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Painting: Testament and Death of Moses (Sistine Chapel)
Artists: Luca Signorelli and Bartolomeo della Gatta 1482
Pope Francis Catechesis on Old Age No. 4
23 March 2022
Deuteronomy chapter 34
Then, leaving the Plains of Moab, Moses went up Mount Nebo, the peak of Pisgah opposite Jericho, and Yahweh showed him the whole country: Gilead as far as Dan, the whole of Naphtali, the country of Ephraim and Manasseh, the whole country of Judah as far as the Western Sea, the Negeb, and the region of the Valley of Jericho, city of palm trees, as far as Zoar.
Yahweh said to him, ‘This is the country which I promised on oath to give to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, saying: I shall give it to your descendants. I have allowed you to see it for yourself, but you will not cross into it.’ There in the country of Moab, Moses, servant of Yahweh, died as Yahweh decreed; they buried him in the valley, in the country of Moab, opposite Beth-Peor; but to this day no one has ever found his grave.
Moses was 120 years old when he died, his eye undimmed, his vigour unimpaired.
The Israelites wept for Moses on the Plains of Moab for thirty days.
The days of weeping for the mourning rites of Moses came to an end.
Joshua son of Nun was filled with the spirit of wisdom, for Moses had laid his hands on him, and him the Israelites obeyed, carrying out the order which Yahweh had given to Moses.
Since then, there has never been such a prophet in Israel as Moses, the man whom Yahweh knew face to face. What signs and wonders Yahweh caused him to perform in Egypt against Pharaoh, all his servants and his whole country! How mighty the hand and great the fear that Moses wielded in the eyes of all Israel!
Catechesis on Old Age : 4. Leave and inheritance: memory and witness
Dear Brothers and Sisters,
In the Bible, the account of the death of the old Moses is preceded by his spiritual testament, called the “Canticle of Moses.” This Canticle is in the first place a beautiful confession of faith, and it says thus: “I want to proclaim the name of the Lord: / magnify our God! / He is the Rock: perfect his works, / justice all his ways; / he is a faithful God without malice, he is just and upright” (Dt 32:3-4). But it is also a memory of the history lived with God, of the adventures of the people who were formed on the basis of faith in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. And so Moses also recalls the bitterness and disappointments of God himself: His faithfulness continually tested by the infidelities of his people. The faithful God and the response of the unfaithful people: as if the people wanted to test God’s faithfulness. And he always remains faithful, close to his people. This is precisely the core of the Canticle of Moses: the fidelity of God that accompanies us throughout our lives. (See footnote below – Canticle of Moses)
When Moses pronounces this confession of faith he is on the threshold of the promised land, and also of his farewell from life. He was one hundred and twenty years old, the story notes, “but his eyes were not extinguished” (Dt 34:7). That ability to see, to really see also to see symbolically, as the elderly have, who know how to see things, the most rooted meaning of things. The vitality of his gaze is a precious gift: it allows him to transmit the legacy of his long experience of life and faith, with the necessary lucidity. Moses sees history and transmits history; the old see history and transmit history.
An old age to which this lucidity is granted is a precious gift for the generation to follow. Personal and direct listening to the story of the lived history of faith, with all its ups and downs, is irreplaceable. Reading it in books, watching it in movies, consulting it on the internet, however useful, will never be the same thing. This transmission – which is the real tradition, the concrete transmission from the old to the young! – this transmission is very lacking today, and and increasingly so, from the new generations. Why? Because this new civilization has the idea that the old are waste material, the old must be discarded. This is a brutality! No, it doesn’t go like that. The direct story, from person to person, has tones and ways of communication that no other means can replace. An old man who has lived a long time and gets the gift of a lucid and passionate testimony of his history, is an irreplaceable blessing. Are we able to recognize and honor this gift of the elderly? Does the transmission of the faith – and of the meaning of life – follow this path of listening to the elderly today? I can give a personal testimony. I learned the hatred and anger at war from my grandfather who had fought at the Piave in 1914: he transmitted this anger to me at war. Because he told me about the sufferings of a war. And this is not learned either in books or in any other way, it is learned in this way, transmitting it from grandparents to grandchildren. And this is irreplaceable. The transmission of life experience from grandparents to grandchildren. Today this is unfortunately not the case and it is thought that grandparents are waste material: no! They are the living memory of a people and young people and children must listen to their grandparents.
