Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
Vatican City (Agenzia Fides) – After expressing new year greetings to visitors gathered in the Paul VI Audience Hall, - “only if we are united with Jesus, the new year will be good and happy ” – the Holy Father Benedict XVI devoted his teaching during the first general audience of 2009, on Wednesday 7 January, to Christian worship, according to the teaching of St Paul. “ Paul sees in the cross of Christ, a historic turning point, which radically transforms and renews the reality of worship” the Pope said and reflected on three parts of the Letter to the Romans where we find this new vision of worship.
In the first passage (Romans 3,25) Saint Paul refers to the rite in which on the great day of reconciliation, the cover of the Arc of the Covenant, considered the point of contact between God and man, was aspersed with the blood of the sacrificed animals, “blood which – the Pope explained - symbolically brought the sins of the past year into contact with God and so the sins thrown into the abyss of divine goodness were almost absorbed by God's power, forgotten, forgiven. Life began all over again. Saint Paul mentions this rite and says: "the rite was an expression of the desire that our faults could be flung into the abyss of divine mercy and so disappear. But this process cannot be achieved with the blood of animals. What was necessary was truer contact between human faults and divine love. This contact happened in the cross of Christ ”. The Holy Father went on to recall that according to the Apostle, “With the cross of Christ – the supreme act of divine love – the old worship with the sacrifice of animals in the temple in Jerusalem came to an end. That symbolic worship of desire, was replaced with true worship: God's love incarnate in Christ and brought to completion in death on the cross … the cross of Christ, his love with flesh and blood is the true worship, corresponding to the reality of God and of humanity”.
The second part of the Letter to the Romans on which the Pope dwelt during his catechesis, was verse one, chapter 12: " I urge you, then, brothers, remembering the mercies of God, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, dedicated and acceptable to God; that is the kind of worship for you, as sensible people ". “The encouragement to ‘offer your bodies' – Pope Benedict XVI explained - refers to the whole person… it is a question of honouring God in our daily concrete life, facts of relational and perceptible visibility. This behaviour is described by Paul as a ‘living sacrifice, dedicated and acceptable to God’.” Correctly used the word “sacrifice” means the slaughtering of an animal in a sacred context. Whereas Paul applies it to the life of the Christian using three adjectives: "living" expressing vitality; "dedicated" recalls Paul's idea of holiness not connected with places or objects, but with the Christian's own person; "acceptable to God" recalls perhaps the frequent biblical expression of a sacrifice "of soave odour”. Immediately after this, Paul describes this new way of living "your spiritual worship". Despite difficulties and incompleteness in the translation, the Pope concluded, we can say that “whatever the case, this sort of worship rather than less real or even metaphoric, is instead more concrete and realistic – worship in which the whole human person, gifted with reason, becomes adoration, glorification of the living God”.
Describing some aspects of religious experience in the centuries before Christ, the Pope mentioned strong criticism in the Prophets and many Psalms with regard to bloody sacrifices in the Temple. “In the destruction of the sanctuary and worship, in a situation of privation of all signs of God's presence, the believer offers as a true holocaust, a contrite heart – his longing for God. We note an important development, beautiful but dangerous. There is a spiritualisation, a moralisation of worship: worship belongs only to the heart, to the spirit. But the body, the community, is missing”. Saint Paul “is the heir to these developments, of a longing for true worship, in which man becomes the glory of God, living adoration with all his being… But here there is also a danger of misunderstanding: this new worship could easily be interpreted in a moralistic sense: offering our life we offer true worship. In this way worship with animals would be replaced with moralism: man would act on his own, with his moral force. This was certainly not the intention of Saint Paul”. Paul always holds that we are "one in Christ Jesus ", we died in baptism and we now live with Christ, for Christ, in Christ. “In this union – and only in this union – we become in Him and with Him, a ‘living sacrifice', offering ‘true worship'. Sacrificed animals were meant to take the place of man, the gift of self. Jesus Christ, with his donation of self to the Father and to us, is not a replacement, within himself he truly carries the human person, our faults and our longing; he truly represents us, he assumes us into himself. In communion with Christ, achieved in faith and in the sacraments, despite all our failings, we become a living sacrifice: this is "true worship"… The Church knows that in the Most Holy Eucharist, the self-giving of Christ, his sacrifice is truly present. But the Church prays that the celebrating community may be truly united to Christ, transformed; she prays that we may become something which we cannot become with our own strength alone: a "rationable" offering pleasing to God.”
The last passage of the Letter to the Romans examined by the Holy Father, was taken from chapter 15, and the Pope dwelt on two aspects: “Firstly, Saint Paul interprets his missionary activity among the peoples of the world in order to build up the universal Church as a priestly activity. Announcing the Gospel to unite the nations in communion with the Risen Christ, is a 'priestly' action. The apostle of the Gospel is a true priest, acting at the centre of the priesthood, he prepares the true sacrifice. The second aspect: the goal of missionary activity is– we might say – a cosmic liturgy: that all peoples united in Christ, may, as such, become the glory of God … Christ's self giving implicates the tendency to draw everyone into the communion of his Body, to unite the world. Only in communion with Christ, the exemplary Man, one with God, can the world become as we all desire it to be: a reflection of divine love”. (S.L.) (Agenzia Fides 8/1/2009; righe 68, parole 1.076)
