The Church of Mercy (7 page)

I would like to speak of three simple attitudes: hopefulness, openness to being surprised by God, and living in joy.

Hopefulness
. The second reading of the Mass presents a dramatic scene: a woman—an image of Mary and the Church—is being pursued by a dragon, the devil, who wants to devour her child. But the scene is not one of death but of life, because God intervenes and saves the child (see Rev. 12:13a, 15–16a). How many difficulties are present in the life of every individual, among our people, in our communities; yet as great as these may seem, God never allows us to be overwhelmed by them. In the face of those moments of discouragement we experience in life, in our efforts to evangelize or to embody our faith as parents within the family, I would like to say forcefully: always know in your heart that God is by your side; he never abandons you! Let us never lose hope! Let us never allow it to die in our hearts! The “dragon,” evil, is present in our history, but it does not have the upper hand. The one with the upper hand is God, and God is our hope! It is true that nowadays, to some extent, everyone, including our young people, feels attracted by the many idols that take the place of God and appear to offer hope: money, success, power, pleasure. Often a growing sense of loneliness and emptiness in the hearts of many people leads them to seek satisfaction in these ephemeral idols. Dear brothers and sisters, let us be lights of hope! Let us maintain a positive outlook on reality. Let us encourage the generosity that is typical of the young and help them to work actively in building a better world. Young people are a powerful engine for the Church and for society. They do not need material things alone; also and above all, they need to have held up to them those nonmaterial values that are the spiritual heart of a people, the memory of a people. In this shrine, which is part of the memory of Brazil, we can almost read those values: spirituality, generosity, solidarity, perseverance, fraternity, joy; they are values whose deepest root is in the Christian faith.

The second attitude:
openness to being surprised by God
. Anyone who is a man or a woman of hope—the great hope that faith gives us—knows that even in the midst of difficulties God acts and surprises us. The history of this shrine is a good example: three fishermen, after a day of catching no fish, found something unexpected in the waters of the Parnaíba River: an image of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception. Whoever would have thought that the site of a fruitless fishing expedition would become the place where all Brazilians can feel that they are children of one Mother? God always surprises us, like the new wine in the Gospel. God always saves the best for us. But he asks us to let ourselves be surprised by his love, to accept his surprises. Let us trust God! [When we are] cut off from him, the wine of joy, the wine of hope, runs out. If we draw near to him, if we stay with him, what seems to be cold water, difficulty, sin, is changed into the new wine of friendship with him.

The third attitude:
living in joy
. Dear friends, if we walk in hope, allowing ourselves to be surprised by the new wine that Jesus offers us, we have joy in our hearts, and we cannot fail to be witnesses of this joy. Christians are joyful; they are never gloomy. God is at our side. We have a Mother who always intercedes for the life of her children, for us, as Queen Esther did in the first reading (see Esther 5:3). Jesus has shown us that the face of God is that of a loving Father. Sin and death have been defeated. Christians cannot be pessimists! They do not look like someone in constant mourning. If we are truly in love with Christ and if we sense how much he loves us, our hearts will “light up” with a joy that spreads to everyone around us.

The One who scrutinizes hearts (see Rom. 8:27) makes himself a beggar of love and questions us on the one truly essential issue, a premise and condition for feeding his sheep, his lambs, his Church. May every ministry be based on this intimacy with the Lord; living from him is the measure of our ecclesial service, which is expressed in the readiness to obey, to humble ourselves, as we heard in the letter to the Philippians, and for the total gift of self (see Phil. 2:6–11).

Moreover, the consequence of loving the Lord is giving everything—truly everything, even our life—for him. This is what must distinguish our pastoral ministry; it is the litmus test that tells us how deeply we have embraced the gift received in responding to Jesus’ call, and how closely bound we are to the individuals and communities that have been entrusted to our care. We are not the expression of a structure or of an organizational need: even with the service of our authority we are called to be a sign of the presence and action of the risen Lord, and thus to build up the community in love.

Not that this should be taken for granted: even the greatest love, in fact, when it is not constantly nourished, weakens and fades away. Not for nothing did the apostle Paul recommend: “take heed to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you guardians, to feed the church of the Lord which he obtained with his own Son’s blood” (see Acts 20:28).

