what actually comes from the flesh. In this field it is more necessary than ever to take into account the advice the Latin poet Ovid gave precisely on the illnesses of love: “Principiis obsta”: ”Oppose the beginnings”. “Sero medicina paratur”: It is too late for the medicine when the illness, due to too many delays, has gained strength.”
* * *
The concrete fruit of this meditation must be a renewed decision to entrust ourselves completely to the interior guidance of the Holy Spirit, as if for a sort of invisible “spiritual direction”. We must totally abandon ourselves to the inner Master who speaks to us without the clamor of words. Like good actors, we must keep our ears open, on large and small occasions, to the voice of this hidden “prompter” so as to faithfully play our part in the scene of life. This is what is meant by the expression “docility to the Spirit”.
It’s easier than you think, because the Spirit speaks to us, teaches us everything, and instructs us about everything. Sometimes a simple interior look, a movement of the heart, a moment of reflection and prayer is enough. John writes in his First Letter:
As for you, the anointing that you received from him remains in you, so that you do not need anyone to teach you. But his anointing teaches you about everything and is true and not false; just as it taught you, remain in him (1 Jn 2:27).
On these words, Saint Augustine establishes an unusual, lively debate with the Apostle. In his commentary on the First Letter of John, he writes:
I ask you, John: “Those to whom you addressed these words already had the anointing… Why then did you write this letter to them? Why instruct them?”… There is a great mystery here, brothers, on which we need to reflect. The sound of our words hits the ears, but the true teacher is inside… We can exhort with the sound of the voice, but if there is no one teaching inside, it is a useless noise.
If welcoming inspirations is important for every Christian, it is vital for those who have governance roles in the Church. Only in this way is the Spirit of Christ allowed to guide his Church through his human representatives. It is not necessary for all the passengers on a ship to be glued with their ears to the on-board radio, to receive signals on the route, on any icebergs, and weather conditions, but it is essential that the managers on board are. From a “divine inspiration” courageously accepted by Pope Saint John XXIII, the Second Vatican Council was born. In the same way, other prophetic gestures were born after him, which those who come after us will recognize.
This coming Easter, may the Risen Lord let resound in our heart one of his divine “I Am” sayings that we have meditated on in our Lenten meditations. Especially the one that proclaims his paschal victory:“I am the resurrection and the life; whoever believes in me, even if he dies, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die” (11:25-26).
Holy Father, Brothers and Sisters: Happy and Holy Easter!

1.See S. Kierkegaard, Journal, X 1 A 154.
2.Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, I-IIae, q. 106, a. 2.
3.Ibid., q. 106, a. 1; cf Augustine, De Spiritu et littera, 21, 36.
4.Augustine, Confessions , X, 29.
5.Gregory of Nyssa, De fide (PG, 45, 141C).
6.Cf. Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exercises, Fourth Week.
7.Ovid, Remedia amoris, V,91.
8.Augustine, On the First Letter of John, 3, 13.

“I am the resurrection!” We ask ourselves: what resurrection is Jesus talking about? Martha thinks of the final resurrection. Jesus does not deny this resurrection “on the last day,” which he himself promises elsewhere (Jn 6:54); but here he announces something new, namely, that the resurrection begins now for those who believe in him. St. Augustine comments: “The Lord has indicated to us a resurrection of the dead which precedes the final resurrection. And it is not a resurrection like that of Lazarus, or the son of the widow of Nain, who were resurrected to die once again.”

As we can see, the idea of a spiritual and existential resurrection taking place in this life thanks to faith, was not unknown in the Christian tradition. The novelty occurred when someone wanted to make it the only meaning of the word of Jesus. Bultmann’s position is well-known, albeit now largely outdated, it was all the rage when I studied theology. According to him, the resurrection of which Jesus speaks indicates an existential resurrection, an awakening of conscience, based on faith. We are on the line of the vague “call to decision” and of “deciding for God,” to which he reduces almost the entire message of the Gospel.

But John devotes two entire chapters of his Gospel to the actual, bodily resurrection of Jesus, providing some of the most detailed information about it. For him, therefore, it is not only “the cause of Jesus” that rose from the dead, but his very person!

The present resurrection does not replace the final resurrection of the body; it is, rather, its guarantee. It does not make Christ’s resurrection from the tomb useless, but rather is based precisely on it. Jesus can say “I am the resurrection” because he is the Risen One! Before John, it was the Apostle Paul who affirmed the inseparable link between the Christian faith and the real resurrection of Christ. It is always useful and timely to remember his incisive words to the Corinthians:

And if Christ has not been raised, then empty [too] is our preaching; empty, too, your faith. Then we are also false witnesses to God, because we testified against God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise if in fact the dead are not raised…and if Christ has not been raised, your faith is vain; you are still in your sins (1Cor 15:14-17).

Jesus himself had indicated his resurrection as the sign par excellence of the authenticity of his mission. To his adversaries who asked him for a sign, he gave an answer that can hardly be attributed to anyone other than Jesus himself:

He said to them in reply, “An evil and unfaithful generation seeks a sign, but no sign will be given it except the sign of Jonah the prophet. Just as Jonah was in the belly of the whale three days and three nights, so will the Son of Man be in the heart of the earth three days and three nights (Mt 12:39-40).
His opponents knew well that Jonah had not remained forever in the belly of the whale, but that after three days he had emerged from it.
In a previous meditation, I spoke about the prejudice present in non-believers towards faith, which is no less evident than what they reproach believers for. In fact, they reproach believers for not being able to be objective, since faith imposes on them, from the start, the conclusion they must arrive at, without realizing that the same thing happens among them. If you start from the assumption that God does not exist, that the supernatural does not exist, and that miracles are not possible, the conclusion you will reach is also given from the start, and is therefore, literally, a pre-judgment.
The resurrection of Christ constitutes the most exemplary case of this. No event in antiquity is supported by as many first-hand testimonies as this one. Some of them date back to personalities of the intellectual caliber of Saul of Tarsus who had previously fiercely fought against this belief. He provides a detailed list of witnesses, some of whom were still alive and could easily have disproved him (1Cor 15:6-9).
Discrepancies regarding the places and times of the apparitions are put forward, without realizing that the unplanned coincidence on the central fact is a proof of the historical truth of it, rather than its denial. No “pre-established harmony” in this case! Before being written down, the events of Jesus’ life were transmitted orally for two decades, and marginal variations and adaptations in the founding narrative are typical of every oral transmission inside a living and expanding community.

Apparitions, of course, are not the only proof of the resurrection of Christ. St. John Chrysostom has a famous page that no modern critical investigation has been able to contradict. In a homily to the people he said:

How could it occur to twelve poor men, and ignorant ones at that, who had spent their lives on lakes and rivers, to undertake such a work? They, who had perhaps never set foot in a city or a square, how could they think of facing the whole earth? […] Rather, shouldn’t they have said to themselves: “In his life he failed to conquer a single nation and we, with his name alone, should conquer the whole world?” Wouldn’t it be crazy to undertake such a mission, or even to simply think about it? It is therefore evident that if they had not seen him resurrected and had not had irrefutable proof of his power, they would never have exposed themselves to such a risk.

To all these proofs the non-believer can only oppose the conviction that the resurrection from the dead is something supernatural and the supernatural does not exist. And what is this if not, precisely, a pre-judgment and an “a priori”?
“Fides christianorum resurrectio Christi est,” St. Augustine wrote — “The faith of Christians is the resurrection of Christ”. And he added: “Everyone believes that Jesus died, even the reprobates believe it, but not everyone believes that he was resurrected and you are not a Christian if you don’t believe this.” This is the true article by which “the Church stands or falls.” In Acts, the Apostles are defined simply as “witnesses of the resurrection” (Acts 1:22; 2:32). This is why it was worthwhile to refresh our faith in it, before celebrating it in our liturgy in a couple of weeks.
* * *
Only now, after having reaffirmed the historical fact of the Resurrection of Christ, can we dedicate our attention to the existential meaning of the word of Jesus: “I am the resurrection and the life”.
Commenting on the episode of the dead resurrected and appearing in Jerusalem at the moment of Christ’s death (Mt 27:52-53), St. Leo the Great writes: “Let the signs of the future resurrection appear now in the Holy City [meaning, the Church], and what must be accomplished one day in the bodies, may now be accomplished in the hearts.”
The best way to understand what a resurrection of the heart is all about, is to see what the physical resurrection of Jesus produced, spiritually, in the life of the Apostles. Peter starts his First Letter with these lofty words:
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who in his great mercy gave us a new birth to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you. (1 Pt 1:3–4)

Strangely enough, the word “hope” is absent from Jesus’ preaching. The Gospels relate many of his sayings on faith and charity but none on hope, even if—as we will see later—all his preaching proclaims that there is a resurrection from the dead and an eternal life. On the contrary, after Easter, we see the idea and the sentiment of hope literally explode in the preaching of the Apostles. God himself is called “the God of hope” (Rom 15:13). The explanation for the absence of sayings on hope in the Gospel is simple: Christ had first to die and rise again. Rising from the dead, he unsealed the source of hope; he inaugurated the very object of hope, which is a life with God beyond death.

Let us try to see what a surge of hope could produce in our spiritual life. The Acts of the Apostles relate what happened one day al the door of the temple of Jerusalem called “the Beautiful Gate” (Acts 3:2). A cripple lay there begging for alms. One day, Peter and John passed by, and we know what happened next. The cripple, healed, jumped to his feet and finally after who knows how many years he had been lying there abandoned, he too went through that door and entered the temple “jumping and praising God” (Acts 3:1–9).

Something similar could also happen to us with regard to hope. We too often find ourselves, spiritually, in the position of the cripple on the threshold of the temple; inert and lukewarm, as if paralyzed in the face of difficulties. But here the divine hope passes by us, carried by the word of God, and says to us too, like Peter to the cripple and Jesus to the paralytic: “Get up and walk!” (Mk 2:11). And we jump to our feet and finally enter into the heart of the Church, ready to assume, again and joyfully, tasks and responsibilities. These are the daily miracles of hope. It is truly a great miracle worker; it puts thousands of cripples back on their feet, thousands of times. Indeed—as Isaiah told us—it puts eagle wings on their feet and makes people walk without stumbling.

What is extraordinary about hope is that its presence changes everything, even when externally nothing changes. I have a small example of this in my own life. I am a person who suffers from the cold much more than the heat. Now, in Italy, in March, at the beginning of spring, the temperature is more or less the same as in late October and early November. Yet I noticed that the cold of March made me less depressed than the cold of November. I wondered why and finally found the answer. The cold of November is a hopeless cold because we are heading toward winter. The cold of March is a cold with hope!

* * *

The Letter to the Hebrews compares hope to “an anchor of our life sure and firm.” Sure and firm because it is cast not on earth but in heaven, not in time but in eternity, “beyond the veil of the sanctuary” (Heb 6:18–19). This image of hope has become classic. But we also have another image of hope, in a certain sense opposite to the previous one: the sail. If the anchor is what gives the boat safety and keeps it steady between the swaying of the sea, the sail is what makes it move and advance in the sea.

Through both things does hope operate, both within the boat of the Church and our own lives. It is truly like a sail that collects the wind and without noise transforms it into a driving force that carries the boat, offshore or ashore according to the needs. Just as the sail in the hands of a good sailor is able to use any wind, from any direction, favorable or unfavorable, to move the boat in the desired direction, so does hope.

First of all, hope comes to our aid in our personal journey of sanctification. Hope becomes, in those who exercise it, the very principle of spiritual progress. Hope is always on guard to discover new “occasions for good,” always something that can be done. Therefore, it does not allow them to settle down in lukewarmness and sloth. Hope is the complete opposite of what is sometimes thought; it is not a beautiful and poetic interior disposition that makes you dream and build imaginary worlds.

On the contrary, it is very concrete and practical; it spends its time putting tasks to be done in front of you. When in a given situation there is absolutely nothing to be done – writes the philosopher Kierkegaard – , then, yes, it would be paralysis and despair. But hope, looking at eternity as it does, always finds that there is something that can be done to improve the situation: work harder, be more obedient, more humble, more mortified.

When you are tempted to say to yourself “There is nothing more to be done,” (it is again Kierkegaard speaking) hope comes forward and tells you “Pray!” You answer “But I prayed!” and she “Pray again!” And even when the situation should become extremely hard, such that it seems that there is really nothing more to be done, hope still points you to a task: to endure until the end and not lose patience.

These objectives emphasized by the believing philosopher are demanding, even downright heroic. It is clear that they are not possible through our efforts, but only thanks to the grace of God who comes to our aid and does not leave us alone.

Hope has a privileged relationship, in the New Testament, with patience. It is the opposite of impatience, of haste, of “everything, and now.” It is the antidote to discouragement. It keeps the desire alive. It is also a great pedagogue in the sense that it does not point out everything at once—all there is to do or can be done—but puts in front of you one possibility at a time. She only gives “a daily bread.” It distributes the effort and thus makes it possible to carry it out.

