FOR THE TWENTY-NINTH WORLD YOUTH DAY
Palm Sunday, 13 April 2014
"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the
kingdom of heaven” (Mt 5:3)
Dear Young Friends,
How vividly I recall the remarkable meeting we had in Rio de
Janeiro for the Twenty-eighth World Youth Day. It was a great celebration of
faith and fellowship! The wonderful people of Brazil welcomed us with open
arms, like the statue of Christ the Redeemer which looks down from the hill of
Corcovado over the magnificent expanse of Copacabana beach. There, on the
seashore, Jesus renewed his call to each one of us to become his missionary
disciples. May we perceive this call as the most important thing in our lives
and share this gift with others, those near and far, even to the distant
geographical and existential peripheries of our world.
The next stop on our intercontinental youth pilgrimage will
be in Krakow in 2016. As a way of accompanying our journey together, for the
next three years I would like to reflect with you on the Beatitudes found in
the Gospel of Saint Matthew (5:1-12). This year we will begin by reflecting on
the first Beatitude: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom
of heaven” (Mt 5:3). For 2015 I suggest: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for
they shall see God” (Mt 5:8). Then, in 2016, our theme will be: “Blessed are
the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy” (Mt 5:7).
1. The revolutionary power of the Beatitudes
It is always a joyful experience for us to read and reflect
on the Beatitudes! Jesus proclaimed them in his first great sermon, preached on
the shore of the sea of Galilee. There was a very large crowd, so Jesus went up
on the mountain to teach his disciples. That is why it is known as “the Sermon
on the Mount”. In the Bible, the mountain is regarded as a place where God
reveals himself. Jesus, by preaching on the mount, reveals himself to be a
divine teacher, a new Moses. What does he tell us? He shows us the way to life,
the way that he himself has taken. Jesus himself is the way, and he proposes
this way as the path to true happiness. Throughout his life, from his birth in
the stable in Bethlehem until his death on the cross and his resurrection,
Jesus embodied the Beatitudes. All the promises of God’s Kingdom were fulfilled
in him.
In proclaiming the Beatitudes, Jesus asks us to follow him
and to travel with him along the path of love, the path that alone leads to
eternal life. It is not an easy journey, yet the Lord promises us his grace and
he never abandons us. We face so many challenges in life: poverty, distress,
humiliation, the struggle for justice, persecutions, the difficulty of daily
conversion, the effort to remain faithful to our call to holiness, and many
others. But if we open the door to Jesus and allow him to be part of our lives,
if we share our joys and sorrows with him, then we will experience the peace
and joy that only God, who is infinite love, can give.
The Beatitudes of Jesus are new and revolutionary. They
present a model of happiness contrary to what is usually communicated by the
media and by the prevailing wisdom. A worldly way of thinking finds it
scandalous that God became one of us and died on a cross! According to the
logic of this world, those whom Jesus proclaimed blessed are regarded as
useless, “losers”. What is glorified is success at any cost, affluence, the
arrogance of power and self-affirmation at the expense of others.
Jesus challenges us, young friends, to take seriously his
approach to life and to decide which path is right for us and leads to true
joy. This is the great challenge of faith. Jesus was not afraid to ask his
disciples if they truly wanted to follow him or if they preferred to take
another path (cf. Jn 6:67). Simon Peter had the courage to reply: “Lord, to
whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” (Jn 6:68). If you too are
able to say “yes” to Jesus, your lives will become both meaningful and
fruitful.
2. The courage to be happy
What does it mean to be “blessed” (makarioi in Greek)? To be
blessed means to be happy. Tell me: Do you really want to be happy? In an age
when we are constantly being enticed by vain and empty illusions of happiness,
we risk settling for less and “thinking small” when it comes to the meaning of
life. Think big instead! Open your hearts! As Blessed Piergiorgio Frassati once
said, “To live without faith, to have no heritage to uphold, to fail to
struggle constantly to defend the truth: this is not living. It is scraping by.
We should never just scrape by, but really live” (Letter to I. Bonini, 27
February 1925). In his homily on the day of Piergiorgio Frassati’s
beatification (20 May 1990), John Paul II called him “a man of the Beatitudes”
(AAS 82 [1990], 1518).