A lack of vigilance—as we know—makes the pastor tepid; it makes him absent-minded, forgetful, and even impatient. It tantalizes him with the prospect of a career, the enticement of money, and with compromises with a mundane spirit; it makes him lazy, turning him into an official, a state functionary concerned with himself, with organization and structures, rather than with the true good of the People of God. Then one runs the risk of denying the Lord, as did the apostle Peter, even if he formally presents him and speaks in his name; one obscures the holiness of the hierarchical Mother Church, making her less fruitful.

Who are we before God? What are our trials? We have so many; we each have our own. What is God saying to us through them? What are we relying on in order to surmount them?

Just as it was for Peter, Jesus’ insistent and heartfelt question can leave us pained and more aware of the weakness of our freedom, threatened as it is by thousands of interior and exterior forms of conditioning that all too often give rise to bewilderment, frustration, and even disbelief.

These are not of course the sentiments and attitudes that the Lord wants to inspire; rather, the enemy, the devil, takes advantage of them to isolate us in bitterness, complaint, and despair.

Jesus, the Good Shepherd, does not humiliate or abandon people to remorse. Through him the tenderness of the Father, who consoles and revitalizes, speaks; it is he who brings us from the disintegration of shame—because shame truly breaks us up—to the fabric of trust. He restores courage, re-entrusts responsibility, and sends us out on mission.

Peter, purified in the crucible of forgiveness, could say humbly, “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you” (John 21:17). I am sure that we can all say this with heartfelt feeling. And Peter, purified, urges us in his first letter to tend “the flock of God . . . not by constraint but willingly, not for shameful gain but eagerly, not as domineering over those in your charge but being examples to the flock” (1 Pet. 5:2–3).

Yes, being pastors means believing every day in the grace and strength that come to us from the Lord despite our weakness, and wholly assuming the responsibility for walking before the flock, relieved of the burdens that obstruct healthy apostolic promptness, hesitant leadership, so as to make our voice recognizable both to those who have embraced the faith and to those who “are not [yet] of this fold” (John 10:16). We are called to make our own the dream of God, whose house knows no exclusion of people or peoples, as Isaiah prophetically foretold (see Isa. 2:2–5).

For this reason, being pastors also means being prepared to walk among and behind the flock; being capable of listening to the silent tale of those who are suffering and of sustaining the steps of those who fear they may not make it; attentive to raising, to reassuring, and to instilling hope. Our faith emerges strengthened from sharing with the lowly. Let us therefore set aside every form of arrogance, to bend down to all whom the Lord has entrusted to our care.

What does being a Christian mean? What does following Jesus on his journey to Calvary on his way to the cross and the resurrection mean? In his earthly mission Jesus walked the roads of the Holy Land; he called twelve simple people to stay with him, to share his journey, and to continue his mission. He chose them from among the people full of faith in God’s promises. He spoke to all without distinction: the great and the lowly, the rich young man and the poor widow, the powerful and the weak; he brought God’s mercy and forgiveness; he healed, he comforted, he understood; he gave hope; he brought to all the presence of God who cares for every man and every woman, just as a good father and a good mother care for each one of their children. God does not wait for us to go to him, but it is he who moves toward us, without calculation, without quantification. That is what God is like. He always takes the first step; he comes toward us. Jesus lived the daily reality of the most ordinary people: he was moved as he faced the crowd that seemed like a flock without a shepherd; he wept before the sorrow that Martha and Mary felt at the death of their brother, Lazarus; he called a publican to be his disciple; he also suffered betrayal by a friend. In him God has given us the certitude that he is with us, that he is among us. “Foxes,” Jesus said, “have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of man has nowhere to lay his head” (Matt. 8:20). Jesus has no house, because his house is the people; it is we who are his dwelling place; his mission is to open God’s doors to all, to be the presence of God’s love. In Holy Week we live the crowning moment of this journey, of this plan of love that runs through the entire history of the relations between God and humanity. Jesus enters Jerusalem to take his last step, with which he sums up the whole of his existence. He gives himself without reserve; he keeps nothing for himself, not even life. At the Last Supper, with his friends, he breaks the bread and passes the cup around “for us.” The Son of God offers himself to us; he puts his body and his blood into our hands, so as to be with us always, to dwell among us. And in the Garden of Olives, and likewise in the trial before Pilate, he puts up no resistance, he gives himself; he is the suffering Servant, foretold by Isaiah, who empties himself, even unto death (see Isa. 53:12).