Scripture continually sheds light on this truth—that tribulation does not take away hope, but rather increases it: “Affliction produces endurance, and endurance, proven character, and proven character, hope” (Rom 5:3–4). Hope needs tribulation as the flame needs the wind to strengthen itself. Human reasons for hoping must die, one after another, for the true unshakable reason that is God to emerge.

It happens as in the launch of a ship. It is necessary that the scaffolding that held the ship up artificially, when it was under construction, be removed and all the various props be taken away one after another so that it can take off and freely float on the water. Tribulation removes from us any “hold” and leads us to hope only in God. It leads to that state of perfection that consists in hoping when there seems to be no hope (Rom 4:18)—that is, to keep hoping by relying on the word once spoken by God, even when all human reasons for hoping have disappeared. Such was Mary’s hope under the cross. Popular piety is not wrong when it invokes Mary with the title of Mater Spei, mother of hope.

This strengthening effect of hope is beautifully described in the text from Isaiah:
Though young men faint and grow weary,
and youths stagger and fall,
They that hope in the LORD will renew their strength,
they will soar on eagles’ wings;
They will run and not grow weary,
walk and not grow faint. (Is 40:30–31)
The oracle is the response to the lament of the people who say: “My fate is hidden from the Lord.” God does not promise to remove the reasons for weariness and exhaustion, but he gives hope. The situation remains in itself what it was, but hope gives the strength to rise above it. It is really like putting on wings.

In the book of Revelation, we read that “When the dragon saw that it had been thrown down to the earth, it pursued the woman who had given birth to the male child. But the woman was given the two wings of the great eagle, so that she could fly to her place in the desert” (Rv 12:13–14). If the image of the eagle’s wings is inspired, as it clearly seems, by the text of Isaiah, this means that the whole Church has been given the great wings of hope so that with them it can, every time, escape the attacks of evil and overcome every difficulty.
We end by listening to the invocation the Apostle Paul addressed to God in favor of the faithful of Rome at the end of his Letter, as it was meant for us in this very moment:
May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the holy Spirit. (Rom 15:13)

1.Augustine, On the Gospel of John, 19,9.
2.W. Marxsen, The Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, London, 1970.
3.Cf. J.D.G. Dunn, Christianity in the Making, 3 vol., Grand Rapids, Mich, 2003, synthesized in his A new Perspective on Jesus, Grand Rapids, Mich 2005.
4.John Chrysostom, Hom. in 1 Corinthians, 4, 4 (PG 61, 35 s.).
5.Augustine, Enarr. in Psaslmos, 120,6.
6.Søren Kierkegaard, The Works of Love, Part II, no. 3.

The LORD is my light and my salvation;
whom should I fear?
The LORD is my life’s refuge;
of whom should I be afraid? (Ps 27:1).
So, let’s talk about this “dark evil” of fear which has so much power to rob people of the joy of living. Fear is our existential condition; it accompanies us from childhood to death. The child is afraid of many things; we call them infantile terrors. The adolescent is sometimes afraid of the opposite sex and becomes entangled in shyness and inferiority complexes. Jesus gave a name to our main fears as adults: fear of tomorrow – “what will we eat?” (Mt 6:31); fear of the world and the powerful – “those who kill the body”(Mt 10:28).On each of these fears he pronounced his own: Nolite timere! “Do not be afraid!”This is not an empty and powerless word, but an effective and almost sacramental word. Like all the words of Jesus, it does what it says; it’s not like the simple,“Take courage!”that we human beings might say to each other.
* * *
But what is fear? Let’s leave aside the existential anguish that philosophers have been discussing for a century and a half now. Let’s talk about common and familiar fears. We can say that fear is a reaction to a threat to our being, the response to a real or perceived danger, from the greatest danger of all which is that of death, to specific dangers that threaten either our tranquility, physical safety, or our emotional world. Fear is a manifestation of our basic instinct for self-preservation. Depending on whether we are dealing with objective and real dangers or imaginary ones, we talk about justified and unjustified fears, or even neuroses: claustrophobia, agoraphobia, imaginary illnesses, and so on.
Psychology and psychoanalysis try to heal people’s fears and neuroses by analyzing them and bringing them from the unconscious to the conscious. The Gospel does not distract from these human means, indeed it encourages them, but adds something that science cannot provide. Saint Paul writes:

“What will separate us from the love of Christ? Will anguish, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or the sword?… No, in all these things we conquer overwhelmingly through him who loved us” (Rom 8:35-37).

Here, liberation is not found in an idea or a technique, but in a person! The “solvent” of all fear is Christ who has said to his disciples: “Do not be afraid,I have overcome the world” (Jn 16:33).From the personal sphere, the Apostle then broadens his gaze to the great scenario of space and time, from small individual fears to large and universal ones. He writes:

“For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor present things, nor future things, nor powersnor height, nor depth, nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord”(Rom 8:38-39).

“Neither death nor life!” Christ has conquered the thing that scares us most in the world, death. The Letter to the Hebrews says of him that he died “That through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and free those who through fear of death had been subject to slavery all their life”(Heb 2:14-15).

“Neither height nor depth!”, which is to say: neither the infinitely large which is the universe with its ever-expanding proportions, nor the infinitely small – the atom –of which we have discovered, at our own risk, the terrible power. Today we are more exposed than ever to this kind of cosmic fear. Modern man acutely feels his vulnerability in a violent and mad world. What will become of the future of our planet if, despite the cries of alarm from the Pope and the most responsible people in society, we continue, with full rein, to consume and pollute?

At the end of his philosophical reflections on the danger of technology for modern man, Martin Heidegger, almost throwing in the towel, exclaimed: “Only a god can save us!” “A god” (small letter!) is the usual mythical way to talk about something above us. We remove the indefinite article and say “Only God (and we know which God!) can save us!”

It is not a shifting of our responsibilities onto God, but believing that, in the end, “everything works for the good of those who love God” [and whom God loves!] (Rom 8:28). When dealing with God, the measure is eternity. You can be disappointed in time, but not for eternity. We Christians have a much stronger reason than the psalmist to repeat, in the face of the physical and moral upheavals of the world:

God is our refuge and our strength,
an ever-present help in distress.
Thus, we do not fear, though earth be shaken
and mountains quake to the depths of the sea (Ps 46:2-3).
* * *
But we have not yet taken into consideration the most consoling thing that the Gospel has to tell us about our fears and anxieties! After having exhorted his disciples in a thousand ways not to fear, he did something else. Never before had it been said in the Bible that the good shepherd lays down his life for his sheep. That he knows them, guides them, takes care of them, defends them: this yes; but not that he gives his life for them. Jesus promised to do it and he did!
He took our fears upon himself. The author of the Letter to the Hebrews says: “In the days of his earthly life he offered prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to God who was able to save him from death” (Heb 5:7). The author alludes to what happened to Jesus on the night of Gethsemane. The Evangelist Mark says that in the Garden of Olives Jesus “Began to be troubled and distressed. Then he said to them, “My soul is sorrowful even to death. Remain here and keep watch”(Mk 14: 33-34). Jesus feels alone, cut off from human society; he asks the apostles to stay close to him, to remain with him.
The same Letter to the Hebrews highlights the consoling message contained for us in this mysterious page of the Gospel:
For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who has similarly been tested in every way, yet without sin.So let us confidently approach the throne of grace to receive mercy and to find grace for timely help (Heb 4:15-16).
By taking them upon himself, Jesus also redeemed our fears and anxieties. “By his wounds, we were healed,” the Scripture says of him (Is 53:5-6; 1 Pt 2:24). Jesus is the true “wounded healer” of whom the psychologist spoke, the wounded man who heals the wounds of many. He transformed fear and anguish into opportunities for growth in humanity and in compassion.
But even this does not exhaust what the Gospel has to tell us about our fears. If everything ended here, our consolation would still not be complete. We would have before our eyes a heroic and moving example to follow, but not a hand to sustain us. But here is the second great good news of the Gospel: the pierced healer rose from the dead and said: “I am with you always, until the end of the world” (Mt 28:20). He didn’t just give us the example of how to overcome anguish; he gave us the means to overcome it: his presence and his grace. To Paul who was complaining about his “thorn in the flesh,” the Risen One responds, “My grace is sufficient for you!” (2 Cor 12:9).
The martyrs have made it — and still make it!— a tangible experience. In the Acts of the Carthage martyrs, killed under the Emperor Septimius Severus in the early years of the 3rd century (among the most historically reliable of all the Acts of the martyrs!), we read that one of them, named Felicitas, was pregnant in her eighth month when she was arrested. In prison, she moaned on account of the pangs of childbirth. One of the jailers said to her: “If you complain now, what will you do when you are thrown to the wild beasts in the arena?” And she replied: “Now, I’m the one who suffers; then, someone else will suffer for me!”
We have an example closer to us. In prison and on the eve of being hanged, following the failed coup against Hitler, Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote these verses which are often used as a liturgical hymn:
By kindly powers so wonderfully protected
we wait with confidence, befall what may.
We are with God at night and in the morning
and, just as certainly, on each new day.

* * *

In these meditations, we have forced ourselves not to talk about what we must do for others, but only about what Jesus is and does for us: to identify with the sheep, not with the shepherd. But we must make a small exception on this occasion. Despite all the exhortations of the Gospel, it is not always within our power to free ourselves from fear and anguish; but it may be in our power to free someone else, or help them free themselves.
Pascal wrote in his Memorial: “Jesus is in agony until the end of the world; we must not sleep during all this time.” He continues to be in agony because, in the dimension of eternity into which he has entered, there is no longer a past, but everything is mysteriously present, even his night in Gethsemane. But he is also in agony in another, less mysterious way. He is so in his mystical body: in those who are oppressed by anguish and fear due to loneliness, illness, persecution, exile, and war. We are now the eyes, mouth, and hands of Christ. Let us try to bring comfort to some of them and we will hear the risen Jesus say in our hearts: “You did it to me!” (Mt 25:40). We too, whether pastors or simple believers, must be wounded healers, poor sick people who, nevertheless, can heal others.
I end with an anecdote that many, I think, know, but which helps us to imprint on us the image of Jesus who carries us on his shoulders in the difficult moments of our lives. It’s about a man who sees his whole life in a dream. Here is a brief summary of the story:
I walk on the sand by the sea, leaving behind me, not one but two pairs of footprints. I understand that the second pair are the footsteps of Jesus walking beside me and I am happy. But then, at a certain point, that second pair disappears and only the footprints of two feet can be seen in the sand. This, I understand, happens precisely in correspondence with the darkest and most difficult moments of my life. I lament it and say, “Lord, you left me alone just when I needed you most!”“Son,” Jesus answers me, “the footprints you saw were mine. You were on my shoulders!”

1.Augustine, Sermo340, 1 (PL 38,1483).
2.Augustine, Expos. in Psalmos, 126, 3.
3.Martin Heidegger, Antwort. Martin Heidegger im Gespräch, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 16,Frankfurt 1975.
4.PassioSanctarumPerpetuae et Felicitatis, XV (Ed. C.J. von Beek, Bonn 1938).
5.Trans. John Brownjohn.
6.B. Pascal, Pensées, 553, ed. Br.

This word is so pregnant and so beautiful that Christians immediately chose it as one of the favorite designations of Christ. In many ancient basilicas – such as in the cathedral of Cefalù and Monreale in Sicily – in the mosaic of the apse, Jesus is represented as the Pantocrator, or Lord of the universe. He holds an open book in front of him and shows the page where those very words are written, in Greek and Latin: Egô eimi to phôs tou cosmou— Ego sum lux mundi. – I am the light of the world.
For us today, Jesus the “light of the world” has become a believed and proclaimed truth, but there was a time when it was not just this; it was a lived experience, as sometimes happens to us, when, after a blackout, the light suddenly returns, or when, in the morning, opening the window, you are flooded with daylight. The First Letter of Peter defines it as a passing “out of darkness into his wonderful light” (1 Pt 2:9; Col 1:12ff). Recalling the moment of his conversion and his baptism, Tertullian describes it with the image of the child who comes out of his mother’s dark womb and is frightened by contact with air and light. “Coming out,” he writes, “from the common womb of the same ignorance, [we Christians] trembled at the light of the truth.”
We immediately ask ourselves the question: what do the words of Jesus, “I am the light of the world,” mean for us, here and now? The expression “light of the world” has two fundamental meanings. The first meaning is that Jesus is the light of the world as he is the supreme and definitive revelation of God to humanity. The incipit of the Letter to the Hebrews states this in the clearest and most solemn way:
In times past, God spoke in partial and various ways to our ancestors through the prophets; in these last days, he spoke to us through a son, whom he made heir of all things and through whom he created the universe (Heb 1:1-2).

