0
0
Illustration – Chrism Blessing on Holy Thursday in Lateran Basilica. P. Villanueva, c. 1900
Pope Francis’ Homily at Chrism Mass
Basilica di San Pietro – Holy Thursday, 14 April 2022
First reading – Isaias 61:1-3s, 6a, 8b-9
The spirit of Lord Yahweh is on me for Yahweh has anointed me. He has sent me to bring the news to the afflicted, to soothe the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to captives, release to those in prison, to proclaim a year of favour from Yahweh and a day of vengeance for our God, to comfort all who mourn, to give them for ashes a garland, for mourning-dress, the oil of gladness, for despondency, but you will be called ‘priests of Yahweh’ and be addressed as ‘ministers of our God’. I shall reward them faithfully and make an everlasting covenant with them. Their race will be famous throughout the nations and their offspring throughout the peoples. All who see them will admit that they are a race whom Yahweh has blessed.
Second Reading – Apocolypse 1:5-8
Grace and peace to youfrom Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the First-born from the dead, the highest of earthly kings. He loves us and has washed away our sins with his blood and made us a Kingdom of Priests to serve his God and Father; to him, then, be glory and power for ever and ever. Amen. Look, he is coming on the clouds; everyone will see him, even those who pierced him, and all the races of the earth will mourn over him. Indeed this shall be so. Amen. ‘I am the Alpha and the Omega,’ says the Lord God, who is, who was, and who is to come, the Almighty.
Holy Thursday Gospel – Luke 4:16-21
He came to Nazara, where he had been brought up, and went into the synagogue on the Sabbath day as he usually did. He stood up to read, and they handed him the scroll of the prophet Isaiah. Unrolling the scroll he found the place where it is written: The spirit of the Lord is on me, for he has anointed me to bring the good news to the afflicted. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives, sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim a year of favour from the Lord. He then rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the assistant and sat down. And all eyes in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to speak to them, ‘This text is being fulfilled today even while you are listening.’
In the reading from the prophet Isaiah, which we have just heard, the Lord makes a hopeful promise that touches us closely: “You shall be called priests of the Lord, / you shall be called ministers of our God. / […] I will give them their wages faithfully, / I will make an everlasting covenant with them” (61:6, 8). To be a priest is, dear brothers, a grace, a very great grace, which is not primarily a grace for us, but for the people; and for our people it is a great gift that the Lord chooses from among his flock, some to look after his sheep exclusively, as fathers and shepherds. It is the Lord himself who pays the priest’s wages: “I will give them their wages faithfully” (Is 61,8). And as we know, He is a good payer although He has His own particularities, such as paying the last first and then the first: it is His style.
The Reading of the Book of Revelation tells us what the Lord’s ‘wages’ are. It is his Love and the unconditional forgiveness of our sins at the price of his blood shed on the Cross: “He who loves us and has delivered us from our sins with his blood, who has made us a kingdom, priests for his God and Father” (Revelations 1:5-6). There is no greater ‘wages’ than friendship with Jesus, do not forget this. There is no greater peace than his forgiveness and we all know this. There is no price more expensive than that of his precious Blood, which we must not allow to be despised by an unworthy conduct.
If we read with our hearts, dear brother priests, these are invitations of the Lord to be faithful to him, to be faithful to his Covenant, to let ourselves be loved, to let ourselves be forgiven; they are invitations not only for ourselves, but also so that we can serve God’s holy faithful people with a clear conscience. People deserve it and they also need this. Luke’s Gospel tells us that, after Jesus had read the passage of the prophet Isaiah before his people and sat down, “the eyes of all were fixed on him” (Luke 4:20). The Book of Revelation also speaks to us today of eyes fixed on Jesus, of the irresistible attraction of the crucified and risen Lord who leads us to adore and recognize: “Look, he is coming on the clouds; everyone will see him, even those who pierced him, and all the races of the earth will mourn over him”. (1:7). The final grace, when the Risen Lord returns, will be that of immediate recognition: we will see him pierced, we will recognize who he is and who we are, sinners; nothing more.
