HOMILY AT VESPERS TODAY, 6/28/08
VIGIL OF THE SOLEMNITY OF SAINTS PETER AND PAUL
FORMAL OPENING OF THE PAULINE YEAR
Here is a translation of the homily delivered by the Holy Father tonight at the Basilica of St. Paul outside the Walls.
Your Holiness and Fraternal Delegations,
Lord Cardinals,
Venerated Brothers in the Episcopate and the Priesthood,
Dear brothers and sisters:
We are gathered at the tomb of St. Paul who was born 2000 years ago in Tarsus of Cilicia, now modern-day Turkey.
Who was this Paul? In the temple of Jerusalem, before an agitated crowd that wanted to kill him, he presented himself with these words: ""I am a Jew, born in Tarsus in Cilicia, but brought up in this city (Jerusalem). At the feet of Gamaliel I was educated strictly in our ancestral law and was zealous for God..." (Acts 22,3).
At the end of his journey, he would say of himself: "...I was appointed... teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth" (1Tm 2,7; cfr 2Tm 1,11). Teacher of the Gentiles, apostle and preacher of Jesus Christ - that is how he characterizes himself in a retrospective look at the course of his life.
But he is not looking only to the past. 'Teacher of the Gentiles' - these words open up to the future, to all peoples and to all generations. Paul is not, for us, a figure of the past whom we remember with veneration. He is also our teacher - apostle and preacher of Jesus Christ, even for us.
We are therefore gathered here not to reflect on a story from a past that has irrevocably gone. Paul speaks to us - today. That is why I proclaimed this special Pauline Year - to listen to him and to learn from him, as our teacher, 'faith and truth', in which are rooted the reasons for unity among the disciples of Christ.
In this context, too, I wished to light, for this bimillennary of the birth of the Apostle, a special Pauline Flame which will remain lit during the whole year in a special brazier mounted in the quadri-portico of the Basilica.
To solemnize this occasion, I have also inaugurated the so-called Pauline Door, through which I entered the Basilica, accompanied by the Patriarch of Constantinople, the Cardinal Arch-Priest of the Basilica and other religious authorities.
It is an intimate joy for me that the opening of the Pauline Year has a special ecumenical character with the presence of numerous delegates and representatives of other churches and ecclesial communities, whom I welcome with an open heart.
I greet in the first place His Holiness Patriarch Bartholomew I and the members of his delegation, as well as the large group of Orthodox lay faithful who have come to Rome from various parts of the world to experience with him and with all of us these moments of prayer and reflection.
I greet the fraternal delegates of the Churches who have a particular bond to the Apostle Paul - Jerusalem, Antioch, Cyprus, Greece - which make up the geographical setting of the Apostle's life before he came to Rome.
I cordially greet our brothers from different churches and ecclesial communities of the East and West, together with all of you who have wanted to take part in this solemn beginning of the year dedicated to the Apostle of the Gentiles.
And we are here to ask ourselves about the great Apostle. We ask ourselves not only 'Who was Paul?' We ask above all "Who is Paul? What does he have to say to me?"
At this time, at the start of the Pauline Year that we are inaugurating, I wish to choose from the rich testimony of the New testament three texts in which we see his interior physiognomy, the specifics of his character.
In the Letter to the Galatians, he has given us a very personal profession of faith , in which he opens his heart to readers of all time and reveals the most intimate marrow of his life.
"I live in the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me" (Gal 2,20). Everything that Paul does comes from this core.
His faith is the experience of being loved by Jesus Christ in a very personal way. It is a consciousness of the fact that Christ faced death not for something anonymous, but out of love for him - of Paul - and that, as the Risen One, he continues to love him; that Christ gave himself for him.
His faith is having been struck by the love of Jesus Christ, a love that stirs him up in his most intimate being and transforms him. His faith is not a theory, an opinion about God and the world. His faith is the impact itself of the love of God on his heart. And so, his very faith is love for Jesus Christ.
Many have presented Paul as a combative person who could wield a sword as well as words. In fact, his path as an apostle never lacked for disputes. He never sought superficial harmony. In the first of his Letters, that which was addressed to the Thessalonians, he says: "We had the courage... to announce the Gospel of God to you in the midst of much struggle....In fact, as you know, we never pronounced words of adulation" (1Ts 2.2.5).
Truth was, for him, too great to consider sacrificing it in order to gain external success. The truth he experienced in his encounter with the Risen Christ earned for him struggle, persecution, suffering.
But what motivated him in his deepest being was being loved by Jesus Christ and the desire to transmit this love to others. Paul was a man capable of love, and all his work and his suffering can be explained on this basis. The founding concepts of his preaching can be understood only on that basis.
Let us take one of his key words: freedom. The experience of being loved all the way by Christ opened his eyes to the truth and the way of human existence - and that experience comprehended everything. Paul was free as a man loved by God, who, because of God, was also able to love together with him. This love was now the 'law' of his life, and as such, was his 'freedom' in life. He spoke and acted in response to the responsibility of that love.
Freedom and responsibility are united here inseparably. Because he has the responsibility of love, he is free. Because he is one who loved, he lives totally in the responsibility of that love, and he does not take freedom as a pretext for arbitrariness and selfishness.
In the same spirit, Augustine formulated the statement he made famous:
Dilige et quod vis fac (Tract. in 1Jo 7,7-8) – love and do what you please.
Whoever loves Christ the way Paul loved him can truly do what he wants, because his love is united to the will of Christ, and therefore, to the will of God: Because his will was anchored in truth and because his will was no longer simply his - no longer the free will of an autonomous I - but integrated in the freedom of God from whom it receives the way to follow.