The novelty consists in the unique and unrepeatable fact that the revealer is himself the revelation! “I am the light of the world,” not “I bring light into the world.” The prophets spoke in the third person: “Thus says the Lord!;” Jesus speaks in the first person: “I say to you!” In 1964 Marshall McLuhan launched the famous slogan: “The medium is the message”, meaning that the means by which a message is spread conditions the message itself. This saying applies in a unique and transcendent way to Christ. In him the means of transmission is truly the message; the messenger is himself the message!
This, as I was saying, is the first meaning of the expression “light of the world.” The second meaning is that Jesus is the light of the world in that he sheds light on the world, that is, he reveals the world to itself; he shows everything in his truth, for what it is before God.

* * *
Let us reflect on each of the two meanings, starting from the first, that is, from Jesus as the supreme revelation of God’s truth. From this point of view, the light that is Christ has always had a fierce competitor: human reason. We speak about it, not with polemical or apologetic intent, that is, to know how to respond to opponents of the faith (it would contradict my initial purpose), but to confirm ourselves in the faith.
The debates on faith and reason—more exactly, on reason and revelation—are affected by a radical dissymmetry. The believer shares reason with the atheist; the atheist does not share faith in the revelation with the believer. The believer speaks the language of the atheist interlocutor; the atheist does not speak the language of the believing counterpart.

Because of that, the fairest debate on faith and reason is the one that takes place in the same person, between one’s own faith and one’s own reason. We have famous cases in the history of human thought of people in whom an identical passion for both reason and faith cannot be doubted: Augustine of Hippo, Thomas Aquinas, Blaise Pascal, Søren Kierkegaard, John Henry Newman, and we could add John Paul II, Benedict XVI…
The conclusion each of them arrived at is that the supreme act of human reason is to recognize that there is something beyond it. It is also what most ennobles reason because it indicates its ability to transcend itself. Faith is not opposed to reason but it supposes reason, just as “grace supposes nature.”
There is a second misunderstanding to be clarified regarding the dialogue between faith and reason. The common criticism addressed to believers is that they cannot be objective, since their faith imposes on them, from the start, the conclusion to arrive at. In other words, it acts as a pre-understanding and a prejudice. Attention is not paid to the fact that the same prejudice also acts, in the opposite direction, in the non-believing scientist or philosopher, and perhaps in a stronger way. If you take for granted that God does not exist, the supernatural does not exist, and miracles are impossible, then your conclusion is also predetermined from the start.
An example among many. Knowing the vision Freud had of reality, could he admit that the “universal love” of Francis of Assisi had a supernatural component called grace? Of course not, and in fact, he makes it a “derivation of genital love.” St. Francis is just “the one who went furthest in using love for the benefit of his internal feeling of happiness.” In other words, he loved God, men, all creation, and, in a very special way, Christ’s Crucifix because this gave him pleasure and made him feel good!
Modern people, instead of the truth, place the search for truth as a supreme value. Lessing has written: “If God were to grasp all truth in his right hand, and in his left, only ever-living aspiration to the truth, were it even on condition of being eternally wrong, and he were to say to me: ‘Choose!,’ I should humbly bow toward the left saying: ‘This one, Father! Pure truth belongs to you alone.”
The reason for this is quite simple. As long as you are researching it, it is you who leads the game as the protagonist, while in the presence of the Truth recognized as such, you no longer have a chance and must pay “the obedience of faith.” Faith posits the absolute, while reason would like to continue the discussion indefinitely. Like the Scheherazade of One Thousand and One Nights, human reason always has a new story to tell to delay its surrender.
There are only two resolutions to the tension between faith and reason: either to reduce faith “within the limits of pure reason,” or to break the limits of pure reason and “put out into the deep.” A bit like when Dante’s Ulysses reached the “Pillars of Hercules,” once considered to be the end of the Earth, and decided not to stop there but rather to make wings out of the oars for a bold flight. ⁠
I must, however, be coherent with my own premises. The discourse on faith and reason, before it becomes a debate between “us and them,” between believers and non-believers, must be a debate between believers themselves. The worst kind of rationalism, in fact, is not the external but the internal one. St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians: “My message and my proclamation were not with persuasive words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of spirit and power, so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God” (1 Cor 2:4–5), and again: “The weapons of our battle are not of flesh but are enormously powerful, capable of destroying fortresses. We destroy arguments and every pretension raising itself against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive in obedience to Christ” (2 Cor 10:3–5).
What the Apostle feared has often occurred among us. Theology, especially in the West, has increasingly distanced itself from the power of the Spirit, to rely on human wisdom. Modern rationalism demanded that Christianity present its message in a dialectical way—that is, submitting it, in all respects, to research and discussion, so that it could be part of the general effort, philosophically acceptable, of a common and ever-provisional self-understanding of human destiny and of the universe. But in doing so, the proclamation about the death and Resurrection of Christ is submitted to a different—and supposedly superior—instance. It is no longer kerygma but only a hypothesis.
The danger inherent in this approach to theology is that God is objectified. He becomes an object we talk about, not a subject with whom—or in whose presence—we talk. A “he”—or worse, an “it”—never a “you”! It is the backlash of having made of theology a “science.” The first duty of those who do science is to be neutral toward the object of their research; but can you be neutral when you are dealing with God? This was the main reason that led me, at a certain point in my life, to abandon the academic teaching of theology and to dedicate myself full-time to preaching. The consequence of that way of doing theology, in fact, is that it becomes more and more a dialogue with the academic elite of the moment and less and less a nourishment for the faith of the people of God.
From this situation we only go out with prayer, speaking to God before speaking of God. “If you are a theologian you will truly pray, and if you truly pray you are a theologian,” an ancient Father used to say.” St. Augustine made his most enduring—and his safest!—theology while speaking to God in his Confessions. The contemplation and imitation of the Mother of God is also helpful. She never had anything to do with abstract ideas about God and her Son Jesus but only with their living reality.
* * *
I mentioned, in the beginning, a second meaning of the expression “light of the world,” and it is to it that I would like to dedicate the last part of my reflection, also because it is the one that concerns us most closely. It is, as I was saying, the instrumental meaning, so to speak, in which Jesus is the light of the world: that is, insofar as he sheds light on all things and he does towards the world, what the sun does towards the earth. The sun does not illuminate or reveal itself, but illuminates all things on earth, making everything appear in its true light.
Also in this second sense, Jesus and his Gospel have a competitor who is the most dangerous of all, being an internal competitor, an enemy at home. The expression “light of the world” changes completely in meaning depending on whether the expression “of the world” is taken as an objective genitive, or as a subjective genitive; depending, that is, on whether the world is the illuminated object, or instead the subject that illuminates. In this second case, it is not the Gospel, but the world that makes us see all things in its own light. The Evangelist John exhorted his disciples with these words:
Do not love the world or the things of the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, sensual lust, enticement for the eyes, and a pretentious life is not from the Father but is from the world.
The danger of conforming to this world – the worldliness – is the equivalent, in the religious and spiritual sphere, of what, in the social sphere, we call secularization. No one (least of all myself) can say that this danger does not also loom over him or her. A saying attributed to Jesus in an ancient non-canonical writing states: “If you do not fast from the world, you will not discover the kingdom of God.” This is perhaps the most necessary fast of all today: fasting from the world, nesteuein tô kosmô, according to the aforementioned saying!
The world we talk about and to which we must not conform is not the world created and loved by God, it is not the men of the world whom, indeed, we must always meet, especially the poor, the last, the suffering. “Mixing” with this world of suffering and marginalization is, paradoxically, the best way to “separate” oneself from the world, because it means going there, whereof the world flees with all its might. It means separating yourself from the very principle that governs the world, which is selfishness.
The change must take place first of all in the way we think. St. Paul exhorts the Christians of Rome saying,
Do not conform yourselves to this age but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and pleasing and perfect (Rom 12:2).
There are many causes at the origin of worldliness, but the main one is the crisis of faith. Faith is the primary battleground between the Christian and the world. It is through faith that a disciple of Christ is “in” the world but not “of” the world. Understood in a moral sense, the “world” is those who refuse to believe. John writes: “This is the victory that has defeated the world: our faith,” (1 John 5:4). In the Letter to the Ephesians, there is a passage on which it is worthwhile to reflect a little longer. It says:
You were dead in your transgressions and sins in which you once lived following the age of this world, following the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the disobedient (Eph 2:1-2).

1.Terullianus, Apologeticum 39,9: “ad lucem expavescentes véritatis”.
2.Thomas Aquinas, S.Th., I, q. 2, a. 2 ad 1.
3.S. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, IV.
4,G. Lessing, Eine Duplik, I, in Werke 3, Zürich 1974, p.149.
5.See Inferno, XXVI, 125: “We of the oars made wings for our mad flight” (trans. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow).
6.Evagrius Ponticus, De oratione, 61 (PG 79, 1180).
7.Cf. Clement Al., Stromata, 111, 15 (GCS, 52, p. 242, 2); A. Resch, Agrapha, 48 (TU, 30, 1906, p. 68).
8.H. Schlier, in “Geist und Leben 31 (1958), pp. 173-183.

The German exegete Heinrich Schlier made a penetrating analysis of this “spirit of the world” considered by Paul to be the direct antagonist of the “Spirit of God” (1 Cor 2:12). Public opinion plays a decisive role in it. Today we can call it, even in a literal sense, “the power of the air,” because it spreads above all through virtual means of communication.

This – writes Schlier – is a spirit of great historical intensity, which the individual can hardly escape. We stick to the general spirit, we consider it obvious. Acting, or thinking, or saying something against it is considered senseless or even an injustice or a crime. Then we no longer dare to face things and situations and life itself in a different way from how it presents them… Its characteristic is to interpret the world and human existence in its own way.

This is what we call “adaptation to the spirit of the times.” The morality of the Mozartian “Così fan tutte.” Today we have a new image to describe the corrosive action of the spirit of the world, the computer virus. From what little I know, the virus is a maliciously designed program that penetrates the computer through the various ways (exchange of e-mails, websites…), and once inside, it confuses or blocks normal operations, altering the so-called “operating systems.”

The spirit of the world acts in a similar way. It penetrates us through a thousand channels, like the air we breathe, and once inside, it changes our operating models: it replaces the “Christ” model with the “world” model. The world also has its own “trinity,” its three gods, or idols to adore: pleasure, power, and money. We all deplore the disasters they create in society, but are we sure that, in our own small way, we ourselves are completely immune to them?

In this struggle against the world outside us and that inside us, our great comfort is that the risen Christ continues praying for us to the Father with the words he addressed to his disciples before leaving them:

I do not ask that you take them out of the world but that you keep them from the evil one. They do not belong to the world any more than I belong to the world… As you sent me into the world, so I sent them into the world… I pray not only for them but also for those who will believe in me through their word (Jn 17:15-20).

The unilateral affirmation of one of these two ways of eating the bread of life to the exclusion of the other is the result of the harmful division that occurred in Western Christianity. On the Catholic side, the Eucharistic interpretation had ended up becoming so preponderant as to make the sixth chapter of John almost the equivalent of the story of the institution of the Eucharist. Luther, in reaction, stated the opposite, that is, that the bread of life is the word of God; it is distributed through preaching and eaten through faith.
The ecumenical climate that has been established among believers in Christ allows us to recompose the traditional synthesis present in the Fathers. There is no doubt that the bread of life comes to us through the word of God and in particular the words of Jesus in the Gospel. His response to the tempter also reminds us of this: “Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Mt 4:4). But how can we not see in Jesus’ speech in the synagogue of Capernaum also a reference to the Eucharist? The whole context evokes a banquet: we talk about food and drink, eating and drinking, the body and blood. The words: “Whoever does not eat my flesh and drink my blood…” recall too closely the words of the institution (“Take, eat, this is my body” and “Take, drink: this is my blood”) to be able to deny any relationship between them.
If in the exegesis and theology, we witness a polarization and sometimes – I was saying – a contrast between the bread of the word and the Eucharistic bread, in the liturgy their synthesis has always been experienced peacefully. Since the most ancient times, for example in Saint Justin Martyr, the Mass has included two moments: the liturgy of the Word, with readings taken from the Old Testament and the “memoirs of the apostles,” and the Eucharistic liturgy with consecration and communion.
Today we can return, as I was saying, to the original synthesis between Word and Sacrament. Indeed, we must take a step forward in this direction. It consists of not limiting eating the flesh and drinking the blood of Christ to the Word and sacrament of the Eucharist alone, but in seeing it implemented in every moment and aspect of our life of grace. When Saint Paul writes: “For me to live is Christ” (Phil 1:21), he is not thinking of a particular moment. For him, Christ is truly, in all ways of his presence, the bread of life; we “eat” him with faith, hope, and charity, in prayer and in everything. The human being is created for joy and cannot live without joy, or without the hope of it. Joy is the bread of the heart. And the Apostle seeks true joy – and exhorts his followers to seek it – in Christ: “Gaudete in Domino semper, iterum dico, gaudete”: “Rejoice in the Lord always. I shall say it again: rejoice!” (Phil 4:4).
Jesus is the bread of eternal life not only for what he gives but also – and first of all – for what he is. The Word and the Sacrament are the means; living in him and in him is the end: “As the Father who has life sent me, and I live through the Father, so he who eats me will live through me” (Jn 6:57). In the hymn Adoro te devote which has fueled the piety and Eucharistic adoration of Catholics for centuries, there is a verse which is a paraphrase of these words of Jesus. In the original that many of us certainly remember, it sounds like this:
O memoriále mortis Dómini,
Panis vivus vitam praestans hómini,
praesta meae menti de te vívere,
et te illi semper dulce sápere.