“Fixing our eyes on Jesus” is a grace that, as priests, we must cultivate. At the end of the day it is good to look to the Lord, and for Him to look at our hearts, together with the hearts of the people we have met. It is not a matter of accounting for sins, but of a loving contemplation in which we look at our day with the gaze of Jesus and thus see the graces of the day, the gifts and all that he has done for us, to give thanks. And we also show him our temptations, in order to recognise and reject them . As we see, it is a matter of understanding what is pleasing to the Lord and what He wants from us here and now, in our present history.
And perhaps, if we sustain his gaze full of goodness, there will also be a sign from him that we show him our idols. Those idols that, like Rachel, we have hidden under the folds of our cloak (Gen 31:34-35 – Now Rachel had taken the household idols and put them inside a camel cushion, and was sitting on them. Laban went through everything in the tent but found nothing. Then Rachel said to her father, ‘Do not look angry, my lord, because I cannot rise in your presence, for I am as women are from time to time.’ Laban searched but did not find the idols.). Let the Lord look at our hidden idols – we all have them, everyone! – And this letting the Lord look at these hidden idols makes us strong before them and takes away their power.
The Lord’s gaze makes us see that, in reality, in them we glorify ourselves, because there, in that space that we live as if it were exclusive, the devil intrudes by adding a very evil element: he makes us not only “please” ourselves by giving free rein to one passion or cultivating another, but he also leads us to replace with them, with those hidden idols, the presence of the Divine Persons, the presence of the Father, the Son and the Spirit, who dwell within us. This is something that actually happens. Although one says to himself that he perfectly distinguishes what an idol is and who God is, in practice we are taking away space from the Trinity to give it to the devil, in a kind of indirect adoration: that of those who hide it, but continually listen to his speeches and consume his products, in such a way that in the end there is not even a corner left for God. Because that is how He is, He moves forward slowly. And then another time I talked about the “polite” demons, the ones Jesus says are worse than the one that was cast out. But they are “polite”, they ring the bell, enter and step by step take possession of the house. We must be careful, these are our idols.
It is that idols have something – an element – of their own. When we don’t expose them, when we don’t let Jesus show us that in them we are maliciously looking for ourselves for no reason and that we leave a space for the Evil One to intrude. We must remember that the devil demands that we do his will and that we serve him, but he does not always ask that we serve him and adore him continuously, no, he knows how to move, he is a great diplomat. Receiving worship from time to time is enough for him to prove that he is our true lord and that he even feels like God in our lives and in our hearts.
Having said this, I would like to share with you, in this Chrism Mass, three areas of hidden idolatry in which the Evil One uses his idols to deprive us of our vocation as pastors and, little by little, to separate us from the beneficial and loving presence of Jesus, of the Spirit and of the Father.
A first space of hidden idolatry opens up where there is spiritual worldliness, which is “a proposal of life, it is a culture, a culture of the ephemeral, a culture of appearance, a culture of make-up”. Its criterion is triumphalism, a triumphalism without a Cross. And Jesus prays that the Father will defend us from this culture of worldliness. This temptation of a glory without the Cross goes against the person of the Lord, it goes against Jesus who humbles himself in the Incarnation and who, as a sign of contradiction, is the only medicine against every idol. To be poor with Christ poor and “because Christ chose poverty” is the logic of Love and not another. In today’s Gospel passage we see how the Lord places himself in his humble chapel and in his small village, the village of all life, to make the same Announcement that he will make at the end of history, when he comes in his Glory, surrounded by angels. And our eyes must be fixed on Christ, in the here and now of Jesus’ history with me, as they will be then. The worldliness of going in search of one’s own glory robs us of the presence of the humble and humiliated Jesus, the Lord who is close to all, the Christ who grieves with all those who suffer, adored by our people who know who their true friends are. A worldly priest is nothing more than a clericalized pagan. A worldly priest is nothing more than a clericalized pagan.