In our culture, so “politically correct”, this path appears hindered in many ways: in the family, in society, in the Christian community itself. Some even propose to abolish the teaching of history, as superfluous information on worlds that are no longer current, which takes away resources from the knowledge of the present. As if we were born yesterday!
The transmission of the faith, on the other hand, often lacks the passion proper to a “lived history”. Transmitting the faith is not saying things “blah-blah-blah-blah.” It is the experience of faith. And then it can hardly attract people to choose love forever, fidelity to the word given, perseverance in dedication, compassion for wounded and dejected faces? Of course, the stories of life must be transformed into testimony, and the testimony must be loyal. The ideology that bends history to its own schemes is certainly not loyal. Propaganda adapting history to the promotion of one’s own group is not loyal. It is not fair to make history into a tribunal in which all the past is condemned and all future is discouraged. To be loyal is to tell the story as it is, and only those who have lived it can tell it well. This is why it is very important to listen to the elderly, to listen to the grandparents. Izt is important for children talk to them.
The Gospels themselves honestly tell the blessed story of Jesus without hiding the mistakes, misunderstandings, and even betrayals of the disciples. This is history, it is truth, this is testimony. This is the gift of memory that the “elders” of the Church transmit, from the beginning, passing it “from hand to hand” to the generation that follows. It will do us good to ask ourselves: how much do we value this way of transmitting the faith, in the passing of the baton between the elderly of the community and the young who are open to the future? And here I am reminded of something that I have said so many times, but I would like to repeat it. How is the faith transmitted? “Ah, here is a book, study it“: no. This is not the way to transmit the faith. Faith is transmitted in dialect, that is, in family speech, between grandparents and grandchildren, between parents and grandchildren. Faith is always transmitted in dialect, in that familiar and experiential dialect learned over the years. This is why dialogue in a family is so important, the dialogue of children with grandparents who are those who have the wisdom of faith.
Sometimes, I happen to reflect on this strange anomaly. The catechism of Christian initiation today draws generously on the Word of God and transmits accurate information on dogmas, the morals of the faith and the sacraments. Often lacking, however, is a knowledge of the Church that comes from listening to and witnessing to the real history of the faith and the life of the ecclesial community, from the beginning to the present day. As children we learn the Word of God in the catechism; but as young people the Church is learned in the classrooms and in the global information media.
The narration of the history of faith should be like the Canticle of Moses, like the testimony of the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles. In other words, a story capable of evoking God’s blessings with emotion and our shortcomings with loyalty. It would be nice if there was from the beginning, in the catechetical itineraries, also the habit of listening to the lived experience of the elderly, to the lucid confession of the blessings received from God, which we must keep, and the loyal witness of our lack of fidelity, which we must repair and correct. The elders enter the promised land, which God desires for every generation, when they offer young people the beautiful initiation of their witness and pass on the story of faith, faith in dialect, that familiar dialect, that dialect that passes from the old to the young. Then, guided by the Lord Jesus, old and young enter together into his Kingdom of life and love. But all together. All in the family, with this great treasure that is the faith transmitted in dialect.
Footnote: Canticle of Moses
Deuteronomy chapter 32
(In the hearing of the whole assembly of Israel, Moses then recited the words of this song to the end:)
Listen, heavens, while I speak; hear, earth, the words that I shall say! May my teaching fall like the rain, may my word drop down like the dew, like showers on the grass, like light rain on the turf! For I shall proclaim the name of Yahweh. Oh, tell the greatness of our God! He is the Rock, his work is perfect, for all his ways are equitable. A trustworthy God who does no wrong, he is the Honest, the Upright One! They have acted perversely, those he fathered without blemish, a deceitful and underhand brood. Is this the return you make to Yahweh? O people brainless and unwise! Is this not your father, who gave you being, who made you, by whom you subsist? Think back on the days of old, think over the years, down the ages. Question your father, let him explain to you, your elders, and let them tell you! When the Most High gave the nations each their heritage, when he partitioned out the human race, he assigned the boundaries of nations according to the number of the children of God, but Yahweh’s portion was his people, Jacob was to be the measure of his inheritance. In the desert he finds him, in the howling expanses of the wastelands. He protects him, rears him, guards him as the pupil of his eye. 11 Like an