In English,
O memorial of my Savior dying,
Living Bread, that gives life to man;
make my soul, its life from Thee supplying,
taste Thy sweetness, as on earth it can.

* * *

All of Jesus’ speech tends, therefore, to clarify what life he gives: not the life of the flesh, but the life of the Spirit, eternal life. However, it is not along these lines that I would like to continue my reflection in the few minutes I have left. With regards to the Gospel, there are always two operations to be done, strictly respecting their order: first, appropriation, then imitation. We have until now appropriated the bread of life through faith and we do so every time we receive Communion. It is now a question of seeing how to translate them into practice in our lives.
To do this, we ask ourselves a simple question: How did he, Jesus, become the bread of life for us? He himself gave us the answer precisely in the Gospel of John: “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it produces much fruit” (Jn 12:24). We know well what the images of falling to the ground and rotting allude to. The whole history of the Passion is contained in them. We must try to see what those images mean to us. In fact, with the image on the grain of wheat, Jesus does not only indicate his personal destiny but that of every one of his true disciples.
One cannot listen to the words addressed by Bishop Ignatius of Antioch to the Church of Rome without being moved and without being amazed, seeing what the grace of Christ is capable of doing for a human creature:
I am corresponding with all the churches and bidding them all realize that I am voluntarily dying for God — if that is, you do not interfere. I plead with you, do not do me an unseasonable kindness. Let me be fodder for wild beasts — that is how I can get to God. I am God’s wheat and I am being ground by the teeth of wild beasts to make a pure loaf for Christ.
Before the teeth of wild beasts, Bishop Ignatius experienced other teeth that ground him, not teeth of wild beasts, but of men: “From Syria to Rome,” he writes, “I fight with wild beasts, on land, and by sea, by night and by day, tied to ten leopards, the handful of soldiers who benefited from me become worse.” This has something to say to us too. Each of us has, in our environment, these teeth of wild beasts that grind us. Saint Augustine said that we human beings are “earthen vessels, which hurt one another”: lutea vasa quae faciunt invicem angustias. We must learn to make this situation a means of sanctification and not of hardening of the heart, hatred, and complaint!
An often-repeated maxim in our religious communities says vita communis mortificatio maxima: “Living in community is the greatest of all mortifications.” Not only the greatest but also the most useful and more meritorious than many other self-chosen mortifications. This maxim does not apply only to those who live in religious communities but to every human coexistence. Where it is achieved in the most demanding way is, in my opinion, marriage, and we must be full of admiration when faced with a marriage carried forward faithfully until death. Spending your whole life, day and night, dealing with the will, character, sensitivity, and idiosyncrasies of another person, especially in a society like ours, is something great and, if done with a spirit of faith, it should already be qualified as “heroic virtue”.
We, however, find ourselves here in the context of the Curia which is not a religious or matrimonial community, but one of ecclesial service and work. There are many opportunities not to be wasted if we too want to be ground to become God’s flour, and everyone must identify and sanctify what is offered to him in his place of service. I’ll name just one or two that I think are valid for everyone.
One opportunity is to accept being contradicted, to give up justifying oneself, and to always want to be right when this is not required by the importance of the matter. It is another to put up with someone whose character, way of speaking or acting gets on our nerves, and to do so without ourselves becoming irritated internally, thinking, rather, that we too are perhaps such a person for someone. The Apostle exhorted the faithful of Colossae with these words:
Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, heartfelt compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience, bearing with one another and forgiving one another, if one has a grievance against another; as the Lord has forgiven you, so must you also do (Col 3:12-13).
What is most difficult to “shred” in us is not the flesh, but the spirit, that is, self-love and pride, and these small exercises serve the purpose magnificently.
Unfortunately, today there exists in society teeth that grind without mercy, more cruelly than the leopard’s teeth of which the martyr Saint Ignatius spoke. They are the teeth of the media and the so-called social networks. Not when they point out the distortions of society or of the Church (in this they deserve all the respect and esteem!), but when they attack someone out of bias, simply because he does not belong to their side. With malice and with destructive, rather than constructive, intent. Unfortunate indeed is whoever ends up in this meat grinder today, be he a layman or a clergyman!
In this case, it is legitimate and necessary to assert one’s reasons in the appropriate forums, and if this is not possible, or it is seen that it is of no use, all that remains for a believer is to join Christ scourged, crowned with thorns, spit upon. In the Letter to the Hebrews we read this exhortation to the first Christians which can help on similar occasions: “Consider how he endured such opposition from sinners, in order that you may not grow weary and lose heart.” (Heb 12:3).
It is a difficult and painful thing to say the least, especially if one’s natural or religious family is involved, but the grace of God can make – and often has made – all of this an opportunity for purification and sanctification. It’s about having faith that, in the end, as happened with Jesus, the truth will triumph over lies. And the triumph will be better served, perhaps, with silence than with the most aggressive self-defense.
* * *
The final aim of allowing oneself to be ground, however, is not of an ascetic nature, but of a mystical one; it does not serve so much to mortify oneself, as to create communion. This is a truth that has accompanied Eucharistic catechesis since the early days of the Church. It is already present in the Didache (IX,4), a writing from apostolic times. Saint Augustine develops this theme in a wonderful way in one of his sermons to the people. He parallels the process that leads to the formation of the bread which is the Eucharistic body of Christ, and the process that leads to the formation of his mystical body which is the Church. He said:
Remember for a moment what wheat once was, when it was still in the field: the earth made it sprout, the rain nourished it; then there was the work of the man who took it to the threshing floor, threshed it, winnowed it and placed it in the granaries; from here he took it to grind and cook it and so, finally, it became bread.
Now think about yourselves: you were not and were created, you were brought to the threshing floor of the Lord, you were threshed…When you gave your names for baptism, you began to be ground down by fasting and exorcisms; then finally you came to the water, you were kneaded and you became one; when the fire of the Holy Spirit came, you were cooked and became the bread of the Lord. Here’s what you received. Therefore, just as you see that the bread prepared is one, so may you also be one, loving one another, maintaining the same faith, the same hope, and undivided charity.”
* * *
I conclude with an episode that actually happened, narrated in a book still on the market entitled “The Price to Pay,” and whose author, I believe, is still alive. It serves, better than long speeches, to realize the power contained in the solemn “I Am” of Jesus in the Gospel and in particular what I have commented on in this first meditation.
A few decades ago, in a Middle Eastern nation, two soldiers – one a Christian believer and the other not – were together acting as sentries at an arms depot. The Christian often took out, sometimes even at night, a small book and read it, attracting the curiosity and irony of his comrade in arms. One night, the latter had a dream. He found himself in front of a stream which however he was unable to cross. He saw a figure enveloped in light who told him: “To cross it, you need the bread of life.” Strongly impressed by the dream, in the morning, without knowing why, he asked, or rather forced, his companion to give him his mysterious book. (It was of course the book of the Gospels). He opened it and fell on the gospel of John. His Christian friend advised him to start with Matthew’s which is easier to understand. But he, without knowing why, insisted. He read everything in one go until he reached chapter six. But at this point, it would be good to listen to his story directly:
Having reached the sixth chapter, I stop, struck by the strength of a sentence. For a moment I think I’m the victim of a hallucination, and I put my eyes back on the book, at the point where I stopped… I just read these words: “…the bread of life.” The same words I heard a few hours ago in my dream. I slowly reread the passage in which Jesus, addressing his disciples, says: “I am the bread of life, whoever comes to me will never be hungry again.” In that very moment, something extraordinary is unleashed within me, like an explosion of warmth and well-being… I have the impression of being caught up, carried aloft by the strength of a feeling I have never experienced, a violent passion, a love immeasurable for this man called Jesus.”
What this person later had to suffer for his faith confirms the authenticity of his experience. The word of God does not always act in such an explosive way, but the example, I repeat, shows us what divine strength is contained in the solemn “I Am” of Christ which with the grace of God we promise to comment on this Lent.

1.Imitation of Christ, IV, 11.
2.Letter to the Romans, IV,1.
3.Augustine, Sermo 229 (Denis 6 (PL 38, 1103)
4,Joseph Fadelle, Le prix à payer. Les Editions de l’Oeuvre, Paris 2010. Engl. trans. The Price to Pay, Ignatius Press, 2012.

Elizabeth’s words: “And blessed is she who believed” do not apply only to that particular moment of the Annunciation. Certainly this represents the culminating moment of Mary’s faith in expectation of Christ, but it is also her starting point, from which she begins her entire journey towards God, her entire journey of faith. (RM, 14).

On this journey, Mary reached the “night of faith” (RM, 18). The words of St. Augustine on Mary’s faith are known and often repeated: “By faith she gave birth to what she had conceived by faith” . We must complete the list with what happened after the Annunciation and Christmas. By faith she presented the Child to the Temple, by faith she followed him in his public life, keeping a low profile, by faith she stood under the cross and by faith she awaited his Resurrection.
Let us reflect on some moments of the journey of faith of the Mother of God. What the angel announces to her is something unheard of: it had never happened before and would never happen afterwards. What is her reaction? She was “very upset” at the words (Lk 1:29). The term used in the Gospel indicates a profound trouble, as when life suddenly takes a whole new turn. The angel’s response: “The Holy Spirit will descend on you…” is sufficient for her to pronounce her total unconditional “Yes”: “Here is the servant of the Lord.” She too sets out on her journey like Abraham, without knowing where she was going; she does not know what God has in store for her, but she accepts without hesitation.
Then comes the moment of joyful enthusiasm for Mary: a time in which everything flourishes and is amplified in joy! It is the moment of her meeting with Elisabeth. The praises she receives are very high. Mary does not refuse them, but she sends them back to God with the Magnificat.
It is easy to believe in these privileged moments, but others also come for her, moments of trial and darkness in which she is guided to a more demanding faith. There are apparently conflicting facts that Mary confronts within herself, without understanding. He is “the Son of God Most high” and lies in a manger! She keeps everything in her heart and lets it ferment in expectation. She hears Simeon’s prophecy and soon realizes how true it was! All the ups and downs of her Son’s life, all the misunderstandings and the progressive desertions around him, had profound repercussions in the heart of his mother. She first experienced this in the loss of Jesus in the Temple: “Why were you looking for me? But they did not understand…” (Lk 2: 49).
Finally there is the cross. She is there, helpless in the face of her son’s execution, but she agrees in love. It is a replica of Abraham’s drama, but how immensely more demanding! With Abraham, God stops at the last moment, with her he does not. She accepts that her Son is to be immolated and she hands him over to the Father, with a broken heart, but on her feet, strong in her unshakable faith. It is here that Mary’s voice reaches its highest note. Of Mary we must say, with much greater reason, what, in Romans 4:18, the Apostle says of Abraham: Mary believed, hoping against all hope, and thus she became the mother of many peoples. Our mother in faith!
There was a time in which Mary’s greatness was seen above all in the privileges that people competed to multiply, with the result of distancing rather than associating her with Christ, who had become “similar to us in every way”, nothing excluded (not even temptation!) but only sin. The Council directed us to see her greatness above all in her faith, hope and charity. Lumen gentium says:

She conceived, brought forth and nourished Christ. She presented Him to the Father in the temple, and was united with Him by compassion as He died on the Cross. In this singular way she cooperated by her obedience, faith, hope and burning charity in the work of the Savior in giving back supernatural life to souls. Wherefore she is our mother in the order of grace.

Let us join Mary in believing!

The renewal of Mariology brought about by Vatican II owes much (perhaps the essential part) to St. Augustine. It was his authority that pushed some theologians and then the conciliar assembly to insert the discussion on Mary into the constitution on the Church, the Lumen gentium, rather than making a separate document on her. Starting from the principle that “the whole is superior to a part”, Augustine wrote:

Holy is Mary, blessed is Mary, but the Church is more important than the Virgin Mary. Why? Because Mary is a part of the Church, a holy, excellent member, superior to all the others, but she is nevertheless a member of the whole body. If she is a member of the whole body, undoubtedly more important than a member is the body.

Now it is St. Augustine himself who suggests to us the resolution to take after having briefly retraced the path of faith of the Mother of God. At the end of his discourse on Mary’s faith, he addresses his listeners a vibrant exhortation which is also valid for us: “Mary believed, and in her life what she believed came true. Let us also believe, so that what came true in her can benefit us too!”
The fourth centenary of the birth of Blaise Pascal – which the Holy Father wanted to remind the Church with his Apostolic Letter of June 19 – helps us to give a current content to the exhortation: “Let us join Mary in believing!” One of Pascal’s most famous “Thoughts” is the following:

Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point. The heart has its reasons that reason does not know […] C’est le cœur qui sent Dieu et non la raison. The heart, and not the reason, feels God. This is what faith is: God felt by the heart and not by the reason.

