Dear brothers and sisters,
we are now on the threshold of the Easter Triduum. Once again the Lord will take us to the summit of his mission, so that his passion, death and resurrection become the heart of our mission.
What we are about to relive, in fact, has within it the strength to transform what human pride generally tends to rigidify: our identity, our place in the world. The freedom of Jesus changes the heart, heals wounds, perfumes and makes our faces shine, reconciles and gathers, forgives and resurrects.
In the first year in which I preside over the Chrism Mass as Bishop of Rome, I wish to reflect with you on the mission to which God consecrates us as his people. It is the Christian mission, the same as that of Jesus, not another. Everyone participates in it according to their own vocation and in very personal obedience to the voice of the Spirit, but never without others, never neglecting or breaking communion! Bishops and priests, by renewing our promises, we are at the service of a missionary people. We are with all the baptized the Body of Christ, anointed by his Spirit of freedom and consolation, Spirit of prophecy and unity.
What Jesus experiences in the culminating moments of his mission is anticipated by Isaiah’s oracle, indicated by Him in the synagogue of Nazareth as the Word that “today” comes true (see Luke 4:21).
In the hour of Easter, in fact, it becomes definitively clear that God consecrates in order to send. “He sent me” (Lk 4:18), says Jesus, describing that movement that binds his Body to the poor, to prisoners, to those who are groping in the dark and to those who find themselves oppressed. And we, members of his Body, call “apostolic” a Church sent, pushed beyond itself, consecrated to God in the service of his creatures: “As the Father has sent me, so I send you” (Jn 20:21).
We know that being sent involves, first of all, a detachment, that is, the risk of leaving what is familiar and certain, to venture into the new. It is interesting that “with the power of the Spirit” (Lk 4.14), which descended upon Him after his baptism in the Jordan, Jesus returns to Galilee and comes “to Nazareth, where he grew up” (Lk 4.16). It is the place he now has to leave. He moves “as usual” (v. 16), but to inaugurate a new time. He will now have to leave that village definitively, so that what has germinated there may mature, Saturday after Saturday, in faithful listening to the Word of God. Equally he will call others to leave, to take risks, so that no place becomes a fence, no identity a den.
Dear ones, we follow Jesus, who “did not consider being like God a privilege, but emptied himself” (Phil 2,6-7): every mission begins from that type of emptying in which everything is reborn. Our dignity as sons and daughters of God cannot be taken away from us, nor be lost, but neither can the affections, places and experiences at the origin of our life be erased.
We are heirs of so much good and at the same time of the limits of a history in which the Gospel must bring light and salvation, forgiveness and healing. Thus, noThere is no mission without reconciliation with our origins, with the gifts and limits of the training received; but, at the same time, there is no peace without departures, there is no awareness without detachment, there is no joy without risk. We are the Body of Christ if we move forward, dealing with the past without being imprisoned by it: everything is found and multiplied if it is first let go, without fear. It is a first secret of the mission. And you don’t experience it just once, but in every restart, with every further sending.
The path of Jesus reveals to us that the willingness to lose, to empty oneself, is not an end in itself, but a condition of encounter and intimacy. Love is true only if disarmed, it needs few encumbrances, no ostentation, it delicately guards weakness and nakedness. We struggle to throw ourselves into such an exposed mission, yet there is no “good news to the poor” (see Luke 4:18) if we go to them with the signs of power, nor is there authentic liberation if we do not become free from possession.
