| In the
Eucharist, from the Cross, Jesus Draws all to Himself
On Sunday, 2 October, in St Peter's Basilica, the Holy Father presided
at a special concelebrated Mass inaugurating the 11th Ordinary General
Assembly of the Synod of Bishops with the theme: "The
Eucharist: Source and Summit of the Life and Mission of the Church". It
was the late Pope John Paul II who suggested this theme, while also
offering the Church two important Documents: Ecclesia de Eucharistia
(2003), and Mane Nobiscum Domine (2004).
As Archbishop Nikola Eterović,
General Secretary of the Synod of Bishops, told journalists at the press
conference he gave at the Holy See Press Office on Saturday, 1 October,
taking part in the Synod are 256 Synod Fathers from 118 countries. Of these, 177 are elected, 39
participate ex officio and 40 are
appointed by the Holy Father. Among these, also, there are 55 Cardinals, 8
Patriarchs, 82 Archbishops, 123 Bishops, 36 Presidents of Bishops' Conferences and 11 Religious; 50 of the
Synod Fathers come from Africa, 59 from America, 44 from Asia, 95 from
Europe and 8 from Oceania.
There are also 32 experts and 27 auditors.
The closure of the Synod on Sunday, 23 October, will coincide with the end of the
Year of the Eucharist proclaimed by Pope John II.
The following is a translation of Pope Benedict's Homily at the
Opening Synod Mass, given in Italian.
Brothers in the Episcopate and in the Priesthood, dear Brothers and
Sisters,
The reading from the Prophet Isaiah and today's Gospel set before our
eyes one of the great images of Sacred Scripture: the image of the vine.
In Sacred Scripture, bread represents all that human beings need for
their daily life. Water makes the earth fertile: it is the fundamental
gift that makes life possible.
Wine, on the other hand, expresses the excellence of creation and gives
us the feast in which we go beyond the limits of our daily routine: wine,
the Psalm says, "gladdens the heart".
So it is that wine and with it the vine have also become images of the
gift of love in which we can taste the savour of the Divine. Thus, the reading
from the Prophet that we have just heard begins like a canticle of love:
God created a vineyard for himself —
this is an image of the history of love for humanity, of his love for
Israel which he chose.
This is therefore the first thought in today's readings: God instilled
in men and women, created in his image, the capacity for love, hence also the
capacity for loving him, their Creator. With the Prophet Isaiah's canticle
of love God wants to speak to the hearts of his people
— and to each one of us.
"I have created you in my image likeness", he says to us. "I myself am
love and you are my image to the extent that the splendour of love shines
out in you, to the extent that you respond lovingly to me". God is waiting
for us. He wants us to love him: should not our hearts be moved by this
appeal?
At this very moment when we are celebrating the Eucharist, in which we
are opening the Synod on the Eucharist, he comes to meet us, he comes to meet
me. Will he find a response? Or will what happened to the vine of which
God says in Isaiah: "He waited for it to produce grapes but it yielded
wild grapes", also happens to us? Is not our Christian life often far more
like vinegar than wine? Self-pity, conflict, indifference?
Vinegar or Wine?
With this we have automatically come to the second fundamental thought
in today's readings.
As we have heard, they speak first of all of the goodness of God's
creation and of the greatness of the choice by which he seeks us out and
loves us. But they then also speak of the story that was successively
lived out — of the "fall" of man. God
had planted the very best vines, yet they yielded wild grapes. Let us ask
ourselves: what do wild grapes consist of?
The good grapes that God was hoping for, the Prophet sings, would have
been justice and righteousness. Wild grapes instead bring violence,
bloodshed and oppression that make people groan under the yoke of
injustice.
In the Gospel, the image changes: the vine produces good grapes, but
the tenants keep them for themselves. They are not willing to hand them
over to the owner of the vineyard. They beat and kill his messengers and
kill his son. Their motive is simple: they themselves want to become
owners; they take possession of what does not belong to them.
In the foreground of the Old Testament is the accusation of the
violation of social justice, of contempt for human beings by human beings.
In the background, however, it appears that with contempt for the Torah,
for the law given by God, it is God himself who is despised. All people
want is to enjoy their own power.
This aspect is fully highlighted in Jesus' Parable: the tenants do not
want to have a master — and these tenants
are also a mirror of ourselves. We men
and women, to whom creation is as it were entrusted for its management,
have usurped it. We ourselves want to dominate it in the first person and
by ourselves. We want unlimited possession of the world and of our own
lives. God is in our way.