This is a bold statement, but one that has the highest authority behind it, that of Holy Scripture! The apostle Paul knows and often uses the word nous, which corresponds to the modern concept of mind, intelligence or reason; but, speaking of faith, he does not say “mente creditur”, with the mind one believes; he says corde creditur (kardia gar pisteùetai), one believes with the heart (Rom 10, 19).
God “is felt by the heart and not by reason”, as Pascal says, for the simple reason that “God is love” and love is not perceived with the intellect, but with the heart. It is true that God is also truth (“God is light”, writes John in his First Letter) and truth is perceived with the intellect; but while love presupposes knowledge, knowledge does not necessarily presuppose love. You cannot love without knowing, but you can know without loving! A civilization like ours knows this well, proud, as we are, of having invented artificial intelligence, but so lacking of love and compassion.
Unfortunately, it is not Pascal’s “reasons of the heart” that have shaped the secular and theological thinking of the last three centuries, but rather the Cogito ergo sum “I think, therefore I exist” of his compatriot Descartes, even if against the intention of the latter who always remained a pious Christian and a believer. (I remember reading his name in the list of the famous pilgrims to the shrine of Loreto!).
The consequence was that rationalism dominated and dictated the law, before arriving at the current nihilism. All the speeches and debates that take place, even today, focus on “Faith and Reason”, never, as far as I know, on “Faith and the heart”, or “Faith and the will”. Pascal himself, however, in another of his thoughts, says that faith is clear enough for those who want to believe, and dark enough for those who do not want to believe. Believing, in other words, is more a question of will than reason and intellect.
At this point, I would like to mention a second lesson left to us by Pascal and which the Holy Father strongly highlights in his Apostolic Letter: the centrality of Christ for the Christian faith: “We know God – writes the philosopher – only through Jesus Christ. Without this mediator any communication with God is excluded.” And in the so-called Memorial, an echo of a memorable night of light, he exclaims: “God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, not of philosophers and scholars…He is found only along the paths taught by the Gospel”
Pascal is often quoted in connection with “calculated risk,” or the profitable gamble. Having to choose between faith and unbelief, he writes, bet on the existence of God, because “if you win you have won everything, and if you lose you have lost nothing.” But the real risk of faith – he also knows this – is a deeper one: it is that of putting Jesus Christ in brackets. A long-standing risk! Let us remember what happened in Athens, on the occasion of the memorable speech given by the apostle Paul at the Areopagus (Acts 17:16-33).
The Apostle begins by speaking of the unique God who created the universe and of whom “we ourselves are offspring”. Those present catch the allusion to the verse of one of their poets and follow it attentively. But soon Paul gets to the point. He speaks of a man whom God designated as universal judge, proving this by raising him from the dead. The spell is over! “When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some mocked him, others said: ‘We will hear from you about this another time’” (Acts 17, 32).
What bothered them so much? Of course, the idea of the resurrection from the dead, so contrary to what, in the same place, Plato had taught. The body is “the tomb of the soul”: it is therefore not worthwhile carrying it around even after death. But perhaps they were even more disconcerted by the assumption that the fate of the whole humanity depended on a single historical event and on a concrete man. A century later, the Platonic philosopher Celsus threw the reasons for the scandal of the Greeks in the faces of Christians: “Son of God, a man who lived a few years ago? One from yesterday or the day before yesterday? A man born in a village in Judea to a poor spinner?”
The real risk of faith is that of being scandalized by the humanity and humility of Christ. It was the biggest obstacle that Augustine had to overcome to adhere to the Christian faith: “Not being humble, I could not accept the humble Jesus as my God”, he writes in the Confessions. Jesus had spoken of the possibility of being “scandalized” by him, due to his distance from the idea that men had of the Messiah, and he concluded by saying: “Blessed is he who finds no cause for scandal in me” (Mt 11:2-6).
The scandal is today less ostentatious than that of the Areopagites, but no less present among intellectuals. The effect – more harmful than rejection – is silence on him. I have followed many high-level debates on the Internet about the existence of God: almost never in them was the name of Jesus Christ mentioned. As if he didn’t belong in a discussion about God!
This must be our main commitment in the effort for evangelization. The world and its media – I said on another occasion in this same place – do everything they can (and unfortunately they succeed!) to keep the name of Christ separate, or silenced, in all their discussions on the Church. We must do everything we can to keep him obstinately present. Not to hide behind it and remain silent about our failures, but because it is “the light of the nations”, the “name that is above every other name”, “the cornerstone” of the world and of the history.

Back to the heart!

Let us return to Pascal’s words about God who “is felt with the heart”, no longer to make it the object of historical and theological considerations, but of a personal and practical decision. Pascal was a fervent disciple of St. Augustine, to the point of sharing even some of his excesses and errors, such as that, adopted by the Jansenists, of the double divine predestination, to glory or damnation! Pascal’s appeal to the heart is likewise influenced by the doctor of Hippo. Commenting on the verse of Isaiah: “Return, O prevaricators, to the heart (redite, praevaricatores ad cor)” (Is 46, 8, Vulgate), in a speech to the people he said:

Return to your heart!… Return from your wanderings that have led you astray; return to the Lord. He is ready. First return to your heart, you who have become a stranger to yourself, by dint of wandering outside. You do not know yourself, and you seek the one who created you! Do return to the heart, detach yourself from the body… return to the heart: there examine what perhaps you perceive of God, because the image of God is found there. Christ dwells in the interiority of man.

We send probes to the outskirts of the solar system and beyond, but we ignore what happens a few thousand meters below the earth’s crust, hence the difficulty in preventing earthquakes. It is an image of what also happens in the sphere of the spirit and in our own lives. We all live projected outside, to what happens around us, inattentive to what happens inside us. Silence makes us scary.

This year’s Christmas marks the eighth centenary of the first creation of the nativity scene in Greccio. It is the first of the three Franciscan centenaries. It will be followed, in 2024, by that of the Stigmata of the saint and, in 2026, by that of his death. This circumstance can also help us return to the heart. His first biographer, Tommaso of Celano, reports the words with which the Poverello explained his initiative:

I would like, he said, to represent the Child born in Bethlehem, and in some way see with the eyes of my body the hardships in which he found himself for the lack of the necessary things for a newborn baby, how he was placed in a crib and how he lay between the ox and the donkey.

Unfortunately, with the passing of time, the nativity scene has moved away from what it represented for Francis. It has often become a form of art or entertainment of which one admires the external setting, rather than the mystical meaning. Even so, however, it fulfills its function as a sign and it would be foolish to give it up. In our western world, initiatives are multiplying to eliminate every evangelical and religious reference from the Christmas solemnities, reducing it to a pure and simple human and family celebration, with many fairy tales and invented characters in place of the real ones. Some would even like to change the name of the feast.
One of the reasons for this is to foster peaceful coexistence with believers of other religions, in practice with Muslims. In reality, this is the pretext of a certain secularist world that does not want these symbols, not of Muslims. In the Quran there is a Sura dedicated to the birth of Jesus that is worth knowing. It says:

The angels said: “O Mary! Allah gives you good news of a Word from Him, his name will be the Messiah, Jesus, son of Mary; honored in this world and the Hereafter, and he will be one of those nearest ˹to Allah˺. And he will speak to people in ˹his˺ infancy and adulthood and will be one of the righteous.” Mary wondered, “My Lord! How can I have a child when no man has ever touched me?” An angel replied, “So will it be. Allah creates what He wills. When He decrees a matter, He simply tells it, ‘Be!’ And it is!

Once, at the time when, on Saturday evenings, I was explaining the Sunday Gospel on the Italian television RAI “, I had this sura read by an Islamic man who said he was happy to contribute in this way to dispel a misunderstanding that damages them, with the pretext of favoring them. The veneration with which the Quran recalls the birth of Jesus and the place that the Virgin Mary occupies in it received unexpected and sensational recognition a few years ago. The emir of Abu Dhabi decided to dedicate the beautiful mosque of the emirate which previously bore the name of its founder, Sheikh Mohammad Bin Zayed, to Mariam, Umm Eisa, “Mary Mother of Jesus”.
The nativity scene is therefore a useful and beautiful tradition, but we cannot be satisfied with traditional external nativity scenes. We must set up a different presepio, that of the heart. Corde creditur: with the heart you believe. “May Christ dwell in your heart through faith”, says the same Apostle (Eph 3:17).
Mary and her husband Joseph continue to mystically knock at the doors, as they did that night in Bethlehem. In the Revelation it is the Risen One himself who says:”Behold, I stand at the door and knock” (Rev 3:20). Let’s open the door of our heart. Let us make it a cradle for the Baby Jesus, making him feel, in the chill of the world, the warmth of our love and our infinite gratitude!
This is not just a beautiful, poetic fiction; it is the most difficult undertaking in life. In our heart there is room for many guests, but for only one master. Giving birth to Jesus means letting one’s “self” die, or at least renewing the decision to no longer live for ourselves, but for Him who was born, died and rose again for us (see Rom 14:7-9). “Where God is born, man dies,” has been the affirmation of a certain atheistic existentialism. It is true! The one who dies, however, is the old man, corrupt and destined anyway to end in death, while the one who is borne is “the new self, created in God’s way in righteousness and holiness of truth” (Eph 4:24), and destined to live eternally. This is an undertaking that will not end with Christmas, but can begin with it.
May the Mother of God – she who “conceived Christ in her heart before conceiving him in her body” – help us to realize our proposal.
Happy birthday to Jesus – and Merry Christmas to all of you: Holy – and beloved Father – Pope Francis – venerated Fathers, brothers and sisters!

1.Augustine, Sermons, 215: “quem credendo peperit, credendo concepit.”
2.Augustine, Sermon 72,7 (ed, in Miscellanea Agostiniana, I, Roma 1930, p.163).
3.Id., Sermon, 215,4.
4.Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 277-278, ed. Brunschvicg.
5.Cf. Ib., 430, ed. Br.
6.Ib., 221, Br.
7.Cf. Origen, Contra Celsum, I, 26.28; VI, 10.
8.Confessions, VII, 18,24.
9.On the Gospel of John, 18,10.
10.Thomas of Celano, Vita Prima, 84-86.
11.Quran, Sura III, 45-47.

