BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

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Dear brothers and sisters,

I did not have time to prepare a true homily. i would simply like to invite each of you to a personal meditation by underscoring some passages from today's liturgy that concern the prayerful dialog between us and the Word of God.

The sentence that I wish to propose for common meditation is this great affirmation by St. Peter: "We must obey God rather than men" (Acts 6,29).

St. Peter says this when facing the supreme [Jewish] religious institution, whom normally one had to obey, but God is above this institution, and God had given them [the Apostles] a new order: they should obey God. Obedience to God is freedom. Obedience to God gives them the freedom to oppose an institution.

Here, the exegetes call our attention to the fact that St. Peter's reply to the Sanhedrin is almost identical word for word to Socrates's reply to the judges of the Athens tribunal.

The tribunal had offered him freedom, liberation, provided he would not continue to 'seek God'. But the search for God was for him a superior mandate that came from God himself. A freedom bought by renouncing the journey towards God would no longer be freedom.

Therefore, [Socrates thought] he had to obey not his judges - he should not buy his life by losing himself, but he should obey God. Obedience to God has primacy.

Here, it is important to underscore that the main point is obedience, and that it is obedience which confers freedom. Modernity speaks of the liberation of man, of his full autonomy, and therefore, also his liberation from obedience to God. There should no longer be any such thing as obedience - man is free, he is autonomous, he needs no one.

But this autonomy is a lie: it is an ontological lie because man does not exist by himself and for himself, and it is also a political and practical lie because collaboration, sharing freedom, is necessary.

If God did not exist, if God were not a recourse accessible to man, then what remains as the supreme recourse is merely the consensus of the majority. Consequently, the majority consensus becomes the last word that one must obey.

This consensus - we know from the history of the last century - can also be 'a consensus for evil'.

So we see that so-called autonomy does not really liberate man. Obedience to God is freedom because He is the truth, he is the recourse that is above all human recourses. In the history of man, the words of Peter and Socrates are the true beacons for the liberation of man, for the man who knows how to see God, and in the name of God, can and should obey not men but Him, thus liberating himself from the positivism of human obedience.

Dictatorships have always opposed this obedience to God. Nazi dictatorship, like the Marxist, could not accept a God that would be above ideological power. And the freedom of the martyrs who acknowledge God precisely in their obedience to divine power, is an act of liberation through which Christ's own freedom comes to us.

Today, thank God, we no longer live under dictatorships, but there are subtle forms of dictatorship: a conformism that becomes obligatory - to think like everyone else thinks, act like everyone does - and the subtle aggressions against the Church (and even the less subtle) demonstrate how this conformism can really be a true dictatorship.

Thus, faced with this word obedience that began a new history of freedom in the world, let us pray above all to know God, to know him humbly and truly, to learn true obedience which is the foundation of human freedom.

Let us take a second sentence from the First Reading: St. Peter says that "God exalted Christ at his right hand as leader and savior" (cfr v 31). 'Leader' here is translated from the Greek archegos which implies a much more dynamic vision. Archegos is he who shows the way, who precedes - in a movement, a movement towards the 'on high'.

God had raised Christ to be at his right hand, so, to speak of Christ as the archegos is to say that Christ walks ahead of us, he precedes us and shows the way. To be in communion with Christ is to be on a journey of ascent with Christ. It means following Christ, in this journey upwards, following the archegos, he who has already been here, who precedes us and shows us the way.

Evidently, it is important to mention here where Christ is leading us, where it is we should arrive ourselves: hypsosen - upwards - to ascend to the right hand of the Father.

Following Christ is not simply an imitation of his virtues. It is not merely living in this world like Christ as much as possible, living according to his Word. It is a journey with a destination - the right hand of the Lord.

The journey of Christ ends at the right hand of the Father. The horizon of discipleship to Christ is his entire journey, up to arriving at the right hand of the Father.

We should understand anew that Christianity remains only a 'fragment' if we do not think of the ultimate goal, if we do not follow the archegos to the heights of God, to the glory of the Son who makes us God's children in him.

We should comprehend anew that Christianity reveals its sense fully only in the great perspective of eternal life. We should have the courage, the joy, the great hope that there is eternal life - that it is the true life from which comes the light that illuminates even this world.

If we can say that, even leaving aside eternal life promised by Heaven, it is better to live according to Christian criteria, because to live according to truth and love, even when under persecution, is good in itself and better than everything else. It is precisely this desire to live in truth and love that should open up to everyone the grandeur of God's plan for us, the courage to have here and now the joy of looking forward to eternal life, of the ascent to God following our archegos .

Soter [Greek word for saviour, deliverer] is the Saviour who saves us from ignorance, and seeks the ultimate things. The Savior saves us from being alone, he saves us from the void of a life without eternity, he saves us by giving us love in its fullness. He is the guide - Christ, the archegos, who saves us by giving us light, giving us truth, giving us the love of God.

Then, let us dwell on another verse: Christ the Savior has given Israel repentance and forgiveness of sins (v. 31). In the Greek text, the word is metanoia - that repentance and forgiveness of sins. For me, this is very important: (it says that) repentance is grace.

There is a tendency in exegesis to say that Jesus in Galilee announced unconditional grace, absolutely unconditional, therefore, a grace without repentance, grace as such, without human preconditions. But this is a false interpretation of grace.

Repentance is grace. It is a grace that we can recognize our sins, it is a grace that we acknowledge the need for renewal, for change, for a transformation of our being. Repentance - to be able to do penance - is a gift of grace.

I must say that we Christians have in recent times avoided the word repentance, which appears to us rather harsh. Now, under the attacks by a world that tells us of our sins, we can see that to do penance is a grace. We can see it is necessary to do penance - which is to acknowledge what is wrong in our life, to be open to forgiveness, to prepare for forgiveness, to allow ourselves to be transformed.

The pain of repentance, namely of purification, of transformation - such pain is grace, because it is renewal, the work of divine mercy.

Thus, the two things that St. Peter speaks of - repentance and forgiveness - correspond to the start of Jesus's preaching: "Metanoeite" - Repent! (Mt 1,19). This is the fundamental point: metanoia is not a private matter which would seem to be replaced by grace. Metanoia is the arrival of the grace that can transform us.

Finally, a sentence from the Gospel, where we are told that he who believes will have eternal life (cfr Jn 3,36). In faith, in this 'transforming oneself' that repentance gives us, in this conversion, this new way of living, we arrive at life, true life.

This brings to mind two other texts. In the Priestly Prayer, the Lord says: "Now this is eternal life, that they should know you, and the one whom you sent" (cfr Jn 17,2). To know what is essential, to know the dicisive Person, to know God and he whom he sent, is life, a knowledge of the realities that constitute life.

The other text is the reply of the Lord to the Sadducees regarding resurrection, when from the books of Moses, our Lord proves the fact of the Resurrection, by saying: God is the God of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob (cfr. Mt 22, 31-32; Mk 12, 26-27; Lk 20, 37-38). God is not a God of the dead. If he is the God of these men, then they live.

Whoever is inscribed in God's name participates in the life of God - he lives. To believe is to be inscribed in the name of God. And so we live. Whoever belongs to God is not dead - he belongs to a living God. This is the sense in which we must understand the dynamism of the faith, which is inscribing our name in the name of God, and thus, lets us enter into life.

Let us pray to the Lord so this may truly happen in our lives, that we may know God, that our name may enter into the name of God and that our existence may become true life: eternal life, love and truth.[/QUOTE

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 05/05/2011 21:23]