29 June

The solemnity of the holy apostles Peter and Paul unites in a single celebration Peter, the first disciple called in the synoptic accounts, the first of the twelve apostles, and Paul, who was not a disciple of Jesus and did not belong to the group of the Twelve, but whom the Church calls “Apostle”, preeminently the one sent, although this title, which he presumes to apply to himself, is never attributed to him in the Acts of the Apostles. This feast is already attested in the oldest liturgical calendar that has come down to us, the Depositio martyrum of the third century, which places together two of Jesus’ apostles who died in Rome at different times, but both of them martyrs, victims of the persecutions of Christians: two lives offered in libation for the cause of Jesus and of the Gospel.

The two apostles are thus united in the liturgical celebration, after their earthly lives saw them even opposing one another: a communion lived in evangelical parresia and for that very reason not always easy, in fact, often difficult. The limestone bas relief preserved in Aquilea, like the traditional iconography that depicts their embrace, intends to express this very communion at high cost that guaranteed the labors of each of the two as the foundation of the Church of Rome, the place where their race had its end, the place that saw both of them martyrs in Nero’s time, put to death for the same reason.

Peter is among the first of those called by Jesus: a fisher of Bethsaida on the lake of Tiberias, a man who certainly gave little time to intellectual formation and who lived his faith especially thanks to the Saturday synagogue worship and then, after Jesus’ call, through the teaching of that teacher who spoke as no one else before him. Generous and impulsive, Peter responded at once to Jesus’ call to follow him, but remained inconstant, an easy victim of fear, capable even of cowardice, to the point of denying him whom he was following as disciple. Always close to Jesus, he sometimes appears as a spokesman of the other disciples, among which he occupied a preeminent position: it would not be able to speak of Jesus’ life without mentioning Peter, who was the first to dare confess boldly faith in Jesus as Messiah. The disciples, like many in the crowd, wondered whether Jesus was a prophet or even “the” prophet of the last times, whether he was the Messiah, the Lord’s Anointed: it was Peter who, on Jesus’ solicitation, made a profession of faith in words that vary in the four Gospels, but which all attest that he was the first to recognize the true identity of Jesus. Peter made this profession not as “spokesman” of the Twelve; rather, he was moved by an interior force, by a revelation that could come to him only from God. To believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, was not possible by only analyzing or interpreting what could be a fulfillment of the Scriptures: it was God himself, the Father who is in heaven, who revealed to Peter Jesus’ identity (cf. Mt 16,17). Jesus, thus, recognized his disciple Simon as a “rock”, Kefa, a stone on whose faith the community, the Church, could find a foundation.

Peter, called “blessed” by Jesus, declared to be a solid rock, capable of confirming the disciples’ faith, will not be exempt from errors, falls, infidelity towards his Lord. Immediately after his profession of faith he will show his all too worldly way of thinking as regards Jesus’ passion, to the point that Jesus will call him “Satan”, and at the end of Jesus’ earthly life Peter three separate times will declare that he never knew him: fear and the desire to save himself will lead him to declare forcefully that he “did not know” that Jesus knowledge about whom he had received directly from God!
Jesus, who had assured him of his prayers so that his faith would not fail, after the resurrection will reconfirm him in his post, asking him three times to attest his love: “Simon son of John, do you love me?” (Jn 21, 15.16.17). Touched to the quick by this question from Jesus, Peter will become Jesus” apostle, the pastor of his sheep, first in Jerusalem, then in the Jewish communities of Palestine, then in Antioch, and finally in Rome, where in his turn he will lay down his life after the example of his Lord and Teacher. In Rome Peter will also again meet Paul: we do not know whether in the daily life of Christian witness, but certainly in the great sign of martyrdom.