John the Baptist, preacher of conversion

In the Gospels, the Forerunner appears to us in two different roles: that of a preacher of conversion and that of a prophet. We dedicate the first part of the reflection to the moralist and the second to the prophet.
Some verses from the Gospel of Luke are sufficient to give us an idea of the Baptist’s preaching:
He said to the crowds who came out to be baptized by him, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? Produce good fruits as evidence of your repentance…The crowds asked him, “What then should we do?” He said to them in reply, “Whoever has two tunics should share with the person who has none. And whoever has food should do likewise.” Even tax collectors came to be baptized and they said to him, “Teacher, what should we do?” He answered them, “Stop collecting more than what is prescribed.” Soldiers also asked him, “And what is it that we should do?” He told them, “Do not practice extortion, do not falsely accuse anyone, and be satisfied with your wages.”(Lk 3:7-14)
The Gospel allows us to see what distinguishes, on this point, the preaching of the Baptist from that of Jesus. The leap in quality is expressed in the clearest way by Jesus himself: “The Law and the Prophets up to John: from then onwards the kingdom of God is announced and everyone strives to enter it.” (Lk 16:16)
We must avoid simplistic contrasts between Law and Gospel. Immediately after the statement just quoted, Jesus (or maybe the evangelist) adds: “It is easier for heaven and earth to pass away than for the smallest part of a letter of the law to become invalid.” (Lk 16: 17). The Gospel does not abolish the law, that is, concretely, the commandments of God; but it inaugurates a new and different relationship with them.
What is new is the order between the commandment and the gift, that is, between the law and grace. At the basis of the Baptist’s preaching is the statement: “Repent and thus the kingdom of God will come to you!” At the basis of Jesus’ preaching is the statement: “Repent because the kingdom of God has come to you!” (Let us remember the word of Jesus just quoted: “The Law and the Prophets until John: from then on the kingdom of God is announced and everyone strives to enter it”).
It is not just a chronological difference, as between a before and an after; it is also a qualitative difference. It means that it is not the observance of the commandments that allows the kingdom of God to come; but it is the coming of the kingdom of God that allows the observance of the commandments. People did not suddenly change and become better, so that the Kingdom could come to them. No, they are the same as always, but it is God who, in the fullness of time, sent his Son, thus giving them the possibility of changing and living a new life. “For the law was given through Moses, but the grace comes from Jesus Christ”, says John the Evangelist (Jn 1:17). Loving God with all your heart is “the first and greatest commandment”; but the order of the commandments is not the first order, or the first level: above it there is the order of the gift: “We love because he loved us first” (1 Jn 4:19).
It is interesting to see how this newness of Christ is reflected in the different attitude of the Baptist and Jesus towards the so-called “sinners”. John, we have seen, attacks sinners who come to him with fiery words. It is Jesus himself who points out the difference between himself and the Forerunner on this subject: “For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they said, ‘He is possessed by a demon’. The Son of Man came eating and drinking and they said, ‘Look, he is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.’” (Lk 11:18-19). “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?”, asked the Pharisees to the disciples of Jesus (Mt 9:11).
Jesus does not wait for sinners to change their lives before he can welcome them; but he welcomes them and this leads sinners to change their lives. All four Gospels – Synoptic and John – are unanimous on this. Jesus does not wait for the Samaritan woman to put her private life in order before spending time with her and even asking her to give him something to drink. But in doing so he changed the heart of that woman who became an evangelizer among her people. The same thing happens with Zacchaeus, with Matthew the publican, the adulteress and the anonymous woman who kisses his feet in Simon’s house.
We cannot draw an absolute norm from these examples. Jesus was Jesus and he read hearts; we are not Jesus; the two ways, moreover, do not contradict each other. The Church cannot ignore, however, the style of Jesus or place it on the same level as that of the Forerunner. Jesus disapproves of sin infinitely more than the most rigid moralists could do, but he proposed a new remedy in the Gospel: not distancing, but acceptance. Changing one’s life is not the condition for approaching Jesus in the Gospel; however, it must be the result (or at least the purpose) after approaching him. God’s mercy, in fact, is without conditions, but it is not without consequences!
On this point, Holy Mother Church has much to learn from today’s mothers and fathers. We all know the tragedies that tear many parents apart today: children who, despite their good example of Christian life and their good advice, take a path opposite to theirs, destroying themselves with drugs, sex abuse, early choices that turn out to be wrong and often tragic…But do parents close the door in their faces and chase them out of the house? They can’t help but respect their choice, as God respects it, and continue to love them. This dramatic situation of society is reflected in that of the Church. We are called to choose between the model of John the Baptist and the model of Jesus, between giving preeminence to the law, or giving it to grace and mercy.
There is one point on which there is no need to choice, because John and Jesus are in perfect agreement. We too should raise our voices on it. It is what John expresses with the words: “Whoever has two tunics should give one to him who has none, and whoever has something to eat should do the same” (Lk 3:11) and that Jesus inculcates with the parable of the rich man, and with the description of the final judgment in Matthew 25.

John the Baptist, “more than a prophet”

Now let’s move on to the second role, or title, of John the Baptist. He is not just a moralist and a preacher of penance; he is also and above all a prophet: “You, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High” (Lk 1:75). Jesus defines him as “more than a prophet” (Lk 7:26).
In what sense, we might ask, is John the Baptist a prophet? Where does the prophecy lie in his case? The prophets announced a future salvation. But John the Baptist does not announce future salvation; he points to someone who is present. In what sense then can he be called a prophet? Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel helped the people to overcome the barrier of time; John the Baptist helps the people to overcome the even thicker barrier of contrary appearances. How can the long-awaited Messiah, the one announced by the prophets, promised in the Psalms, be that man with such ordinary and modest appearances and origins?
It is easy to believe in something grandiose, divine, when it appears in an indefinite future – “in those days”, “in the last days”… -, in a cosmic setting, with the heavens dripping with sweetness and the earth opening up to make the Savior germinate. More difficult is when you have to say, “Now! It’s here! It’s this!” The man is immediately tempted to say: “Is that all?” ”Can anything good come from Nazareth?”, they said.
It is the scandal of God’s humility who reveals himself “under contrary appearances”, to confuse men’s pride and “will to power”. Believing that the man they saw shortly before eating, sleeping, perhaps even yawning upon waking up, is the Messiah, the one waited by everyone; believe that the time has reached its fullness: this required greater prophetic courage than that of Isaiah. This is a superhuman task and we understand the greatness of the precursor and why he is defined as “more than a prophet”.
All four Gospels highlight the dual role of John the Baptist, that of moralist and that of prophet. But while the Synoptics insist more on the first, the Fourth Gospel insists more on the second. John the Baptist is the man of the “Ecce!”, of the Behold!: “Behold the man of whom I spoke…Behold the Lamb of God!” (Jn 1:15.29). What a shiver must have run through the bodies of those who, with these or other similar words, first received the revelation. It was like a short circuit: past and future, expectation and fulfillment touched each other.
What does John the Baptist teach us as a prophet? Is his prophecy still alive or did it end that day? I believe that he left us his prophetic task. Saying: “There is one among you whom you do not know!” (Jn 1:26), he inaugurated the new Christian prophecy, which does not consist in announcing a future salvation, but in revealing the hidden presence of Christ in the world, in tearing the veils from people’s eyes, as if shouting, with the words of Isaiah: “God is doing something new! Do you not perceive it?” (see Is 43:19).
Jesus said, “I am with you always until the end of the world.” He is among us; he is in the world and the world even today, after two thousand years, does not recognize him. There is a saying of Jesus that has always worried believers: “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” (Lk 18:8). But Jesus does not speak here of his coming at the end of the world. In the so-called eschatological discourses, two perspectives are often intertwined: that of the final coming of Christ and that of his coming as resurrected and glorified by the Father, which Paul defines as his coming “with power according to the Spirit of holiness” (Rom 1, 4), in contrast to the previous coming “according to the flesh”. It is in reference to this coming according to the Spirit that Jesus can say: “This generation will not pass away until all this happens” (Mt 24:34).
That disturbing phrase of Jesus therefore does not question our posterity, those who will find themselves living at the moment of his parousia; it questions our ancestors and it questions our contemporaries, including us. Despite his resurrection and the wonders that accompanied the beginning of the Church, did Jesus find faith among his people? Despite two thousand years of his presence in the world and all the confirmations of history, does he still find faith on earth, especially among the so-called “intellectuals”? The prophetic task of the Church will be the same as that of John the Baptist, until the end of the world: to shake each generation from its terrible distraction and blindness that prevents it from recognizing and seeing the light of the world.
At the time of John Baptist the scandal derived from the physical body of Jesus; from his flesh so similar to ours, except in sin. Even today it is his body, his flesh that scandalizes, his mystical body, the Church, so similar to the rest of humanity, not even sin excluded. Just as John the Baptist made his contemporaries recognize Christ under the humility of the flesh, so it is necessary today to make him recognized in the poverty of the Church – and in the poverty of our own lives.

An evangelization “new in fervor”

Saint John Paul II characterized the new evangelization as an evangelization – I quote – “new in fervor, new in methods and new in expressions”. John the Baptist is our teacher above all in the first of these three things, fervor. He is not such a great theologian; he has a very rudimentary Christology. He does not yet know the highest titles of Jesus, such as Son of God, Word, or Son of man.
He uses very simple images. “I am not worthy – he says – to untie the ties of his sandals …“ But, despite the poverty of his theology, how he manages to make us feel the greatness and uniqueness of Christ! The world and humanity appear, from his words, all contained as if inside a winnowing winch, or a sieve, which he, the Messiah, holds and shakes in his hands. In front of him it is decided who stands and who falls, who is good wheat and who is chaff that the wind scatters. Following the example of St. John the Baptist everyone can be an evangelizer!
Commenting on the words of John Paul II that I mentioned, someone pointed out that the new evangelization can and must be new “in fervor, in method and in expression”, but not in the contents which remain those always deriving from revelation. In other words: that there can and must be a new evangelization, but not a new Gospel.
All this is true. There cannot be truly and totally new content. There may, however, be new contents, in the sense that they were not highlighted enough in the past and had remained in the shadows or little valorized. Saint Gregory the Great said: “Scriptura cum legentibus crescit” (Moralia in Job, 20, 1, 1), the Scripture grows with those who read it. And in another passage, he explains why. “In fact – he says – one understands [the Scriptures] all the more deeply the deeper the attention he pays to them” (Hom in Ez. I, 7, 8). This growth is achieved first of all on a personal level in growth in holiness; but it is also realized on a universal level, as the Church advances in history.
What sometimes makes it so difficult to accept the “growth” of which Gregory the Great speaks is the lack of attention given to the history of the development of Christian doctrine from its origins to today, or a very superficial knowledge of it. This history demonstrates, in fact, that this growth has always been there, as Cardinal John Newman demonstrated in his famous essay.
Revelation – Scripture and Tradition together – grows according to the questions and provocations that are posed to it throughout history. Jesus promised the apostles that the Paraclete would guide them “into the whole truth” (Jn 16, 13), but he did not specify in how long time: whether in one or two generations, or – as everything seems to indicate – for the whole time that the Church is a pilgrim on earth.
The preaching of John the Baptist offers us the opportunity for an important observation precisely regarding this “growth” of the word of God that the Holy Spirit operates in history. The liturgical and theological tradition has collected, above all, his cry of the Baptist: “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” The Liturgy proclaims it at every Mass before communion, after the people have sung three times: “Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, have mercy on us”.
In reality, however, this is only half of his prophecy about Christ. He adds immediately, almost in one breath and in all four Gospels, that Jesus Christ is the one “ who baptizes with the Holy Spirit!” (Jn 1:33; Mt 3.11). Christian salvation is not, therefore, just something negative, “taking away sin”. It is above all something positive: it is a “giving”, an instilling new life, the life of the Spirit. It’s a rebirth.
The remission of sin appears to be the way and the condition for the gift of the Spirit which is the ultimate purpose, the supreme gift. The third chapter of the Letter to the Romans on the justification of the wicked must never be separated from the eighth chapter on the gift of the Spirit, with that liberating message that should resonate more often in our preaching: “Now there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus has freed you from the law of sin and death.” (Rom 8: 1-2).
Of course, this positive aspect has never been forgotten. But perhaps not enough emphasis has always been placed on it. We have run the risk, especially in the West, of seeing Christianity, in a “negative” way, as the solution to the problem of original sin; as something, therefore, gloomy. This explains, at least in part, its rejection by large sectors of culture, such as those represented, in philosophy, by Nietzsche and, in literature, by the Norwegian playwright Ibsen. The current greater attention given to the action of the Holy Spirit and his charisms in all Christian Churches is a concrete example of Scripture “growing with those who read it”.
The saints love to continue, from heaven, the mission they carried out while alive on earth. Saint Teresa of the Child Jesus – whose 150th anniversary of her birth is this year – put this as a kind of condition to go to heaven. Saint John the Baptist also loves to be the precursor of Christ, he loves to prepare the paths for him. Let us lend him our voice!
Contemplating the icon of the Forerunner in the Deesis, with his hands extended towards Christ and a pleading gaze, the Orthodox Church addresses a prayer to him that we can make our own:
The hand that touched the head of the Lord and with which you pointed out to us the Savior, now extend it, O Baptist, towards him in our favor, by virtue of that assurance which you largely enjoy, since, according to his own testimony, you were the greatest of all the prophets; the eyes that saw the Holy Spirit descending in the form of a dove, turn them to him, O Baptist, so that he may show us his grace. Amen.

The Advocate, the holy Spirit that the Father will send in my name — he will teach you everything and remind you of all that [I] told you (Jn 14:26).

When the Advocate comes whom I will send you from the Father, the Spirit of truth that proceeds from the Father, he will testify to me. And you also will testify, because you have been with me from the beginning (Jn 15:26-27).

