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GENERAL AUDIENCE
Sept. 5, 2012
'Prayer must begin with praise
of God for his gift of Christ'
Pope Benedict XVI held his weekly General Audience at the Aula Paolo VI in the Vatican today, during which he continued his reflections on Christian prayer.
The Pope flew by helicopter from Castel Gandolfo for the GA for the first time this summer. The Pope's catechesis was focused on the theme of prayer at the start of the Book of Revelation - also known as the Apocalypse. Here is how he synthesized the lesson in English:
Today we consider the theme of prayer as found at the start of the Book of Revelation, also known as the Apocalypse. In some ways, it is a difficult book, but it contains many riches. Even the opening verses of the Book contain a great deal: they tell us that prayer means, above all, listening to the God who speaks to us.
Today, amid the din of so many useless words, many people have lost the habit of listening, even to God’s word. The opening lines of the Apocalypse teach us that prayer is not just more words, asking God to grant our various needs, but rather it must begin as praise to God for his love, and for his gift of Jesus Christ, who has brought us strength, hope and salvation.
We are to welcome Jesus into our lives, to proclaim our "Yes!" to Christ and to nourish and deepen our Christian living. Constant prayer will reveal to us the meaning of God’s presence in our lives and in history.
Prayer with others, liturgical prayer in particular, will deepen our awareness of the crucified and risen Jesus in our midst. Thus, the more we know, love and follow Christ, the more we will want to meet him in prayer, for he is the peace, hope and strength of our lives.
He went on to greet English-speaking pilgrims:
I am pleased to welcome all the English-speaking pilgrims and visitors present today, including those from England, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, and the United States. I am especially pleased to welcome the group of Missionary Sisters Servants of the Holy Spirit as well as the young men and women of the Focolare Movement who have been participating in this year’s Genfest in Budapest.
Dear young people, you have taken to heart Christ’s call to promote unity in the human family by courageously building bridges. I therefore encourage you: be strong in your Catholic faith; and let the simple joy, the pure love, and the profound peace that come from the encounter with Jesus Christ make you radiant witnesses of the Good News before the young people of your own lands. God bless all of you abundantly!
In August, Pope Benedict held his General Audiences at Castel Gandolfo. The return to the Vatican today comes just over a week before the Pope’s scheduled departure for Lebanon, from September 14th to 16th.
Here is a full translation of the catechesis:
Dear brothers and sisters,
Today, after the interruption of the summer holiday, we resume the audiences at the Vatican, continuing in the 'school of prayer' that I have been living with you in these Wednesday catecheses.
I wish to speak today about prayer in the Book of the Apocalypse which, as you know, is the last book of the Old Testament. It is a difficult book, but it contains great wealth.
It brings us in contact with the living and palpitating prayer of the Christian community assembled "on the day of the Lord" (Ap 1,10); in fact, this is the basic feature on which the text develops.
A reader presents to the assembly a message entrusted by the Lord to the evangelist John. The reader and the assembly constitute, so to speak, the two protagonists in the development of the book. It is a festive address directed to them from the beginning: "Blessed is the one who reads aloud and blessed are those who listen to this prophetic message" (1,3).
From the constant dialog between them comes forth a symphony of prayer which develops with a great variety of forms to the conclusion of the book. Listening to the reader who presents the message, listening and observing the assembly which reacts to it, their prayer tends to become ours.
The first part of the Apocalypse (1,3-3,22) presents three successive phases in the attitude of the praying assembly. The first (1,4-8) is a dialog which develops - the only case in the New Testament - between the assembly that has just gathered and the reader who addresses them with a benedictory greeting: "Grace to you and peace" (1,4).
The reader proceeds, underlining the provenance of this greeting: It comes from the Trinity, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, who are involved together in carrying forward the creative and salvific project for mankind.