Either he is reduced merely to a few devout words, or he is denied in
everything and banned from public life so as to lose all meaning. The
tolerance that admits God as it were as a private opinion but refuses him
the public domain, the reality of the world and of our lives, is not
tolerance but hypocrisy.
But nowhere that the human being makes himself the one lord of the
world and owner of himself can justice exist. There, it is only the desire
for power and private interests that can prevail.
Of course, one can chase the Son out of the vineyard and kill him, in
order selfishly to taste the fruits of the earth alone. However, in no
time at all the vineyard then reverts to being an uncultivated piece of
land, trampled by wild boar as the Responsorial Psalm tells us (cf. Ps
80[79]:14).
God's Promise, the Last Word
Thus, we reach a third element of today's readings. In the Old and New
Testaments, the Lord proclaims judgment on the unfaithful vineyard. The
judgment that Isaiah foresaw is brought about in the great wars and exiles
for which the Assyrians and Babylonians were responsible.
The judgment announced by the Lord Jesus refers above all to the
destruction of Jerusalem in the year 70. Yet the threat of judgment also
concerns us, the Church in Europe, Europe and the West in general. With
this Gospel, the Lord is also crying out to our ears the words that in the
Book of Revelation he addresses to the Church of Ephesus: "If you do not
repent I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place"
(2:5).
Light can also be taken away from us and we do well to let this warning
ring out with its full seriousness in our hearts, while crying to the
Lord: "Help us to repent! Give all of us the grace of true renewal! Do not
allow your light in our midst to blow out! Strengthen our faith, our hope
and our love, so that we can bear good fruit!".
At this point, however, we ask ourselves: "But is there no promise, no
word of comfort in today's readings and Gospel? Is the threat the last
word?". No!
There is a promise, and this is the last, the essential word. We hear
it in the Alleluia verse from John's Gospel: "I am the vine, you are the
branches. He who lives in me and I in him will produce abundantly" (Jn
15:15).
With these words of the Lord, John illustrates for us the final, true
outcome of the history of God's vineyard. God does not fail. In the end he
wins, love wins.
A veiled allusion to this can already be found in the Parable of the
Tenants presented by today's Gospel and in the concluding words. There
too, the death of the Son is not the end of history, even if the rest of
the story is not directly recounted. But Jesus expresses this death
through a new image taken from the Psalm: "The stone which the builders
rejected has become the cornerstone..." (cf. Mt 21:42; Ps 118[117]:22).
From the Son's death springs life, a new building is raised, a new
vineyard. He, who at Cana changed water into wine, has transformed his
Blood into the wine of true love and thus transforms the wine into his
Blood.
In the Upper Room he anticipated his death and transformed it into the
gift of himself in an act of radical love. His Blood is a gift, it is
love, and consequently it is the true wine that the Creator was expecting.
In this way, Christ himself became the vine, and this vine always bears
good fruit: the presence of his love for us which is indestructible.
Banquet of Eternal Love
These parables thus lead at the end to the mystery of the Eucharist, in
which the Lord gives us the bread of life and the wine of his love and
invites us to the banquet of his eternal love. We celebrate the Eucharist
in the awareness that its price was the death of the Son
— the sacrifice of his life that
remains present in it. Every time we eat this bread and drink this cup, we
proclaim the death of the Lord until he comes, St Paul says (cf. I Cor
11:26).
But we also know that from this death springs life, because Jesus
transformed it into a sacrificial gesture, an act of love, thereby
profoundly changing it: love has overcome death. In the Holy Eucharist,
from the Cross, he draws us all to himself (cf. Jn 12:32) and makes us
branches of the Vine that is Christ himself.
If we abide in him, we will also bear fruit, and then from us will no
longer come the vinegar of self-sufficiency, of dissatisfaction with God and
his creation, but the good wine of joy in God and of love for our
neighbor.
Let us pray to the Lord to give us his grace, so that in the three
weeks of the Synod which we are about to begin, not only will we say
beautiful things about the Eucharist but above all, we will live from its
power.
Let us invoke this gift through Mary, dear Synod Fathers whom I greet
with deep affection as well as the various Communities from which you come
and which you represent here, so that, docile to the action of the Holy
Spirit, we may help the world become in Christ and with Christ the
fruitful vine of God. Amen.
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