It is better for you that I go. For if I do not go, the Advocate will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you (Jn 16:7).
I have much more to tell you, but you cannot bear it now. But when he comes, the Spirit of truth, he will guide you to all truth. He will not speak on his own, but he will speak what he hears and will declare to you the things that are coming. He will glorify me because he will take from what is mine and declare it to you (Jn 16:12-14).
But what, or rather, who is the Holy Spirit Jesus promises? Is it he, or another? If it is himself, why does he say in the third person, “when the Paraclete will come…”; if it is someone else, why does he say in the first person, “I will come to you?” We touch upon the mystery of the relationship between the Risen One and his Spirit. It is a relationship so close and mysterious that St. Paul sometimes seems to simply identify them. He writes, “The Lord is the Spirit,” but then he quickly adds, “and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (2 Cor 3:17). If it is the Spirit of the Lord, it cannot be, purely and simply, the Lord.
The answer of Scripture is that the Holy Spirit, with the redemption, has become “the Spirit of Christ;” it is the way in which the Risen One – having been “constituted Son of God with power according to the Spirit of sanctification, by virtue of the resurrection from the dead” (Rom 1:4) – now works in the Church and in the world. This is why he can say to the disciples, “It is good that I go away,” and adds, “but I will not leave you orphans.”
We must get rid of a vision of the Church that has become dominant in the consciousness of many believers. I call it a deistic or Cartesian image, because of the affinity it has with the Cartesian deistic vision. How was the relationship between God and the world conceived in this vision? More or less like this: God first created the world and then withdrew, letting it develop according to the laws that he had given it – like a clock that had been given enough wind to run by itself indefinitely. Any new intervention by God would disturb this order, which is why miracles are considered inadmissible. God, in creating the world, would be acting like someone who flips a light balloon and pushes it into the air, while he remains on the ground.
What does this vision mean when applied to the Church? It means that Christ founded the Church, endowed it with all the hierarchical and sacramental structures it needed to function, and then left it, retiring to his heaven at the moment of the Ascension. Like someone pushing a small boat into the sea and then moving away from the shore.
But it is not so! Jesus has boarded the boat and is inside it. His last words in Matthew must be taken seriously, “Behold, I am with you always, to the close of the age” (Mt 28:20). With each new storm, including the present ones, he repeats what he said to the apostles in the episode of the calmed storm, “Why are you afraid, people of little faith?” (Mt 8:26). Am I not here with you? Can I sink? Can he who created the sea sink into the sea?
I noted with joy that, under the name of the pope, in the Annuario Pontificio, there is only the title “Bishop of Rome;” all other titles – Vicar of Jesus Christ, Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, Primate of Italy, etc. – are listed as “historic titles” on the next page. It seems right to me, especially with regard to “Vicar of Jesus Christ”. Vicar is one who takes the place of the boss in his absence, but Jesus Christ never absented himself and will never be absent from his Church. With his death and resurrection, he became “the head of the body which is the Church” (Col 1:18) and will continue to be such until the end of the world, the true and only Lord of the Church.
His presence is not, so to speak moral and intentional, it is not a lordship by proxy. When we cannot be present in person at some event, we usually say, “I will be present spiritually,” which is not of much consolation and help to those who have invited us. When we say of Jesus that he is “spiritually” present, this spiritual presence is not a less strong form than the physical one, but infinitely more real and effective. It is the presence of the Risen One who acts in the power of the Spirit, in every time and place, and who acts within us.
If in the current situation of the growing energy crisis, the existence of a new, inexhaustible source of energy were to be discovered; if we finally discovered how to use solar energy at will and without negative effects, what a relief it would be for all of humanity! Well, the Church has, in her field, a similar inexhaustible source of energy – the “power from above” which is the Holy Spirit. Jesus could say of him, “Until now you have asked for nothing in my name. Ask and you will receive, so that your joy may be complete” (Jn 16:24).
There is a moment in the history of salvation that closely recalls the words of Jesus at the Last Supper. It is the oracle of the Prophet Haggai. Let us listen to it:
On the twenty-first day of the seventh month, the word of the LORD came through Haggai the prophet: “Speak to the governor of Judah, Zerubbabel, son of Shealtiel, and to the high priest Joshua, son of Jehozadak, and to the remnant of the people: Who is left among you who saw this house in its former glory? And how do you see it now? Does it not seem like nothing in your eyes? Now be strong, Zerubbabel—oracle of the LORD—be strong, Joshua, son of Jehozadak, high priest. Be strong, all you people of the land—oracle of the LORD— and work! For I am with you—oracle of the LORD of hosts… My spirit remains in your midst; do not fear!” (Hag 2:1-5).

It is one of the very few texts of the Old Testament that can be dated with great accuracy –October 17, 520 B.C. Does it not seem to us that Haggai’s words describe the current situation of the Catholic Church and in many respects that of all Christianity? Those of us who are old enough remember with a certain nostalgia the time immediately after the end of the Second World War. Churches filled up on Sundays; weddings and baptisms took place in the parishes; seminaries and religious novitiates abounded in vocations… “But now in what conditions do we see it?,” could we say with Haggai. It is not worth spending time repeating the list of present evils, of what, to some, appear only as ruins, no different from the ruins of ancient Rome that we have all around this city.
Not everything that once glittered and we now regret was gold. If it had all been pure gold, if those full seminaries had forged holy pastors, and the traditional formation imparted to them solid and true, we wouldn’t have to mourn so many scandals today… But this is not what we need to talk about here, and I’m certainly not the most qualified person to do so. What I am anxious to retain is the exhortation that the prophet addressed to the people of Israel back then. He did not exhort them to feel sorry for themselves, to resign themselves, and be prepared for the worst. No. He said, like Jesus, “Take courage and work because I am with you – oracle of the Lord –; my Spirit will be with you!”
But be careful! Again, this is not a vague and empty, “Take courage.” The prophet had previously stated what “the job” was that they would have to do. And since it concerns us closely, let us also listen to the previous oracle of Haggai to the people and their leaders:
Thus says the LORD of hosts: This people has said: “Now is not the time to rebuild the house of the LORD.” Then the word of the LORD came through Haggai the prophet: “Is it time for you to dwell in your paneled houses while this house lies in ruins? Now thus says the LORD of hosts: Reflect on your experience! You have sown much, but have brought in little; you have eaten, but have not been satisfied. You have drunk, but have not become intoxicated; you have clothed yourselves, but have not been warmed; And the hired worker labors for a bag full of holes… Go up into the hill country; bring timber, and build the house that I may be pleased with it, and that I may be glorified, says the LORD (Hag 1:2-8).

Once pronounced, the word of God becomes active and alive again every time it is proclaimed. It is not a simple biblical quotation. We are now “this people” to whom the word of God is addressed. What are for us today the “well-paneled houses” in which we are tempted to remain tranquil? I see three concentric houses, one inside the other, from which we have to exit to climb the mountain and rebuild the house of God.

The first house, well-paneled, cared for and furnished, is my “I” – my comfort, my glory, my position in society or in the Church. It’s the hardest wall to break down. It is so easy to mistake my honor for the honor of God and the Church, attachment to my ideas for attachment to pure and simple truth. The one speaking does not think he is an exception. We stay inside this shell of ours like the silkworm in its case: all around it is silk, but if the silkworm doesn’t break the shell, it will remain a caterpillar and will never become a free floating butterfly.

But let’s leave this topic aside, having so many opportunities to hear about it. The well-paneled second home from which to go out in order to work on the “house of the Lord” is my parish, my religious order, ecclesial movement or association, my local Church, my diocese… We must not be mistaken. Woe to us if we did not have love and attachment to these particular realities in which the Lord has placed us, and for which we are perhaps responsible. Evil is in making them absolute, considering nothing outside of it, not being interested in anything else, criticizing and despising those who don’t share our reality. In short, losing sight of the catholicity of the Church, forgetting what the Holy Father often says, that “the whole is greater than the part.” We are one body, the body of Christ, and, as Paul says, in the body “if one member suffers the whole body suffers” (1 Cor 12:26). The synod should also serve this: to make us aware and sharers in the problems and joys of the entire Catholic Church.

But let’s get to the well-paneled third house. Getting out of it is made particularly difficult by the fact that for centuries we have been taught that just looking outside of it would be a sin and a betrayal. I was recently reading, on the occasion of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, the testimony of a Catholic woman from a mixed-religion country. Her parish priest used to teach the congregation that even just physically entering a Protestant church was a mortal sin. And I suppose the same was said, on the other side of the fence, about entering a Catholic Church.

I speak, of course, of the well-paneled house which is the particular Christian denomination to which we belong. I do so in the still-fresh memory of the extraordinary and prophetic event of the ecumenical meeting in South Sudan last February. We are all convinced that part of the weakness of our evangelization and action in the world is due to the division and mutual struggle between Christians. What God says in Haggai is still occurring:

You expected much, but it came to little; and what you brought home, I blew away. Why is this?—oracle of the LORD of hosts— Because my house is the one which lies in ruins, while each of you runs to your own house (Hag 1:9-1).

Jesus said to Peter, “On this rock, I will build my Church.” He didn’t say, “I will build my Churches.” There must be a sense in which what Jesus calls “my Church” embraces all believers in him and all the baptized. The Apostle Paul has a formula that could accomplish this task of embracing all who believe in Christ. At the beginning of his First Letter to the Corinthians, he extends his greeting to “all those everywhere who call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, their Lord and ours” (1 Cor 1:2).

Of course, we cannot be satisfied with this very vast but all too vague unity. And this justifies the commitment and discussion, even doctrinal, between the Churches. But neither can we despise and disregard this basic unity that consists in invoking the same Lord Jesus Christ. Whoever believes in the Son of God also believes in the Father and the Holy Spirit. What has been repeated on several occasions is very true: “what unites us is more important than what divides us.”

There are instances where we cannot fail to disapprove of the use made of the name of Jesus and the way in which the Gospel is proclaimed. In such cases, what St. Paul wrote about some who, in his time, proclaimed the Gospel “in a spirit of rivalry and with unrighteous intentions” can help us in overcoming the refusal, “But what does that matter?” He wrote to the Philippians, “Provided that in any way, for convenience or for sincerity, Christ is proclaimed, I rejoice” (Phil 1:16-18). Not to mention that Christians of other denominations also find things in us Catholics that they cannot approve of.

Haggai’s oracle about the new, rebuilt temple ends with a radiant promise: “The future glory of this house will be greater than it was before, says the Lord of hosts; in this place, I will put peace. Oracle of the Lord of hosts (Hag 2:9). We dare not say that this prophecy will also come true for us and that the house of God which is the Church of the future will be more glorious than that of the past which we now regret; however, we can hope for it and ask God for it in a spirit of humility and repentance.

We witness some encouraging signs in this regard, one of the most evident being precisely the search for unity among Christians. In an interview with a Catholic journalist on his return journey from South Sudan, Archbishop Justin Welby said, “When the Churches work together, –which in the past had literally been enemies, attacking each other, and burning each other’s priests, and had condemned each other in the most forceful of terms –, when that is the case, there is something spiritual that happens. There is a liberation of the Spirit of God, and this gives me great hope.”

The prophecy of Haggai that I have commented on, Venerable Fathers, brothers and sisters, is linked to a personal memory and I apologize if I dare to recall it again here after some of you may have already heard it from me. I do so in the certainty that the prophetic word unleashes its charge of trust and hope every time it is proclaimed and listened to with faith.

The day that my Superior General allowed me to leave my teaching position at the Catholic University of Milan, to devote myself full-time to preaching, there was precisely Haggai’s prophecy in the Liturgy of the Hours. After reciting the Office, I came here to St. Peter’s. I wanted to ask the Apostle to bless my new ministry. At a certain point, while I was in the square, that word of God came forcefully back to my mind. I turned towards the pope’s window in the Apostolic Palace and began to proclaim aloud: “Take courage, John Paul II, take courage, cardinals, bishops, and all the people of the Church, and work because I am with you, says the Lord.” It was easy to do because it was raining and there was no one around.

A few months later, however, in 1980, I was appointed Preacher of the Pontifical Household and found myself in the presence of the pope to begin my first Lent. That word echoed inside me again, not as a quote and a memory, but as a living word for that moment. I shared what I had done that day in St. Peter’s Square. Then I turned to the pope, who at that time was following the sermon from a side chapel, and forcefully repeated Haggai’s words: “Take courage, John Paul II, take courage you cardinals, bishops, and people of God, and get to work because I am with you, says the Lord. My Spirit will be with you.” And from the reaction, it seemed to me that the words gave what they promised: that is, courage, (even if John Paul II was the last person in the world who needed to be exhorted to have courage!).

Today I dare to proclaim that word again, knowing that it is not just a quotation, but of an ever-living word that always does what it promises. Courage, therefore, Pope Francis! Courage, fellow cardinals, bishops, priests, and faithful of the Catholic Church, and work, because I am with you, says the Lord. My Spirit will be with you!”

1.Augustine, Confessions, VII, 10: “contremui amore et orrore”.
2.Ib. XI, 9: “et inhorresco et inardesco”.
3.Max Horkheimer

For your consolation and mine, Holy Father, Venerable Fathers, brothers and sisters, this meditation will be entirely and exclusively centered on God. The discourse on God, that is, theology, cannot not remain extraneous to the reality of the Synod, just as it can’t remain extraneous to any other moment of the life of the Church. Without theology, faith would easily become dead repetition and would lack the main tool for its “inculturation.”
To fulfill this task, theology itself, however, needs a profound renewal. What God’s people need is a theology imbued with life, which does not always speak of God “in the third person,” with categories often borrowed from the philosophical system of the moment, incomprehensible outside the small circle of “insiders.” It is written that “the Word was made flesh,” but in theology, often the Word was only made idea! Karl Barth hoped for the advent of a theology “capable of being preached,” but this hope seems far from being fulfilled as yet. St. Paul wrote:
For the Spirit scrutinizes everything, even the depths of God…No one knows what pertains to God except the Spirit of God. We have not received the spirit of the world but the Spirit that is from God, so that we may understand the things freely given us by God (1 Cor 2: 10-12).
But where can we now find a theology that relies on the Holy Spirit to know “the depths of God” rather than on categories of human wisdom? For this, it is necessary to resort to so-called “optional” disciplines: to “Spiritual theology,” or to “Pastoral theology” if one wants a theology capable of being preached. Henri de Lubac wrote: “The ministry of preaching is not the vulgarization of a doctrinal teaching of a more abstract form, which would be prior and superior to it. It is, on the contrary, doctrinal teaching itself, in its highest form. This was true of the first Christian preaching, that of the apostles, and it is equally true of the preaching of those who succeeded them in the Church: the Fathers, the Doctors, and our pastors at the present time.”