Another space of hidden idolatry takes root where primacy is given to the pragmatism of numbers. Those who have this hidden idol recognize themselves for their love of statistics, those that can erase every personal trait in the discussion and give prominence to the majority, which, ultimately, becomes the criterion of discernment, it is ugly. This cannot be the only way forward or the only criterion in Christ’s Church. People cannot be “numbered”, and God does not give the Spirit “with measure” (Jn 3:34 – he whom God has sent speaks God’s own words, for God gives him the Spirit without reserve. ). In this fascination with numbers, in reality, we seek ourselves and we are pleased with the control assured by this logic, which is not interested in faces and is not that of love, loves numbers. A characteristic of the great saints is that they know how to step back so as to leave all the space to God. This stepping back, this forgetting of oneself and wanting to be forgotten by everyone else is the characteristic of the Spirit, who lacks an image, the Spirit does not have an image of its own simply because it is all Love that makes the image of the Son shine and, in it, that of the Father. The substitution of his Person, who already in itself likes “not to appear” – because it has no image -, is what the idol of numbers aims at, which makes everything “appear”, albeit in an abstract and accounted for way, without incarnation.
A third space of hidden idolatry, related to the second, comes from functionalism. This can be a seductive area in which many, “rather than by the route, get excited about the roadmap “. The functionalist mentality does not tolerate mystery, it aims at effectiveness. Little by little, this idol is replacing the presence of the Fatherin us. The first idol replaces the presence of the Son, the second idol that of the Spirit, and this is the presence of the Father. Our Father is the Creator, but not one who only makes things “work”, but One who “creates” as Father, with tenderness, taking charge of his creatures and working so that man is freer. The functionalist does not know how to rejoice in the graces that the Spirit pours out on his people, on which he could “feed” even as a worker who earns his salary. The priest with a functionalist mentality has his own nourishment, which is his ego. In functionalism we leave aside adoration of the Father in the small and great things of our lives and rejoice in the effectiveness of our programs. As David did when, tempted by Satan, he set out to carry out the census (1 Ch 21:1 – Satan took his stand against Israel and incited David to take a census of Israel). These are the lovers of the plan of course, of the plan of the path, not of the path.
In these last two spaces of hidden idolatry (pragmatism of numbers and functionalism) we replace hope, which is the space of the encounter with God, with empirical feedback. It is an attitude of vainglory on the part of the pastor, an attitude that disintegrates the union of his people with God and shapes a new idol based on numbers and programs: the idol “my power, our power”, our program, our numbers, our pastoral plans. Hiding these idols (with Rachel’s attitude) and not knowing how to unmask them in one’s daily life hurts the fidelity of our priestly covenant and warms our personal relationship with the Lord. But what does this Bishop want who, instead of speaking of Jesus, speaks to us of idols today? Some may think this…
Dear brothers, Jesus is the only way not to make mistakes in knowing what we feel, what our heart leads us to…; He is the only way for us to discern wellby confronting us with Him, every day, as if today too He had sat down in our parish church and told us that today everything we have heard has been fulfilled. Jesus Christ, being a sign of contradiction – which is not always something bloody or harsh, since mercy is a sign of contradiction and much more so is tenderness – Jesus Christ, I say, allows these idols to be revealed, their presence to be seen, their roots and how they work, so that the Lord can destroy them, this is the proposal: to give space so that the Lord can destroy our hidden idols. And we must remember them, we must be careful, so that the weeds of these idols that we have been able to hide in the folds of our hearts do not grow again.
And I would like to conclude by asking Saint Joseph, a most chaste father without hidden idols, to free us from all lust for possession, since this, the lust for possession, is the fertile soil in which these idols grow. And may he also obtain for us the grace not to give up in the arduous task of discerning these idols that we so frequently hide or are hidden. And let us also ask Saint Joseph, where we doubt how to do things better, to intercede for us so that the Spirit may enlighten our judgment, as he enlightened his own when he was tempted to leave Mary “in secret” (lathra), so that, with nobility of heart, we know how to subordinate to charity what we have learned by law
