Homily of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI at the Celebration of Vespers (Sunday,
10 September 2006, Munich Cathedral)
Dear First Communicants! Dear
Parents and Teachers!
The reading we have just heard is from the final book
of the New Testament, the Book of Revelation. The seer is helped to lift his eyes
upward, towards heaven, and forward, towards the future. But in doing so, he speaks
to us about earth, about the present, about our lives. In the course of our lives,
all of us are on a journey, we are traveling towards the future. Naturally, we want
to find the right road: to find true life, and not a dead end or a desert. We don=t
want to end up saying: I took the wrong road, my life is a failure, it went wrong.
We want to find joy in life; we want, in the words of Jesus, to have life in abundance.
But
let us listen to the seer of the Book of Revelation. What is he saying? He is talking
about a reconciled world. A world in which people of every nation, race, people
and tongue(7:9) have come together in joy. How can this happen? What road do
we take to get there? First and most important: these people are living with God;
God himself has Asheltered them in his tent (cf. 7:15), as the reading says. What
do we mean by God's tent? Where is it found? How do we get there? The seer
might be alluding to the first chapter of the Gospel according to John, where we read:
The Word became flesh and pitched his tent among us (1:14). God is not far from us,
he is not somewhere out in the universe, somewhere that none of us can go. He has
pitched his tent among us: in Jesus he became one of us, flesh and blood just like
us. This is his tent. And in the Ascension, he did not go somewhere far away from
us. His tent, he himself in his Body, remains among us and is one of us. We can
call him by name and speak at ease with him. He listens to us and, if we are attentive,
we can also hear him speaking back.
Let me repeat: In Jesus, it is God
who camps in our midst. But let me also repeat: Where does this happen? Our
reading gives us two answers to this question. It says that the men and women at
peace have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb
(7:14). To us this sounds very strange. In his cryptic language, the seer is speaking
about Baptism. His words about the blood of the Lamb allude to Jesus's love,
which he continued to show even up to his violent death. This love, both divine and
human, is the bath into which he plunges us at Baptism the bath with which he washes
us, cleansing us so that we can be fit for God and capable of living in his company.
The act of Baptism, however, is just a beginning. By walking with Jesus, in faith
and in our life in union with him, his love touches us, purifies us and enlightens
us. For the ancient world, white was the colour of light. The white robes mean that
in faith we become light, we set aside darkness, falsehood and every sort of evil,
and we become people of light, fit for God. The baptismal gown, like your First Communion
robes, is meant to remind us of this, and to tell us: by living as one with Jesus
and the community of believers, the Church, you have become a person of light, a person
of truth and goodness, a person radiant with goodness, the goodness of God himself.
The
second answer to the question: Where do we find Jesus? is also given by the
seer in cryptic language. He tells us that the Lamb leads the great multitude of
people from every culture and nation to the sources of living water. Without water,
there is no life. People who lived near the desert knew this well, and so springs
of water became for them the symbol par excellence of life. The Lamb, Jesus, leads
men and women to the sources of life. Among these sources of life are the Sacred
Scriptures, in which God speaks to us and teaches us the right way to live. The true
source is Jesus himself, in whom God gives us his very self. He does this above all
in Holy Communion. There we can, as it were, drink directly from the source of life:
he comes to us and makes each of us one with him. We can see how true this is: through
the Eucharist, the sacrament of communion, a community is formed which spills over
all borders and embraces all languages, the universal Church, in which God speaks
to us and lives among us. This is how we should receive Holy Communion: seeing it
as an encounter with Jesus, an encounter with God himself, who leads us to the sources
of true life.
Dear parents! I ask you to help your children to grow in
faith, I ask you to accompany them on their journey towards Holy Communion, on their
journey towards Jesus and with Jesus. Please, go with your children to Church and
take part in the Sunday Eucharistic celebration! You will see that this is not time
lost; rather, it is the very thing that can keep your family truly united and centred.
Sunday becomes more beautiful, the whole week becomes more beautiful, when you go
to Sunday Mass together. And please, pray together at home too: at meals and before
going to bed. Prayer does not only bring us nearer to God but also nearer to one
another. It is a powerful source of peace and joy. Family life becomes more joyful
and expansive whenever God is there and his closeness is experienced in prayer.
Dear
catechists and teachers! I urge you to keep alive in the schools the search for God,
for that God who in Jesus Christ has made himself visible to us. I know that in our
pluralistic world it is no easy thing in schools to bring up the subject of faith.
But it is hardly enough for our children and young people to learn technical knowledge
and skills alone, and not the criteria that give knowledge and skill their direction
and meaning. Encourage your students not only to raise questions about particular
things, but also to ask about the why and the wherefore of life as a whole. Help
them to realize that any answers that do not finally lead to God are insufficient.
Dear
priests and all who assist in parishes! I urge you to do everything possible to make
the parish a spiritual community for people: a great family where we also experience
the even greater family of the universal Church, and learn through the liturgy, catechesis
and all the events of parish life to walk together on the way of true life.
These
three places of education -the family, the school and the parish - go together, and
they help us to find the way that leads to the sources of life, towards life in abundance.
Amen!