The assembly listens, and when they hear Jesus Christ mentioned, they react with what is almost a jolt of joy, and they answer with enthusiasm, raising the following prayer of praise: "To him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood, who has made us into a kingdom, priests for his God and Father, to him be glory and power forever and ever. Amen." (1,5b-6),
The assembly, wrapped in Christ's love, feels freed from the bonds of sin and proclaims itself the 'kingdom' of Christ which belongs totally to him. They acknowledge the great mission that has been entrusted to them in Baptism to bring the presence of God to the world.
They conclude their hymn of praise by looking directly to Jesus once more, and with growing enthusiasm, acknowledge that he has 'the glory and the power' to save mankind.
The final Amen concludes the hymn of praise to Christ. The first four verses contain a great wealth of indications for us; they tell us that our prayer must be, above all, listening to God who speaks to us.
Submerged in words like these, we realize we have not been accustomed to hear them, and above all, to place ourselves in an interior and exterior disposition of silence in order to be attentive to what God wants to tell us.
These verses also teach us that our prayer, often only of request, must instead be, above all, praise of God for his love, for his gift of Jesus Christ who has brought us strength, hope and salvation.
A new intervention by the reader then reminds the assembly, which is gripped by their love for Christ, of the commitment to grasp his presence in their own lives. He says: "Behold, he is coming amid the clouds, and every eye will see him, even those who pierced him. All the peoples of the earth will lament him" (1,7a).
After ascending to heaven in a 'cloud', symbol of transcendence (cfr Acts 1,9),, Jesus Christ returns as he had ascended to heaven (cfr Acts 1,11b). At that time, all peoples will acknowledge him and, as John exhorts in the fourth Gospel, "they will look upon him whom they have pierced" (19,37).
They will think about their own sins, the cause of his crucifixion, and like those who had been direct witnesses of it on Calvary, they will be 'beating their breasts' (Lk 23,48), asking forgiveness, so they can follow him in life and prepare for full communion with him after his final return.
The assembly reflects on this message, and says, "Yes, Amen" (Ap 1,7b). With their Yes, they are expressing their full acceptance of what has been communicated to them and ask that this may indeed become reality. It is the prayer of an assembly which meditates on the love of God manifested supremely on the Cross and which asks to live as befits disciples of Christ.
And God's responseis, “'I am the Alpha and the Omega', says the Lord God,'“the one who is and who was and who is to come, the almighty' (1,8). God, who reveals himself as the beginning and end of history, accepts and takes to heart the assembly's request. He was, is and will be present and active with his love in human affairs, in the present, in the future, as in the past, until man reaches the final goal. This is the promise of God.
And here we find another important element: constant prayer awakens in us a sense of the presence of the Lord in our life. His is a presence that sustains us, guides us, and gives us great hope even in the midst of the darkness of some human events.
Moreover, every prayer, even in the most radical solitude, is never an isolation, never sterile, but it is the vital lymph that nourishes an ever more committed and consistent Christian life.
The second phase of the assembly's prayer (1,9-22) further deepens the relationship with Jesus Christ: the Lord shows himself, he speaks, he acts, and the community, ever more closer to him, listens, reacts and welcomes him.
In the message presented by the reader, St. John recounts his own personal experience of encountering Christ: he finds himself on the island of Patmos "because I proclaimed God’s word and gave testimony to Jesus" (1,9) "on the Lord’s day", Sunday, on which the Resurrection is celebrated.
St. John is 'caught up in spirit' (1,10a). The Holy Spirit pervades and renews him, expanding his capacity to welcome Jesus, who asks him to write down his messages,
The prayer of the assembly that is listening gradually assumes a contemplative attitude, to the rhythm of the verbs 'see' and 'look': thus, it contemplates what the reader is proposing, interiorizing it and making it theirs.
John hears "a voice as loud as a trumpet" (1,10b),: the voice asks him to send a message "to the seven Churches" (1,11) found in Asia Minor, and through them, to all the Churches in all times, united with their Pastors.
The expression 'like a trumpet' taken from the Book of Exodus (cfr 20,18) recalls the divine manifestation to Moses on Mount Sinai and indicates the voice of God who speaks form heaven, from his transcendence.