If you are really open to the deepest aspirations of your
hearts, you will realize that you possess an unquenchable thirst for happiness,
and this will allow you to expose and reject the “low cost” offers and
approaches all around you. When we look only for success, pleasure and
possessions, and we turn these into idols, we may well have moments of
exhilaration, an illusory sense of satisfaction, but ultimately we become
enslaved, never satisfied, always looking for more. It is a tragic thing to see
a young person who “has everything”, but is weary and weak.
Saint John, writing to young people, told them: “You are
strong, and the word of God abides in you, and you have overcome the evil one”
(1 Jn 2:14). Young people who choose Christ are strong: they are fed by his
word and they do not need to ‘stuff themselves’ with other things! Have the
courage to swim against the tide. Have the courage to be truly happy! Say no to
an ephemeral, superficial and throwaway culture, a culture that assumes that
you are incapable of taking on responsibility and facing the great challenges
of life!
3. Blessed are the poor in spirit...
The first Beatitude, our theme for the next World Youth Day,
says that the poor in spirit are blessed for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
At a time when so many people are suffering as a result of the financial
crisis, it might seem strange to link poverty and happiness. How can we
consider poverty a blessing?
First of all, let us try to understand what it means to be
“poor in spirit”. When the Son of God became man, he chose the path of poverty
and self-emptying. As Saint Paul said in his letter to the Philippians: “Let
the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the
form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied
himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in human likeness” (2:5-7).
Jesus is God who strips himself of his glory. Here we see God’s choice to be
poor: he was rich and yet he became poor in order to enrich us through his
poverty (cf. 2 Cor 8:9). This is the mystery we contemplate in the crib when we
see the Son of God lying in a manger, and later on the cross, where his
self-emptying reaches its culmination.
The Greek adjective ptochós (poor) does not have a purely
material meaning. It means “a beggar”, and it should be seen as linked to the
Jewish notion of the anawim, “God’s poor”. It suggests lowliness, a sense of
one’s limitations and existential poverty. The anawim trust in the Lord, and
they know that they can count on him.
As Saint Therese of the Child Jesus clearly saw, by his
incarnation Jesus came among us as a poor beggar, asking for our love. The
Catechism of the Catholic Church tells us that “man is a beggar before God”
(No. 2559) and that prayer is the encounter of God’s thirst and our own thirst
(No. 2560).
Saint Francis of Assisi understood perfectly the secret of
the Beatitude of the poor in spirit. Indeed, when Jesus spoke to him through
the leper and from the crucifix, Francis recognized both God’s grandeur and his
own lowliness. In his prayer, the Poor Man of Assisi would spend hours asking
the Lord: “Who are you?” “Who am I?” He renounced an affluent and carefree life
in order to marry “Lady Poverty”, to imitate Jesus and to follow the Gospel to
the letter. Francis lived in imitation of Christ in his poverty and in love for
the poor – for him the two were inextricably linked – like two sides of one
coin.
You might ask me, then: What can we do, specifically, to make
poverty in spirit a way of life, a real part of our own lives? I will reply by
saying three things.
First of all, try to be free with regard to material things.
The Lord calls us to a Gospel lifestyle marked by sobriety, by a refusal to
yield to the culture of consumerism. This means being concerned with the essentials
and learning to do without all those unneeded extras which hem us in. Let us
learn to be detached from possessiveness and from the idolatry of money and
lavish spending. Let us put Jesus first. He can free us from the kinds of
idol-worship which enslave us. Put your trust in God, dear young friends! He
knows and loves us, and he never forgets us. Just as he provides for the lilies
of the field (cf. Mt 6:28), so he will make sure that we lack nothing. If we
are to come through the financial crisis, we must be also ready to change our
lifestyle and avoid so much wastefulness. Just as we need the courage to be
happy, we also need the courage to live simply.