Jesus does not experience this love that leads to his sacrifice passively or as a fatal destiny. He does not, of course, conceal his deep human distress as he faces a violent death, but with absolute trust he commends himself to the Father. Jesus gave himself up to death voluntarily in order to reciprocate the love of God the Father, in perfect union with his will, to demonstrate his love for us. On the cross Jesus “loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal. 2:20). Each one of us can say, “He loved me and gave himself for me.” Each one can say this “for me.”

What is the meaning of all this for us? It means that this is my, your, and our road too—living Holy Week, following Jesus not only with the emotion of the heart. Living Holy Week, following Jesus, means learning to come out of ourselves in order to go to meet others, to go toward the outskirts of existence, to be the first to take a step toward our brothers and sisters, especially those who are the most distant, those who are forgotten, those who are most in need of understanding, comfort, and help. There is such a great need to bring the living presence of Jesus, merciful and full of love!

Living Holy Week means entering ever more deeply into the logic of God, into the logic of the cross, which is not primarily that of suffering and death, but rather that of love and of the gift of self that brings life. It means entering into the logic of the Gospel. Following and accompanying Christ, staying with him, demands “coming out of ourselves,” requires us to be outgoing; to come out of a dreary way of living faith that has become a habit, out of the temptation to withdraw into our own plans, which end by shutting out God’s creative action. God came out of himself to come among us; he pitched his tent among us to bring to us his mercy that saves and gives hope. Nor must we be satisfied with staying in the pen of the ninety-nine sheep if we want to follow him and to remain with him; we too must “go out” with him to seek the lost sheep, the one that has strayed the furthest. Be sure to remember: [we need to come] out of ourselves, just as God came out of himself in Jesus and Jesus came out of himself for all of us.

Someone might say to me, “But Father, I don’t have time,” “I have so many things to do,” “It’s difficult,” “What can I do with my feebleness and my sins, with so many things?” We are often satisfied with a few prayers, with a distracted and sporadic participation in Sunday Mass, with a few charitable acts; but we do not have the courage “to come out” to bring Christ to others. We are a bit like St. Peter. As soon as Jesus speaks of his Passion, death, and resurrection, of the gift of himself, of love for all, the apostle takes him aside and reproaches him. What Jesus says upsets his plans, seems unacceptable, threatens the security he had built for himself, his idea of the Messiah. And Jesus looks at his disciples and addresses to Peter what may possibly be the harshest words in the Gospels: “Get behind me Satan! For you are not on the side of God, but of human beings” (Mark 8:33). God always thinks with mercy: do not forget this. God always thinks mercifully. He is the merciful Father! God thinks like the father waiting for the son and who goes to meet him when he spots him coming when he is still far off . . . What does this mean? That he went every day to see if his son was coming home: this is our merciful Father. It indicates that he was waiting for him with longing on the terrace of his house. God thinks like the Samaritan who did not pass by the unfortunate man, pitying him or looking at him from the other side of the road, but helped him without asking for anything in return—without asking whether he was a Jew, a pagan, or a Samaritan, whether he was rich or poor: he asked for nothing. He went to help him; God is like this. God thinks like the shepherd who lays down his life in order to defend and save his sheep.

Holy Week is a time of grace, which the Lord gives us to
open the doors
of our heart, of our life, of our parishes—what a pity so many parishes are closed!—of the movements, of the associations; and “to come out” in order to meet others, to make ourselves close, to bring them the light and joy of our faith. To come out always! And to do so with God’s love and tenderness, with respect and with patience, knowing that God takes our hands, our feet, our heart, and guides them and makes all our actions fruitful.