Here it is attributed to the risen Jesus Christ, who speaks from the glory of the Father, with the voice of God, to the praying assembly. Turning "to see whose voice it was that spoke to me" (1,12), John sees "seven gold lampstands and in the midst of the lampstands one like a son of man" (1,12-13), terms referring to Jesus himself that are particularly familiar to John.
The golden lampstands with the candles lit indicate the Church in every age that is in an attitude of prayer in the Liturgy: the Risen Jesus, the 'Son of man', is in their midst, who, dressed in the robes of the High Priest in the Old Testament, carries out his priestly function of mediator with the Father.
In John's symbolic message, what follows is a luminous manifestation of the Risen Jesus, with the characteristics of Hod himself as they recur in the Old Testament. "The hair of his head was as white as white wool or as snow" (1,14), symbol of the eternity of God (cfr Dt 7,9) and of the resurrection.
A second symbol is that of fire, which in the Old Testament often refers to God to show two of his characteristics. The first is the jealous intensity of his love which animates his covenant with man (cfr Dt 4,24). It is this same burning intensity of love that is seen in the Risen Jesus: "His eyes were like a fiery flame" (Ap 1,14a).
The second is the unstoppable ability to triumph over evil like a 'devouring flame' (Dt 9,3). And so, even 'the feet' of Jesus, on the way to confront and destroy evil, have the incandescence of 'polished brass refined in a furnace' (Ap 1,15).
Jesus's voice, 'like the sound of rushing water' (1,15c), has the impressive rumble "of the glory of the God of Israel'moving towards Jerusalem, as the prophet Ezekiel said (cfr 43,2).
Three other symbolic elements follow which shows what the Risen Jesus is doing for his Church: he holds it firmly in his right hand, he speaks with the penetrating force of a sharp sword, and he shows the splendor of his divinity: "His face shone like the sun at its brightest" (Ap 1,16).
John is so overtaken by this stupendous experience of the Risen One that "he fell down at his feet as though dead".
After this experience of Revelation, the Apostle sees the Lord Jesus before him who speaks to him, reassures him, places one hand on his head, discloses himself as the one who had been crucified and resurrected, and gives him the responsibility of transmitting his message to the Churches (cfr Ap 1,17-18).
So beautiful was this God before him that John faints and falls as though dead! Jesus is the friend of life, and he places his hand on his head. And so he is, even for us. We are friends of Jesus.
The revelation of the Risen God, the Risen Christ, is not tremendous, but his encounter with John is. Even the assembly lives with John this special moment of light before the Lord, but one united with the daily encounter with Jesus, experiencing the richness of contact with the Lord that fills every space of existence.
In the third and last phase of this first part of the Apocalypse (Ap 2-3), the reader proposes to the assembly a sevenfold message in which Jesus speaks in the first person. Addressing the seven Churches of Asia Minor around Ephesus, Jesus enters right away into the situation of each Church, pointing out their lights and shadows, and pressing upon them an urgent appeal: "Repent!" (2,4,16; 3,19c); "Do the works you did at first" (2,5); "Hold fast to what you have" (3,11); "Be earnest, therefore, and repent" (3,19b).
These words of Jesus, heeded with faith, begin to take effect immediately: the Church in prayer, welcoming the Word of the Lord, is transformed. All the Churches should put themselves in the attitude of earnest listening to the Lord, opening up to the Spirit as Jesus asks insistently, repeating this command seven times: “Whoever has ears ought to hear what the Spirit says to the churches” (2,7.11.17.29; 3,6.13.22).
The assembly listens to the message and receives a stimulus for repentance, conversion, perseverance, growing in love, orientation for the journey.
Dear friends, the Apocalypse presents us with a community united in prayer, because it is precisely in prayer that we become increasingly aware of the presence of Jesus with us and in us. The more and the better we pray with constancy, with intensity, the more we assimilate ourselves to him, and he truly enters into our live, and guides it, giving it peace and joy.
And the more we know, love and follow Jesus, the more we feel the need to pause in prayer with him, receiving serenity, hope and strength for our life. Thank you for your attention.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 06/09/2012 11:19] |