Here we touch on a second secret of the Christian mission. After that of detachment there is the law of encounter. We know that throughout history the mission has often been distorted by the logic of domination, completely foreign to the way of Jesus Christ. Saint John Paul II had the clarity and courage to recognize how “due to that bond which, in the Mystical Body, unites us to each other, all of us, despite having no personal responsibility for it and without substituting the judgment of God who alone knows hearts, carry the weight of the errors and faults of those who preceded us”.(1)
Consequently, it is now a priority to remember that neither in the pastoral nor in the social and political sphere can good come from abuse. The great missionaries are witnesses of tiptoeing approaches, which have as their method the sharing of life, selfless service, the renunciation of any calculating strategy, dialogue, respect. It is the path of incarnation, which always takes the form of inculturation. Salvation, in fact, can be welcomed by everyone only in their mother tongue. “How come each of us hears people speaking in their native tongue?” (Acts 2.8). The surprise of Pentecost is repeated when we do not pretend to dominate God’s times, but we trust in the Holy Spirit, who «is there, even today, as in the time of Jesus and the Apostles: he is there and is working, he arrives before us, he works more than us and better than us; It is up to us neither to sow him nor to wake him up, but first of all to recognize him, welcome him, support him, make way for him, go after him. He is there and has never lost heart with our time; on the contrary it smiles, dances, penetrates, invests, envelops, even reaches places where we would never have imagined”.(2)
To establish this harmony with the invisible, it is necessary to arrive where one is sent with simplicity, honoring the mystery that every person and every community brings with them. We are guests: we are guests as bishops, as priests, as religious men and women, as Christians. To host, in fact, we must learn to be hosted. Even the places where secularization seems most advanced are not a land of conquest, or reconquest: «New cultures continue to be generated in these enormous human geographies where the Christian is no longer used to be a promoter or generator of meaning, but receives from them other languages, symbols, messages and paradigms that offer new life orientations, often in contrast with the Gospel of Jesus. (…) It is necessary to get to where the new stories and paradigms are formed, to reach with the Word of Jesus the deepest nuclei of the soul of the city”.(3) This only happens if we walk together in the Church, if the mission is not someone’s heroic adventure, but a living testimony of a Body with many members.
Then there is a third dimension, perhaps the most radical, of the Christian mission. The dramatic possibility of misunderstanding and rejection is already manifested in the violent reaction of the inhabitants of Nazareth to the word of Jesus: «When everyone in the synagogue heard these things, they were filled with indignation. They rose up and drove him out of the city and led him to the edge of the mountain on which their city was built, to throw him down” (Luke 4:28-29). Although the liturgical reading has omitted this part, what we are preparing to celebrate this evening commits us not to flee, but to “pass through” the test, like Jesus, who, “passing among them, set out on his way” (Lk 4:30). The cross is part of the mission: the sending becomes more bitter and frightening, but also more gratuitous and disruptive. The imperialist occupation of the world is then interrupted from within, the violence that until today is the law is exposed. The poor, prisoner, rejected Messiah falls into the darkness of death, but thus brings to light a new creation.
How many resurrections we too are given to experience, when, free from a defensive attitude, we descend into service like a seed in the earth! In life, we can go through situations where everything seems over. We then ask ourselves if the mission was useless. It’s true: unlike Jesus, we also experience failures that depend on our own or others’ insufficiency, often on a tangle of responsibilities, lights and shadows. But we can make our own the hope of many witnesses. I remember one, which is particularly dear to me. A month before his death, in the notebook of the Spiritual Exercises, the holy Bishop Óscar Arnulfo Romero he noted as follows: «The nuncio of Costa Rica warned me of an imminent danger just this week… Unforeseen circumstances will be faced with the grace of God. Jesus Christ helped martyrs and, if there is need, I will feel him very close when I entrust my last breath to him. But, more than the last moment of life, what matters is giving him his whole life and living for Him… To be happy and confident, it is enough for me to know with certainty that in Him is my life and my death; that, despite my sins, I have placed my trust in Him and I will not remain confused, and others will continue, with more wisdom and holiness, the work for the Church and for the country”.
Dearest sisters and brothers, saints make history. This is the message of the Apocalypse. «Grace to you and peace from Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn from the dead and the ruler of the kings of the earth» (Rev 1,5). This greeting summarizes the journey of Jesus in a world contested between powers that devastate it. Within it a new population arises, not of victims, but of witnesses. In this dark hour of history it pleased God to send us to spread the scent of Christ where the smell of death reigns. Let us renew our “yes” to this mission which asks us for unity and which brings peace. Yes, we are here! Let’s overcome the sense of helplessness and fear! We announce your death, Lord, we proclaim your resurrection, awaiting your coming.
(1) St. John Paul II, Bull announcing the Great Jubilee of 2000 Incarnationis mysterium (29 November 1998), 11.
(2) CM Martini, Three tales of the Spirit, Milan 1997, 11.
(3) Francis, Exhortation. ap. Evangelii gaudium (24 November 2013), 73-74.