Paul, the “other”, a different apostle, placed next to Peter in all his difference, almost as if to guarantee from the very beginning that the Christian Church would always be plural and nourished by diversity. A Jew of the diaspora, born in Tarsus, the capital of Cilicia, he went up to Jerusalem to become a scribe and rabbi in the following of Gamaliel, one of the most famous teachers of the rabbinic tradition; Paul was a Pharisee, expert and zealous in the law of Moses, who had known neither Jesus nor his first disciples, but who distinguished himself by his opposition and persecution of the infant Christian movement. Paul could call himself a “miscarriage” (cf. 1Cor 15,8) in comparison to the other apostles who had seen the risen Lord Jesus, but asked to be considered as one sent, a servant, an apostle of Jesus Christ just like them, because he had placed his life at the service of the Gospel, he had made himself an imitator of Christ even in sufferings, he had done his utmost in apostolic journeys in the entire eastern Mediterranean, he was driven by concern for all the churches of God. His passion, his intelligence, his dedication to announcing the Lord Jesus shine through all his letters, and the Acts of the Apostles too give sincere testimony of this. By his own definition, he is “the apostle of the gentiles”, while Peter is “the apostle of the circumcised” (Gal 2,8).

Peter and Paul, both of them disciples and apostles of Christ, are nevertheless so very different: Peter a poor fisherman, Paul a rigorous intellectual; Peter a Palestinian Jew from an obscure village, Paul a Jew of the diaspora and Roman citizen; Peter slow to understand and to act, Paul consumed by eschatological urgency. They were apostles with two different styles, they served the Lord in very different ways, they lived the Church in a manner that was sometimes dialectic if not in opposition, but bought sought to follow the Lord and his will and together, thanks to their very diversity, they were able to give a face to the Christian mission and a foundation to the church of Rome that presides in charity. It is hence just to celebrate their memory together, a memory of unity in diversity, of life given over for the love of the Lord, of charity lived in expectation of Christ’s return.

Every year Lent return, a full time of forty days to be lived by Christians all together as a time of conversion, of return to God. Christians ought to live always resisting idols that entice, the time is always right for receiving the Lord-s mercy and grace, nevertheless the Church – which in its wisdom knows how we human beings are unable to live always on the same plane of high tension as we daily proceed towards the Kingdom – asks that there be a certain time when we detach ourselves from our daily routine, a time that is ‘different’, a time for concentrating the major portion of the energies that each one of us possesses in striving for conversion. The Church asks moreover that this effort be lived by all Christians at the same time, that is, that it be a common striving in solidarity of all together. There are thus forty days for the return to God, for repudiating idols that entice but at the same time alienate, for a better knowledge of the Lord’s infinite mercy.

Conversion, in fact, is not an event that happens once and for all, but is rather a dynamism that must be renewed in different moments of existence, at different ages, especially when the passing of time can induce the Christian to yield to worldliness, to fatigue, to a loss of the sense and the end of his own vocation, all of which lead him to live his faith schizophrenically. Lent is a time for recuperating one’s own truth and authenticity even before being a time of penance: it is not a time of ‘doing’ some particular work of charity or of mortification, but a time for recuperating the truth of one’s own being. Jesus declares that hypocrites also fast, that hypocrites also do acts of charity (cf. Mt 6, 1-6. 16-18): this is why it is necessary to unify one’s life before God and put in order the end and means of the Christian life without mistaking them.

Lent is supposed to re-propose for today the forty years that Israel spent in the desert by leading the believer to know himself, that is, to know what the believer’s Lord already knows: a knowledge that does not consist of psychological introspection, but that finds light and orientation in the Word of God. Just as Christ fought for forty days in the desert and overcame the tempter thanks to the Word of God (cf. Mt 4, 1-11), so the Christian is called to listen, to read, to pray more intensely and more assiduously – in solitude and in the liturgy – the Word of God contained in Scripture. Christ’s struggle in the desert, thus, becomes truly exemplary, and the Christian, combating idols, stops doing the evil that he is in the habit of doing and of doing the good that he does not do! In this way emerges the ‘Christian difference’, that what constitutes the Christian and renders him eloquent in the company of men, what enables him to show the Gospel lived, made flesh and life.

Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of this propitious time of Lent and is characterized, as its name proclaims, by the imposition of ashes on the head of the Christian. This is a gesture that perhaps is not understood today, but which, if it is explained and received, can become more efficacious than words in transmitting a truth. Ashes are the fruit of fire that burns, it implies the symbol of purification, it is a reference to the condition of our body, which after death decomposes and becomes dust: yes, just as a leafy tree, once it is cut down and burned, becomes ashes, so our body return to earth, but those ashes are destined for the resurrection.

The rich symbolism of ashes was known already in the Old Testament and in Jewish prayer: to sprinkle one’s head with ashes is a sign of penitence, of the desire of transformation through trial, the crucible, through purifying fire. Certainly, it is only a sign, which intends to signify a genuine spiritual event lived in the Christian’s daily life: conversion and repentance of a contrite heart. This very quality of sign, of gesture, however, if lived with conviction and invoking the Spirit, can impress itself on the body, on the heart, and on the spirit of the Christian, and thus favor the event of conversion.

At one time, in the rite of the imposition of ashes the Christian was reminded above all of his condition of human being taken from the earth and returning to the earth, according to the Lord’s word spoken to Adam the sinner (cf. Gen 3, 19). Today the rite’s significance has been enriched; in fact, the word that accompanies the gesture can also be the invitation made by the Baptist and by Jesus himself at the beginning of their preaching: ‘Repent and believe in the Gospel’… To receive the ashes means to become aware that the fire of God’s love consumes our sin, to receive the ashes in our hand means to perceive that the weight of our sins, consumed by God’s mercy, is a ‘small weight’, to look at those ashes means to reconfirm our Easter faith: we will be ashes, but ashes destined for the resurrection. Yes, at our Easter our flesh will arise and God’s mercy will consume by fire our sins in death.

In living Ash Wednesday Christians only reaffirm their faith of being reconciled to God in Christ, their hope of rising one day with Christ to eternal life, their vocation to charity that will never have an end. The day of ashes is the announcement of the Easter of each one of us.

Enzo Bianchi

The Christian Holidays
by ENZO BIANCHI
The Most High made himself the Most Low, the infinite became finite, the eternal became temporal, the powerful became weak

24 June 2008

Birth of St John the Baptist

Summer has just begun, and here we have the feast of the birth of John the Baptist, a very old feast, already celebrated by St Augustine in Africa. Besides Mary, the mother of the Lord, John the Baptist is the only saint of whom the Church celebrates not only the day of death, the dies natalis to eternal life, but also the dies natalis in this world: in fact, John is the only witness whose birth, so intertwined with that of Jesus, is noted in the New Testament. That very intertwining of the two births has le to the choice of 24 June: if the Church recalls Jesus’ birth on 25 December, then it was bound to recall that of John on 24 June, since, as Luke’s Gospel records, it occurred six months earlier. The parallelism of these dates is also symbolic, at least in the Mediterranean basin, which was the crucible of the Jewish-Christian faith: while 25 December is the feast of the sun-victor, which begins to increase its declination to the earth, 24 June is the day when the sun begins to decrease its declination, just as it happened in the relationship of the Baptist with Jesus, according to John’s own words: “He must increase and I decrease” (Jn 3, 30). John is the lamp that declines before the victorious light, he is the lamp prepared for the Messiah (cf. Ps 132,17 and Jn 5,35), he is his precursor in birth, in mission, and in death, he is Jesus’ teacher, his disciple who follows him, he is the friend of Jesus who is the approaching Spouse, as the fourth Gospel justly says.

