12 August 2000 - St. Peter's Square
15th World Youth Day
Mass for the Jubilee Volunteers
My
dear young people, young men and women, the Mass we are celebrating here in St.
Peter's Square this morning is, as it were, the prologue to World Youth Day,
the opening of the first page.
It
is particularly nice, indeed only right, that this first page should open with
you volunteers, you who have come here to give rather than to receive. You already are familiar with the phrase:
"It is better to give than to receive" : it is a phrase Jesus himself
used, a phrase which has come down to us not through the Gospels but through
the writings of St. Paul the Apostle.
In this lies the profound meaning of World Youth Day and we, here
together, want to ask the Lord that we be those who find our joy primarily in
giving, above all in giving ourselves in service of our friends, of our
neighbours. Yet we know that we can
only give truly, we can only give something of ourselves as a result of what we
in turn have received. For that reason
we open this day with the Eucharist, itself a gift of salvation and mystery of
salvation. The Eucharist, the Holy
Mass, is an expression of the overflow
of God's love. For that reason too, the
great concluding act of World Youth Day will once again be Holy Mass,
celebrated by the Pope at Tor Vergata on Sunday morning.
Let
us try to enter, with our heads but also with our hearts, into that overflow of
God's love, so that we can be filled with that love and in that way express it
and bear witness to it in our own way.
I should like, therfore, to linger for a moment on the first reply which
Jesus gave to the rich young man, who featured in the Gospel we have just
heard. The young man called him
"Good Sir", and Jesus replied: "Why do you call me good? No one
is good but God alone". God is
good. We must guard against reducing
this word. God is not simply good in
the sense that he is a bit like us, measured by the standard of our petty
desires. God is infinitely better. He is good because he is infinite being, the
sea, the veritable ocean of being, omnipotent, eternal. Already in that sense God is good because
all possible perfection is contained in him, quite simply because He is totally
perfect. God is also good in the moral
sense. This is the way we use the
concept good to describe one another: he/she is a good person. God is generous, God is holy, god is
intellegent and free: all these qualities are summed up in his love. In him there is no separation or distance
possible. God is infinitely intellegent and understands everything; his freedom
is infinite and dominates all things; his love is infinite and pours itslef out
on us. Thus, as as result of this free
and intellegent love, God loves us and all of the created universe, he holds us
and the universe in existence. Here
lies our origin. This is our most
profound reality. We can go so far as
to say that this is the stuff of which we are made, we are made of the
substance of divine love. This too
makes sense of our existence and of the entire world, of the infinite universe
which God has created. And this too
indicates the direction of our lives, the goal for which we should always
strive. For this reason, Jesus said to
the rich young man: "observe the commandments". These commandments which are the word God
addresses to us for our own good, the road indicated to us by God so that we
can grow and carry out his plan, the road which is our life. But Jesus also felt able to add: "if
you wish to be perfect, go, sell all that you have and give it to the
poor. Then, come, follow me". In other words, come with me, trust in me. Here we find the sense of total gift which
Jesus addressed not only to others, to his disciples, to the rich young
man. He was the first one to put this
concept of total gift into practice.
During
the course of this Mass an image of the Blessed Virgin will be carried to the
altar. It will be blessed at the end of
the Mass. The presence of this icon is
a recognition that this woman, this young woman, the Blessed Virgin Mary, the
mother of Jesus is not only mother in the physical sense, because she gave
Jesus the gift of life, but that she is totally united to him. It was she who believed profoundly in him,
she was the first disciple, she who had most perfectly put his word into
practice. It was she who had loved him
with an undivided heart. For this
rreason we carry the image of Mary,
because during this World Youth Day we want to be like her, we want to follow
her example, we want to respond as radically as we can to the invitation which
Jesus addressed to the rich young man.
I
should now like to linger a moment on the first reading, the reading from St.
Paul's Epistle to the Romans. We are
reading this letter here in Rome and we are linked spiritually to those first Christians of Rome to whom
the Apostle Paul originally wrote.
Twenty centuries almost, nineteen centuries and a half, separate us from
them, but in reality we are not separated, because here in Rome the Christian
faith has always remained alive. There
is a continuity which passes from one generation to the next. You who are young have the wonderful task of
passing this torch of faith, this flame, to people of the future, to future
generations which come after you. In
this way the story of Christian faith continues in Rome and in the whole
world. The Apostle Paul, in the passage
which we have just heard, asks us to offer our bodies: when Paul speaks of
bodies, he is speaking of our total being, of our day to day lives. Paul tells us: "offer your bodies as a
living sacrifice pleasing to God", and adds: "this is your spiritual
sacrifice". These words of Paul
are the prefiguration of that idea which in the subsequent tradition of the
Church and, more recently, the Second Vatican Council, expressed in the formula
of the universal priesthood of all believers.
In order to understand this idea better, I should like to make a
comparaison with the Lord's last Supper.
At the Last Supper, taking the bread and the cup, Jesus said: "This
is my body, given for you", "this is my blood, poured out for
you". Jesus was able to pronounce
these words with the fullness of truth, as truly authentic words, because after
the Last Supper came the Cross, and before the Cross and the Supper there was a
human life totally spent in the service of his brothers, spent for the glory of
God and for the well-being and the salvation of humankind. It was for that reason that Jesus could say:
this is my body, give for you, this is my blood, poured out for you. We too, therfore, make our Mass authentic,
make our sacraments authentic, we make our baptism authentic, in the measure in
which we render this spiritual sacrifice to God concrete and day to day, just
as St. Paul said to us: our sacrifice is the offering of our life.
We
wish to offer this sacrifice of ours to God on the occasion of WYD. You volunteers are doing this in a very
concrete way in the way you receive and welcome our friends who are coming, young people who are coming. You do this in looking after their lodgings,
their food, in the way you animate the catechesis sessions and finally in the
way you help with the great closing ceremonies on Saturday and Sunday. It is this reciprocal welcome that will
create the spiritual atmosphere of the WYD and should, so to speak, touch all
our friends who come to Rome, especially from far away countries, who are
living in difficult situations of misery and persecution. Christ is really present in them, and we thus
realise that the love of God is not only words but a reality of deeper truth in
our lives. The Apostle Paul, in order
to render concrete this idea of spiritual sacrifice, this offering to God,
speaks of reciprocal love, of service rendered without pretence and without
hypocricy, a word which speaks of forgiveness, which says that we have to
construct unity between us and create peace.
Just
allow me to explore a little further this fundamental point. Our service to our firends is at the same
time service to God, not in the sense that we answer God's needs, because we
know that God is perfect, God does not have this sense of need of us, but it is
a service of praise to him, a sort of adoration, and act of thanksgiving above
all for all that God is, for all that God is for us, for all that God does for
us. The prayer I desire to make with
you at this Mass is just this: that we may be able to discover in Christ the
face of God and the love of God. In
this way we carry out and put into practice our baptism, our being christian,
and in that way we celebrate a real Eucharist today and all the Masses we
celebrate during WYD until we celebrate the last one with the Holy Father.