Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
Vatican City (Fides Service) – On Wednesday 3 December during his general audience in the Paul VI Hall, Pope John Paul II reflected on Psalm 113 prayed at Vespers in the evening prayer of the Church: “marvellous exodus from Egypt”. “the joyful and triumphant song we have just heard proclaimed, evokes Israel’s exodus from Egyptian oppression – the Pope explained -. Christianity assumed Psalm 113a with the same Paschal connotation while opening it to a new reading deriving from the resurrection of Christ. The exodus celebrated in the Psalm becomes therefore a figure of another more radical and universal liberation.”
Describing the thematic and spiritual path of this composition, the Pope said that after evoking Israel’s exodus from Egyptian oppression the author proclaims of the wonders God has worked for his people. “The Red Sea of the exodus from Egypt and the Jordan of the entrance to the Holy Land are personified and transformed in witnesses and instruments which participate in the liberation operated by the Lord”. In the last part of the Psalm another significant event of Israel’s wandering in the desert is introduced, the water flowing from the rock: “God transforms the rock into a source of water which becomes a lake: at the basis of this miracle lies his paternal concern for his people. The act acquires then a symbolic significance: it is a sign of the saving love of the Lord who sustains and regenerates humanity as it advances in the desert of history. As we know Saint Paul used this image and, on the basis of a Jewish tradition according to which the rock accompanied Israel on its journey through the desert, we re-read the event in a Christological key: «They all drank of the same spiritual drink: they drink in fact from a spiritual rock which accompanied them and that rock was Christ».”(S.L.) (Fides Service 3/12/2003 – lines 22; words 309)