We could even say that the Gospel is the synchronic account of two prophets, John and Jesus, with their profound peculiarities, their specific call, but also their essential unanimity in carrying out God’s designs, with the same resoluteness in the service of the Kingdom. Today, unfortunately, the Baptist no longer possesses the post he merits in the Church’s memory and consciousness: after the first millennium and the middle of the second — in which John the Baptist and Mary together represented the bond between the old and the new alliance and together stood as intercessors next to the Lord in glory, in the liturgy and in iconography — the growth of the Marian cult overtook the Baptist and ended by obscuring it, drifting with danger to the equilibrium of Christological consciousness. If the Church still today solemnly celebrates the Baptist’s birth, that is because it remains conscious of this figure’s central position according to Revelation: in the Synoptics the good news of the announcement of the kingdom always opens with John, just as the Gospel of Jesus’ infancy according to Luke open with the angel’s annunciation to Zacharias and with the story of John’s marvelous birth.

John is a man whom only God could give to Israel. At the beginning of his story there is an old, sterile woman, Elizabeth, and a father in the temple, he too advanced in years: the Lord’s poor, “just before God, irreprehensible in the observance of all the Lord’s laws and prescriptions” (Lk 1,6), the humble rest that trusts in God, and it is just to these that God turns to carry out his design of love and salvation. Nothing can condition God’s choice, nor can it be impeded by human limits such as old age and sterility: he only asks that there be predisposition, awaiting, faith. This is how John is born, announced by an angel to the father-priest officiating in the temple, and he is only an embryo in his mother’s womb when he already dances at recognizing the presence of the Messiah and Lord Jesus just conceived in Mary’s womb, and in his mother’s womb he is sanctified by the Holy Spirit who descends on her.

Then when he is born, his names defines his vocation and mission, the name given by God through the angel — Johanan, “the Lord works mercy” — and his father intones a Messianic psalm in thanksgiving and praise of God, but in which he also addresses his son: “And you, who now are little, will be called prophet of the Most High and will walk before the Lord” (Lk 1,76). This is how into the world came “he who is the greatest of those born of woman… more than a prophet” (Lk 7,28), according to Jesus’ confession about him: he is not the light come into the world, but “the lamp that burns and illuminates” (Jn 5,35) to testify to the light.
All his earthly life is intertwined with that of Jesus, and the events of his life narrated in the Gospel not only prefigure what will happen to Jesus, but are synchronous with them, contemporary, even superimposed and mingled together: John and Jesus lived together! Even when John will be violently killed, his life and his mission will appear fully in that of Jesus. It is certainly not by chance that the Gospel registers king Herod’s opinion about Jesus: “It is John the Baptist risen from the dead”, nor that the disciples report to Jesus the views of some contemporaries who said about him “it is John the Baptist” (cf. Mt 16,14 and par.).

When John will die, he will anticipate Jesus’ death and will prefigure it as the passion of the prophet persecuted and killed in his own land, but just as in his death Jesus too dies, so in Jesus’ resurrection John the Baptist also rises.

The Christian Holidays
by ENZO BIANCHI
Epiphany is the commemoration that Jesus, the Messiah, the Son of God and son of man, is meant for all mankind

Christmas 

The event that Christians celebrate at Christmas is not an “apparition” of God among men, but the birth of a child that only God could give to humanity, one “born of a woman” who, however, came from God and was to be narration and explanation of God. The birth of him who is Lord and God must not be taken metaphorically, but in all its real, historic sense, which the Gospel emphasizes as “sign”. In fact, three times in the account of Jesus’ birth the evangelist Luke repeats in the same words the image that should be looked at without distraction: “a child wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger” (Lk 2:7.12.16)! yes, there is also the light that shines and wraps the shepherds around, there is the divine glory that strikes fear, there is the choir of angels that sings peace for men beloved of God, but all this is only the frame that places in relief the picture and seeks to uncover for us the meaning of what it contains.