In the search for the interior physiognomy of St. Paul, I wish, in the second place, to remember the words that the Risen Christ said to him on the road to Damascus.
First the Lord asked him, "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?" To his question, "Who are you, Lord?", the answer was, "I am Jesus whom you persecute" (Acts 9,4f). In persecuting the Church, Paul was persecuting Jesus himself.
"You are persecuting me." Jesus is identifying with the Church as one sole subject. This exclamation by the Risen Lord, which transformed the life of Saul, contains the entire doctrine of the Church as the Body of Christ.
Christ has not retreated to heaven, leaving on earth a legion of followers to carry 'his cause' forward. The Church is not an association to promote a certain cause. It is not about any cause. It is about the person of Jesus Christ, who even as the Risen One remains 'flesh'. He is 'flesh and bone' (Lk 24,39), the Risen One affirms in the Gospel of Luke to the disciples who thought he was a phantasm.
He has a Body. He is personally present in his Church. "Head and Body' form one single subject, Augustine would say.
"Do you not know know that your bodies are members of Christ?", writes Paul to the Corinthians (1Cor 6,15). And he adds: as, in the second Book of Genesis, man and woman become one single flesh, so Christ with his own becomes one single spirit, one single subject in the new world of the resurrection (cfr 1Cor 6,16ff).
In all this, one sees the Eucharistic mystery in which Christ continually gives bis Body and makes of us his Body: "The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ? Because the loaf of bread is one, we, though many, are one body, for we all partake of the one loaf" (1Cor 10,16f).
With these words, not only Paul but the Lord himself addresses us: How could you have lacerated my Body? Before the face of Christ, this word becomes at the same time an urgent request: Let us repair together all divisions, make it reality again: There is one bread because we, though we are many, are just one body.
For Paul, the word on the Church as the Body of Christ is not a metaphor. It goes far beyond being a metaphor.
"Why do you persecute me?" Continually Christ draws us within his Body, he h builds his Body starting from the Eucharistic center, which, for Paul, is the center of the Christian existence - by virtue of which everyone, together and individually, can experience in a very personal way (that) Jesus has loved me and given himself for me.
I wish to conclude with a late word from St. Paul, an exhortation to Timothy from prison in the face of death. "Bear your share of hardship for the Gospel", the apostle tells his disciple (2Tm 1,8). This word, which comes like a testament at the end of the ways the Apostle has gone through, goes back to the very beginning of his mission.
When, after his encounter with the Risen Christ, Paul found himself blind in his habitation in Damascus, Ananias received the order to go to the feared persecutor to lay his hands on him so that he might regain his sight. To Ananias's objection that this Saul was a dangerous persecutor of Christians, came the answer: This man should bring my name before peoples and kings. "I will show him how much he must suffer for my name" (Acts 9,15f).
The responsibility of proclaiming Christ and the call to suffering for Christ come together inseparably. The call to become the teacher of peoples is at the same time and intrinsically a call to suffering in communion with Christ, who has redeemed us through his Passion.
In a world where lies have power, the truth is paid for with suffering. Whoever wants to avoid suffering, to keep it away from himself, also holds life itself and its greatness away - and cannot be a servant of the truth and thus, a servant of the faith.
There is no love without suffering - without the suffering of self-renunciation, of transformation and purification of the I, for true freedom.
Where there is nothing worth suffering for, life itself loses its value. The Eucharist - center of our Christian being - is based on Jesus's sacrifice for us, it is born from the suffering of love, which culminated on the Cross. From this love that was self-giving, we live. It gives us the courage and the strength to suffer with Christ and for him, in this world, knowing that by doing so, our life becomes great and mature and true.
In the light of all the letters of St. Paul, we see how his journey as the teacher of all peoples fulfilled the prophecy made to Ananias when he was called: "I will show him how much he must suffer for my name."
His suffering made him credible as a teacher of truth who did not seek his own interest, his own glory, his personal satisfaction, but committed himself for him who loved us and gave himself for all of us.
At this time, let us thank the Lord because he called Paul and made him the light for the Gentiles and teacher of us all, and let us pray to him: Give us even today witnesses to the Resurrection, struck by your love and able to carry the light of the Gospel in our time.
St. Paul, pray for us! Amen.
GREETING FROM HIS HOLINESS BARTHOLOMEW I
Holiness, Beloved Brother in Christ,
and all the faithful in the Lord,
Inspired by joy full of solemnity, we find ourselves praying the Vespers in this ancient and splendid temple of St. Paul outside the Walls, in the presence of many devout pilgrims from all over the world, for the happy formal inauguration of the Year of St. Paul, Apostle of the Gentiles.
The radical conversion and apostolic kerygma of Saul of Tarsus 'shook' history in the literal sense of the word and shaped the identity of Christianity itself. This great man exercised a profound influence on the classic Fathers of the Church, like St. John Chrysostom in the East, and St. Augustine of Hippo in the West. Even if he had never met Jesus of Nazareth, St. Paul directly received the Gospel "through the revelation of Jesus Christ" (Gal 1,11,12).
This sacred place outside the walls is doubtless more than ever the appropriate place to commemorate and celebrate a man who established the union between the Greek language and the Roman mentality of his time, stripping Christianity once and for all of every mental constraint and forging for always the catholic foundation of the ecumenical Church.
Let us hope that the life and Letters of St. Paul may continue to be for us a source of inspiration "so that all men may have the obedience of faith in Christ" (cfr Rom 16,26-27).
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 29/06/2008 11:02]