Second, if we are to live by this Beatitude, all of us need
to experience a conversion in the way we see the poor. We have to care for them
and be sensitive to their spiritual and material needs. To you young people I
especially entrust the task of restoring solidarity to the heart of human
culture. Faced with old and new forms of poverty – unemployment, migration and
addictions of various kinds – we have the duty to be alert and thoughtful,
avoiding the temptation to remain indifferent. We have to remember all those
who feel unloved, who have no hope for the future and who have given up on life
out of discouragement, disappointment or fear. We have to learn to be on the
side of the poor, and not just indulge in rhetoric about the poor! Let us go
out to meet them, look into their eyes and listen to them. The poor provide us
with a concrete opportunity to encounter Christ himself, and to touch his
suffering flesh.
However – and this is my third point – the poor are not just
people to whom we can give something. They have much to offer us and to teach
us. How much we have to learn from the wisdom of the poor! Think about it:
several hundred years ago a saint, Benedict Joseph Labré, who lived on the
streets of Rome from the alms he received, became a spiritual guide to all
sorts of people, including nobles and prelates. In a very real way, the poor
are our teachers. They show us that people’s value is not measured by their
possessions or how much money they have in the bank. A poor person, a person
lacking material possessions, always maintains his or her dignity. The poor can
teach us much about humility and trust in God. In the parable of the pharisee
and the tax-collector (cf. Lk 18:9-14), Jesus holds the tax-collector up as a
model because of his humility and his acknowledgment that he is a sinner. The
widow who gave her last two coins to the temple treasury is an example of the
generosity of all those who have next to nothing and yet give away everything
they have (Lk 21:1-4).
4. … for theirs is the kingdom of heaven
The central theme of the Gospel is the kingdom of God. Jesus
is the kingdom of God in person; he is Immanuel, God-with-us. And it is in the
human heart that the kingdom, God’s sovereignty, takes root and grows. The
kingdom is at once both gift and promise. It has already been given to us in
Jesus, but it has yet to be realized in its fullness. That is why we pray to
the Father each day: “Thy kingdom come”.
There is a close connection between poverty and
evangelization, between the theme of the last World Youth Day – “Go therefore,
and make disciples of all nations!” (Mt 28:19) – and the theme for this year:
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Mt 5:3).
The Lord wants a poor Church which evangelizes the poor. When Jesus sent the
Twelve out on mission, he said to them: “Take no gold, nor silver, nor copper
in your belts, no bag for your journey, nor two tunics, nor sandals, nor a
staff; for the labourers deserve their food” (Mt 10:9-10). Evangelical poverty
is a basic condition for spreading the kingdom of God. The most beautiful and
spontaneous expressions of joy which I have seen during my life were by poor
people who had little to hold onto. Evangelization in our time will only take
place as the result of contagious joy.
We have seen, then, that the Beatitude of the poor in spirit
shapes our relationship with God, with material goods and with the poor. With
the example and words of Jesus before us, we realize how much we need to be
converted, so that the logic of being more will prevail over that of having
more! The saints can best help us to understand the profound meaning of the
Beatitudes. So the canonization of John Paul II, to be celebrated on the Second
Sunday of Easter, will be an event marked by immense joy. He will be the great
patron of the World Youth Days which he inaugurated and always supported. In the
communion of saints he will continue to be a father and friend to all of you.
This month of April marks the thirtieth anniversary of the
entrustment of the Jubilee Cross of the Redemption to the young. That symbolic
act by John Paul II was the beginning of the great youth pilgrimage which has
since crossed the five continents. The Pope’s words on that Easter Sunday in
1984 remain memorable: “My dear young people, at the conclusion of the Holy
Year, I entrust to you the sign of this Jubilee Year: the cross of Christ!
Carry it throughout the world as a symbol of the love of the Lord Jesus for
humanity, and proclaim to everyone that it is only in Christ, who died and rose
from the dead, that salvation and redemption are to be found”.
Dear friends, the Magnificat, the Canticle of Mary, poor in
spirit, is also the song of everyone who lives by the Beatitudes. The joy of
the Gospel arises from a heart which, in its poverty, rejoices and marvels at
the works of God, like the heart of Our Lady, whom all generations call
“blessed” (cf. Lk 1:48). May Mary, Mother of the poor and Star of the new evangelization
help us to live the Gospel, to embody the Beatitudes in our lives, and to have
the courage always to be happy.
Francis
© Copyright - Libreria Editrice Vaticana