The sign that the pastors receive from the announcement of angels is of an extreme simplicity, a poor sign, a sign belonging to poor humanity: a child is born, but in the poverty of a stable, a child is born, the child of a poor couple, child is born, to whom hospitality has been denied. This is all the sign of Christmas! And yet, the child is proclaimed Messiah: The Savior and Lord is a poor child, the son of the poor, born in poverty.

If Christians in their faith were not to maintain alive the link between the child and the Lord, between poverty and glory, they would not understand the truth of Christmas. Unfortunately, Christians are always tempted to hide the child’s naked poverty and would like his glory to be in power and in success, but the authentic image of Christmas disavows these desires of theirs.

Full of this understanding of the incarnation, a Christian hymn of the fourth century thus sings of the feast of Christmas:

“While deepest night,
dark and tranquil,
wrapped with its silence vales and hills,
the Son of God was born of a virgin
and obedient to the Father’s will
began his life as man on earth”.

The beginning of a man’s life on earth: perhaps just for this extreme simplicity the message of Christmas is so universal. It is in fact a simple message, within the reach of all, beginning with the poor shepherds of Bethlehem, yet it is the announcement of a great mystery, because that son of man who is born will pass in a very ordinary manner most of his life: he will pass among other men doing good, he will work the great miracle of refound communion with God and with others using signs and marvels connected with man’s basic needs: bread and wine multiplied, health restored, nature again reconciled with man, fraternal relations reestablished, life reaffirmed as stronger than death. For this reason the apostle Paul says that the manifestation of Christ in the world has as its scope “to teach us to live in this world” (Tt 2:11-12).

AAt Christmas Christians celebrate this mystery that has already occurred – the coming of God in the flesh of Christ – as promise and guarantee of what they still await: that God be in all humanity and that humanity be made God. But if this is the foundation of the feast, then the joy that fills it cannot be subjected to any “exclusiveness”: it is joy “for all the people”, for all of humanity as receiver of God’s love. Christians cannot take possession of Christmas by taking it away from others, they cannot imprison the hope that is the longing of everyone’s heart. If in Jesus the Creator has become creature, the Eternal has become mortal, the All-Powerful has become powerless, it is so that man could become the Son himself of God. We are confronted with that “admirabile commercium”, with that “wonderful exchange”, by which the fathers of the first centuries sought to explain to their contemporaries the event that had not so much changed the course of history as it had rather restored to history its sense. This is the shining hope that Christians ought still today announce to the men and women among whom they live, so thirsting for meaning, so desirous of hope, so possessed by an expectation greater than their own heart. For Christians it is a matter of going, of staying in the midst of others with the same joy with which God came among us in the Son, the Emmanuel, the God-with-us, who cannot and should not ever become the God-against-the-others. Then Christmas – not only the Christian one, but also that “of all”. even that contagious climate of goodness that overcomes the hypocrisy of a foolish do-goodiness – will not end burned up in consuming many goods in a few hours, will not go out with the last light, will not know the depreciation of the end of season sale, but will expand, multiplying itself in daily living: it will be the pledge of a more human life, containing authentic relations and respect for the other, a life rich in meaning, capable of expressing in acts and words beauty and light, echoes of that light which shone in the deep night of Bethlehem and which ought to shine also today in every place enveloped by the darkness of pain and of non-sense. Christians know by faith that God wanted to commit himself radically to humanity in becoming man, they know that he entered history to direct it definitively towards the exit of salvation, they know that he assumed the weakness of men exposed to the offenses of evil just in order to overcome evil and death. And they are called to witness this “knowledge” of theirs in a daily taking up of poverty, of abasement to meet the other, in the consciousness that what unites men is greater than what makes them different against each other.

Yes, if at Christmas Christians are in joy, this is not a privilege reserved to them, a gift the sharing of which would frustrate it: on the contrary, it is not permitted to them to take exclusive possession of it because they cannot withdraw Christ from the humanity to which he was sent by the Father. Christmas is an invitation to hope, and this hope is offered to all.

Enzo Bianchi
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