Homily of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI Palm Sunday, (17 April 2011, Saint Peter’s
Square)
Dear Brothers and Sisters, Dear young people!
It is
a moving experience each year on Palm Sunday as we go up the mountain with Jesus,
towards the Temple, accompanying him on his ascent. On this day, throughout the world
and across the centuries, young people and people of every age acclaim him, crying
out: “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!”
But
what are we really doing when we join this procession as part of the throng which
went up with Jesus to Jerusalem and hailed him as King of Israel? Is this anything
more than a ritual, a quaint custom? Does it have anything to do with the reality
of our life and our world? To answer this, we must first be clear about what Jesus
himself wished to do and actually did. After Peter’s confession of faith in Caesarea
Philippi, in the northernmost part of the Holy Land, Jesus set out as a pilgrim towards
Jerusalem for the feast of Passover. He was journeying towards the Temple in the
Holy City, towards that place which for Israel ensured in a particular way God’s closeness
to his people. He was making his way towards the common feast of Passover, the memorial
of Israel’s liberation from Egypt and the sign of its hope of definitive liberation.
He knew that what awaited him was a new Passover and that he himself would take the
place of the sacrificial lambs by offering himself on the cross. He knew that in
the mysterious gifts of bread and wine he would give himself for ever to his own,
and that he would open to them the door to a new path of liberation, to fellowship
with the living God. He was making his way to the heights of the Cross, to the moment
of self-giving love. The ultimate goal of his pilgrimage was the heights of God himself;
to those heights he wanted to lift every human being.
Our procession today
is meant, then, to be an image of something deeper, to reflect the fact that, together
with Jesus, we are setting out on pilgrimage along the high road that leads to the
living God. This is the ascent that matters. This is the journey which Jesus invites
us to make. But how can we keep pace with this ascent? Isn’t it beyond our ability?
Certainly, it is beyond our own possibilities. From the beginning men and women have
been filled – and this is as true today as ever – with a desire to “be like God”,
to attain the heights of God by their own powers. All the inventions of the human
spirit are ultimately an effort to gain wings so as to rise to the heights of Being
and to become independent, completely free, as God is free. Mankind has managed to
accomplish so many things: we can fly! We can see, hear and speak to one another
from the farthest ends of the earth. And yet the force of gravity which draws us
down is powerful. With the increase of our abilities there has been an increase not
only of good. Our possibilities for evil have increased and appear like menacing
storms above history. Our limitations have also remained: we need but think of the
disasters which have caused so much suffering for humanity in recent months.
The
Fathers of the Church maintained that human beings stand at the point of intersection
between two gravitational fields. First, there is the force of gravity which pulls
us down – towards selfishness, falsehood and evil; the gravity which diminishes us
and distances us from the heights of God. On the other hand there is the gravitational
force of God’s love: the fact that we are loved by God and respond in love attracts
us upwards. Man finds himself betwixt this twofold gravitational force; everything
depends on our escaping the gravitational field of evil and becoming free to be attracted
completely by the gravitational force of God, which makes us authentic, elevates us
and grants us true freedom.
Following the Liturgy of the Word, at the beginning
of the Eucharistic Prayer where the Lord comes into our midst, the Church invites
us to lift up our hearts: “Sursum corda!” In the language of the Bible and the thinking
of the Fathers, the heart is the centre of man, where understanding, will and feeling,
body and soul, all come together. The centre where spirit becomes body and body becomes
spirit, where will, feeling and understanding become one in the knowledge and love
of God. This is the “heart” which must be lifted up. But to repeat: of ourselves,
we are too weak to lift up our hearts to the heights of God. We cannot do it. The
very pride of thinking that we are able to do it on our own drags us down and estranges
us from God. God himself must draw us up, and this is what Christ began to do on
the cross. He descended to the depths of our human existence in order to draw us
up to himself, to the living God. He humbled himself, as today’s second reading says.
Only in this way could our pride be vanquished: God’s humility is the extreme form
of his love, and this humble love draws us upwards.
Psalm 24, which the Church
proposes as the “song of ascent” to accompany our procession in today’s liturgy, indicates
some concrete elements which are part of our ascent and without which we cannot be
lifted upwards: clean hands, a pure heart, the rejection of falsehood, the quest for
God’s face. The great achievements of technology are liberating and contribute to
the progress of mankind only if they are joined to these attitudes – if our hands
become clean and our hearts pure, if we seek truth, if we seek God and let ourselves
be touched and challenged by his love. All these means of “ascent” are effective
only if we humbly acknowledge that we need to be lifted up; if we abandon the pride
of wanting to become God. We need God: he draws us upwards; letting ourselves be
upheld by his hands – by faith, in other words – sets us aright and gives us the inner
strength that raises us on high. We need the humility of a faith which seeks the
face of God and trusts in the truth of his love.
The question of how man can
attain the heights, becoming completely himself and completely like God, has always
engaged mankind. It was passionately disputed by the Platonic philosophers of the
third and fourth centuries. For them, the central issue was finding the means of
purification which could free man from the heavy load weighing him down and thus enable
him to ascend to the heights of his true being, to the heights of divinity. Saint
Augustine, in his search for the right path, long sought guidance from those philosophies.
But in the end he had to acknowledge that their answers were insufficient, their methods
would not truly lead him to God. To those philosophers he said: recognize that human
power and all these purifications are not enough to bring man in truth to the heights
of the divine, to his own heights. And he added that he should have despaired of
himself and human existence had he not found the One who accomplishes what we of ourselves
cannot accomplish; the One who raises us up to the heights of God in spite of our
wretchedness: Jesus Christ who from God came down to us and, in his crucified love,
takes us by the hand and lifts us on high.
We are on pilgrimage with the Lord
to the heights. We are striving for pure hearts and clean hands, we are seeking truth,
we are seeking the face of God. Let us show the Lord that we desire to be righteous,
and let us ask him: Draw us upwards! Make us pure! Grant that the words which we
sang in the processional psalm may also hold true for us; grant that we may be part
of the generation which seeks God, “which seeks your face, O God of Jacob” (cf. Ps
24:6). Amen.