eagle watching its nest, hovering over its young, he spreads out his wings to hold him, he supports him on his pinions. Yahweh alone is his guide; no alien god for him! He gives him the heights of the land to ride, he feeds him on the yield of the mountains, he gives him honey from the rock to taste, and oil from the flinty crag; curds from the cattle, milk from the flock, and the richness of the pasture, rams of Bashan’s breed, and goats, the richness of the wheat kernel; the fermented blood of the grape for drink. Jacob has eaten to his heart’s content, Jeshurun, grown fat, has now lashed out. (You have grown fat, gross, bloated.) He has disowned the God who made him, and dishonoured the Rock, his salvation, whose jealousy they aroused with foreigners — with things detestable they angered him. They sacrificed to demons who are not God, to gods hitherto unknown to them, to newcomers of yesterday whom their ancestors had never respected. (You forget the Rock who fathered you, the God who made you, you no longer remember.) Yahweh saw it and, in anger, he spurned his sons and daughters. ‘I shall hide my face from them,’ he said, ‘and see what will become of them. For they are a deceitful brood, children with no loyalty in them. They have roused me to jealousy with a non-god, they have exasperated me with their idols. In my turn I shall rouse them to jealousy with a non-people, I shall exasperate them with a stupid nation. Yes, a fire has blazed from my anger, it will burn right down to the depths of Sheol; it will devour the earth and all its produce, it will set fire to the footings of the mountains. I shall hurl disasters on them, on them I shall use up all my arrows. They will be weakened by hunger, eaten away by plague and the bitter scourge. Against them I shall send the fang of wild animals and the poison of snakes that glide in the dust. Outside, the sword bereaves, while inside terror will reign. Young man and girl alike will perish, suckling and greybeard both together. I should crush them to dust, I said, I should wipe out all memory of them, did I not fear the boasting of the enemy.’ But do not let their foes be mistaken! Do not let them say, ‘We have got the upper hand and Yahweh plays no part in this.’ What a short-sighted nation this is, how thoroughly imperceptive! Were they wise, they would succeed, they would be able to read their destiny. How else could one man rout a thousand, how could two put ten thousand to flight, were it not that their Rock has sold them, that Yahweh has delivered them up? But their rock is not like our Rock; our enemies cannot pray for us! For their vine springs from the stock of Sodom and from the groves of Gomorrah: their grapes are poisonous grapes, their clusters are bitter; their wine is snakes’ poison, the vipers’ cruel venom. But he, is he not safe with me, sealed inside my treasury? Vengeance is mine, I will pay them back, for the time when they make a false step. For the day of their ruin is close, doom is rushing towards them, for he will see to it that their power fails. that neither serf nor free man remains. (For Yahweh will see his people righted, he will take pity on his servants.) ‘Where are their gods then?’ he will ask, ‘the rock where they sought refuge, who ate the fat of their sacrifices and drank the wine of their libations?’ Let these arise and help you, let these be the shelter above you! See now that I, I am he, and beside me there is no other god. It is I who deal death and life; when I have struck, it is I who heal (no one can rescue anyone from me). Yes, I raise my hand to heaven, and I say, ‘As surely as I live for ever. When I have whetted my flashing sword, I shall enforce justice, I shall return vengeance to my foes, I shall take vengeance on my foes. I shall make my arrows drunk with blood, and my sword will feed on flesh: the blood of the wounded and the prisoners, the dishevelled heads of the enemy!’ Heavens, rejoice with him, let all the children of God pay him homage! Nations, rejoice with his people, let God’s envoys tell of his power! For he will avenge the blood of his servants, he will return vengeance to my foes, he will repay those who hate him and purify his people’s country. Moses came with Joshua son of Nun and recited all the words of this song in the people’s hearing. When Moses had finished reciting these words to all Israel, he said to them, ‘Take all these words to heart; I intend them today to be evidence against you. You must order your children to keep and observe all the words of this Law. You must not think of this as empty words, for the Law is your life, and by its means you will live long in the country which you are crossing the Jordan to possess.’ Yahweh spoke to Moses that same day and said to him, ‘Climb this mountain of the Abarim, Mount Nebo, in the country of Moab, opposite Jericho, and view the Canaan which I am giving to the Israelites as their domain. Die on the mountain you have climbed, and be gathered to your people, as your brother Aaron died on Mount Hor and was gathered to his people. Because, with the other Israelites, you broke faith with me at the Waters of Meribah-Kadesh in the desert of Zin, because you did not make my holiness clear to the Israelites; you may only see the country from outside; you cannot enter it — the country which I am giving to the Israelites.’ This is the blessing that Moses, man of God, pronounced over the Israelites before he died.