I am convinced that there is no content of the faith, however high, that cannot be made comprehensible to every intelligence open to the truth. One thing we can learn from the Church Fathers is that you can be profound without being obscure. St. Gregory the Great says that Holy Scripture is “simple and profound, like a river in which, so to speak, lambs can walk and elephants can swim.” Our theology should be inspired by this model. Everyone should be able to find in it bread for their teeth: the simple, their nourishment, and the learned, their pasture. Not to mention that often it is revealed to the “little ones” what remains hidden “from the wise and the learned.”
But I apologize for breaking my initial promise. It is not a discourse on the renewal of theology that I intend to develop here. I wouldn’t have the qualifications to do it. Rather, I would like to show how theology, understood in the sense just outlined, can contribute to present the Gospel message in a significant way to today’s humanity and to give new life to our faith and our prayer.
The most beautiful news that the Church has the task of proclaiming to the world, the one that every human heart expects to hear, is: “God loves you!” This certainty must eradicate and take the place of the one we have always carried within us: “God is judging you!” The truth that “God is love” (1 Jn 4:8) must accompany, like a bass note, every Christian proclamation, even when the practical demands of this love must be recalled, as the Gospel does.
When we invoke the Holy Spirit, including the present occasion of the Synod, we think first of all of the Holy Spirit as a light that enlightens us in each situation and suggests the right solutions. We think less of the Holy Spirit as love. Instead, this is the first and most essential operation of the Spirit that the Church needs. Only charity builds up; knowledge – even theological and ecclesiastical knowledge – often only inflates and divides. If we ask ourselves why we are so eager to know (and today, so excited at the prospect of artificial intelligence!) and so little concerned about loving, the answer is simple: knowledge translates into power, love into service!
The same Henri de Lubac wrote: “The world must know: the revelation of God as Love upsets everything it had conceived of the divinity.” To this day, we have not yet finished (and never will) drawing all its consequences from this evangelical revolution about God. In this meditation, I would like to show how, starting from the revelation of God as love, the main mysteries of our faith are illuminated with new light: the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the Passion of Christ, and it becomes less difficult to make people understand them. When Saint Paul defines Christ’s ministers as “stewards of the mysteries of God” (1 Cor 4:1), he means these mysteries of faith, he is not referring to some rites or even primarily to the sacraments.

Why the Trinity

Let’s start with the mystery of the Trinity. Why do we Christians believe that God is one and trine? On several occasions, I have preached the word of God to Christians who live in countries with a Muslim majority, in which however there is a relative tolerance and a possibility of dialogue, as in the United Arab Emirates. Those Christians, mostly immigrants and employed as laborers, have sometimes asked me to help them answer a question they are often asked in the workplace: “Why do you Christians say you are monotheists if you do not believe in one and only God?”
I repeat here the answer I suggested to them because it’s the same answer we should give to ourselves and to those who are struggling with the same problem. We Christians believe in a triune God because we believe that God is love. All love is love of someone or something; there is no “empty” love, without an object, just as there is no knowledge that is not knowledge of someone or something. Now, whom does God love, to be called love? Humankind? The universe? If so, then he has only been love for some billions of years, that is, since the physical universe and humanity came into being. Before that, whom did God love to be called love, since God cannot change and begin to be what he was not before? The Greek thinkers, conceiving God above all as Intelligence (Nous), could answer: God thought of himself; he was “pure thinking.” But this is no longer possible when it is said that God is love, because “pure love of oneself” would only be selfishness and narcissism.
And here is the answer of revelation, defined at Nicaea in 325. God has always been love – ab aeterno – because even before there was an object outside himself to love, he had in himself the Word, the “only-begotten Son” whom he loved with infinite love, that is “in the Holy Spirit.”
All this does not explain how unity can be trinity at the same time, a mystery unknowable to us because it occurs only in God. However, it helps us to understand why, in God, unity must also be communion and plurality. God is love, therefore he is Trinity! A God who was pure knowledge or pure law, or absolute power, would not need to be triune. This would actually complicate things. No “triumvirate” and no “diarchy” has ever lasted long in history!

Christians too, therefore believe in the unity of God and are monotheists; a unity, however, not mathematical and numerical, but of love and communion. If there is something that the experience of the proclamation shows is still capable of helping people today, if not to explain, at least to get an idea of the Trinity, this, I repeat, is precisely what hinges on love. God is a “pure act” and this act is an act of love involving, simultaneously and ab aeterno, a lover, a loved one and love itself.
The mystery of mysteries is not, I am convinced, the Trinity; it is to understand what love really is! Since love is the very essence of God, we will not be given to fully know what it is, not even in eternal life. Something better than knowing it, however, shall be given to us, that is, possessing it and being satiated with it eternally. You cannot embrace the ocean, but you can enter into it!

Why the Incarnation

Let’s move on to the other great mystery to be believed and proclaimed to the world: the Incarnation of the Word. I beg your pardon if in this part I perhaps ask for an effort of attention greater than what is lawfully asked of listeners to a sermon, but I believe that the effort is worth making at least once in life.
Let’s start with the famous question of St. Anselm (1033-1109): “Why did God become man?” – Cur Deus homo? His answer is because only one who was both man and God could redeem us from sin. As a man, in fact, he could represent all of humanity, and as God, what he did had infinite value, proportionate to the debt that man had contracted with God by sinning.
St. Anselm’s answer is valid, but it is not the only one possible, nor is it entirely satisfactory. In the Creed we profess that the Son of God became flesh “for us men and for our salvation,” but our salvation is not limited to the remission of sins alone, much less of a particular sin, the original one. There is therefore room for a deepening of faith.
This is what Blessed Duns Scotus (1265-1308) tried to do. God, he says, became man because this was the original divine plan, prior to the fall itself, namely that the world – created “through Christ and for him” (Col 1:16) – should find in him, “in the fullness of time,” his crowning and his recapitulation (Eph 1:10). “First of all,” Scotus writes, “God loves himself;” then he “wants to be loved by someone who loves him in the highest possible degree outside of himself;” therefore he “foresees the union with the nature that had to love him in the highest degree.” This perfect lover could not be any creature, being finite, but only the eternal Word, who, therefore, would become incarnate “even if no one had sinned.” Adam’s sin determined the modality of the Incarnation (that is, atonement through passion and death), not the fact itself.
Unfortunately, at the beginning of everything there is still, for Scotus, a God to be loved, not a God who loves. It is a remnant of the philosophical vision of God as an “immovable mover” who can be loved, but cannot love. “God,” wrote Aristotle, “moves the world by being loved,” that is, as an object of love, not as someone who loves. In line with the Western vision of the Trinity, the divine nature, not the person of the Father, is here the starting point of the discourse on God. And nature, unlike the person, is not a subject capable of loving! In this, our Orthodox brothers, heirs of the Greek Fathers, have a better vision than we Latins.
On this precise point, Scripture calls us to take a step forward, even with respect to Scotus, always aware, however, that our affirmations about God are nothing but fleeting finger marks on the surface of the ocean. God the Father determines the Incarnation of the Word not because he wants to have someone outside himself who loves him in a way worthy of him, but because he wants to have someone outside himself to love in a way worthy of himself! Not to receive love, but to pour it out. Presenting Jesus to the world, in Baptism and in the Transfiguration, the heavenly Father says: “This is my beloved Son” (Mk 1:11; 9:7); he does not say “my loving Son.”
Only the Father in the Trinity (and in the whole universe!), does not need to be loved to exist; he only needs to love. The Son exists thanks to the Father; the Father exists thanks to no one. This is what guarantees the role of the Father as the unique source and origin of the Trinity while assuring the equality in nature of the three divine persons. At the root of everything, there is the dazzling intuition of Augustine and the school born from him which define the Father as the lover, the Son as the beloved, and the Holy Spirit as the love uniting them. On this point, we Latins, too, have something precious and essential to offer for an ecumenical synthesis. A reconciliation between the two theologies no longer seems so difficult and remote and it would be a decisive step forward in the unity among the two Churches.

Why the Passion

We come to the third great mystery: the passion and death of Christ which we are preparing to celebrate at Easter. Let us see how, starting from the revelation of God as love, this mystery too is illuminated by a new light. “By his wounds you have been healed”– with these words, spoken of the Servant of Yahweh (Is 53:5-6), the faith of the Church has expressed the saving meaning of Christ’s death (1 Pt 2:24). But can wounds, cross, and pain – negative facts and, as such, only deprivation of good – produce such a positive reality which is the salvation of all mankind? The truth is that we have not been saved by Christ’s suffering, but by his love! More precisely, by the love that is expressed in the sacrifice of oneself. From a crucified love!
To Abelard who, already in his time, found the idea of a God “pleased” in the death of his Son to be repugnant, St. Bernard replied: “It was not his death that pleased him, but his will to die spontaneously for us.”
Christ’s pain retains all its value and the Church will never cease meditating on it: not, however, as a cause, in itself, of salvation, but as a sign and testimony of love: “God demonstrates his love towards us in the fact that, while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom 5:8).
This takes away from the passion of Christ a connotation that has always left me perplexed and unsatisfied: the idea, that is, of a price and a ransom paid to God (or, worse still, to the devil!), or of a sacrifice with which to appease divine anger. In reality, it is rather God who made the great sacrifice of giving us his Son – of not “sparing him,” just as Abraham made the sacrifice of not sparing his son Isaac (Gen 22:16; Rom 8:32). God is more the subject than the beneficiary of the sacrifice of the cross!

A love worthy of God

Now we have to see what the truth that we have contemplated in the mysteries – the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the passion of Christ – changes in our lives. And here awaits us the “good news” that is never missing when we try to deepen the treasures of the Christian faith. The good news, thanks to our incorporation into Christ, is that we too can love God with a love worthy of him! Paul’s affirmation: “God’s love has been poured into our hearts” (Rom 5:5), cannot be fully understood except in the light of the words Jesus says to the Father: “I in them and you in me…that the love with which you loved me may be in them and I in them” (Jn 17:23.26).
The love that has been poured into us is the same with which the Father has always loved the Son, not a different love! It is an overflow of divine love from the Trinity to us. God communicates to the soul, writes St. John of the Cross, “the same love that he communicates to the Son, even if this does not happen by nature, as in the case of the Son, but by union.” The consequence is that we can love the Father with the love with which the Son loves him and we can love Jesus with the love with which the Father loves him. And all this thanks to the Holy Spirit who is that very love.
What, then, do we give to God of our own when we say to him, “I love you!” Nothing but the love we receive from him! So absolutely nothing on our part? Is our love for God nothing more than a “bouncing” of his own love towards him, like the echo that sends sound back to his source? Not in this case! The echo returns to God from the cavern of our hearts, but with a novelty that is everything for God: the scent of our freedom and our filial gratitude! All this is accomplished, in an exemplary way, in the Eucharist. In it we offer to the Father, as “our sacrifice,” what the Father has first given us, that is, his Son Jesus.
We can say to God the Father in our prayer: “Father, I love you with the love with which your Son Jesus loves you!” And we can say to Jesus: “Jesus, I love you with the love with which your heavenly Father loves you!” And know with certainty that all this is not a pious figment of our imagination!
Every time, in prayer, I try to do this myself, I am reminded of the episode of Jacob who presents himself to his father Isaac to receive the blessing, pretending to be his elder brother (Gen 27:1-23). And I try to imagine what God the Father might be saying to himself at that moment: “The voice is not really that of my firstborn Son; but the hands, the feet, and the whole body are the same that my Son took on earth and brought up here to heaven.” And I’m sure that he blesses me, just as Isaac blessed Jacob! And he blesses all of you, Venerable Fathers, brothers and sisters. It is the splendor of our Christian faith. We hope to be able to pass on some fragments of it to the men and women of our time who thirst for love but ignore its source.

1.H. de Lubac, Exégèse médièvale, I, 2, Parigi 1959, p. 670.
2.Gregory the Great, Moralia in Job, Epist. Missoria, 4 (PL 75, 515).
3.Henri de Lubac, Histoire et Esprit, Aubier, Paris 1950, cap. V.
4.Aristotle, Metaphysics, XII,7 1072b.
5.Duns Scotus, Opus Parisiense, III, d. 7, q. 4 (Opera omnia, XXIII, Parigi 1894, p. 303).
6.Augustine, De Trinitate, VIII, 9,14; IX, 2,2; XV,17,31; Richard of St. Victor, De Trin. III,2.18; Bonaventure, I Sent. d. 13, q.1.
7.Bernard of Clairvaux, Against the errors of Abelardi, VIII, 21-22: “Non mors, sed voluntas placuit sponte morientis”.
8.John of the Cross, Spiritual canticle A, str. 38, 4.