The German Sunday newspaper Welt am Sonntag, associated with the German newspaper Die Welt, published today the German version of one of the sermons that the Pope Emeritus delivered after his resignation during private Sunday celebrations in the chapel of the Mater Ecclesiae monastery. Below you will find the full text
Father Federico Lombardi, president of the Ratzinger Foundation, explained that it is a collection of “private” sermons by Benedict XVI. recorded and transcribed by the “Memores Domini”, the consecrated women who lived with him. The collection contains over thirty sermons in Italian from the years of the pontificate and over a hundred from the first years after his resignation. Father Lombardi will soon publish it in a volume with Libreria Editrice Vaticana. The following sermon was preached for the Fourth Sunday of Advent, December 22, 2013, and is primarily dedicated to the figure of Saint Joseph, featured in the day's Gospel text.
BENEDICT XVI
Dear friends,
In addition to Mary, Mother of the Lord, and St. John the Baptist, the liturgy today presents us with a third figure in which Advent is almost a person, a figure that includes Advent: St. Joseph. As we reflect on the text of the Gospel, I believe we can see three essential elements of this vision.
The first and crucial thing is that St. Joseph is called “a righteous man.” For the Old Testament, this is the maximum characterization of a person who truly lives according to the Word of God, who lives the covenant with God.
To understand this well, we need to think about the difference between the Old and New Testaments.
The fundamental act of a Christian is the encounter with Jesus, in Jesus with the Word of God, who is a person. Through the encounter with Jesus we encounter the truth, the love of God and so the friendship relationship becomes love, our fellowship with God grows, we are true believers and we become saints.
The fundamental act in the Old Testament is different, because Christ was still in the future and therefore should at most meet Christ, but it was not yet a real encounter as such. The Word of God in the Old Testament essentially has the form of the law – “Torah”. God leads, that is the meaning, God shows us the way. It is an educational path that shapes people according to God and enables them to encounter Christ. In this sense, this righteousness, this life according to the law, is a path to Christ, an extension of him; but the fundamental act is obeying the Torah, the law, and thus being “righteous.”
Saint Joseph is a righteous man, still an example of the Old Testament.
But here lies a danger and at the same time a promise, an open door.
The danger appears in Jesus' conversations with the Pharisees and especially in the letters of Saint Paul. The danger is that if the Word of God is essentially law, it should be viewed as a sum of commands and prohibitions, a set of rules, and the attitude should therefore be to observe the rules and thus be correct . But if religion is like that, then it is just like that: the personal relationship with God does not arise, and man remains within himself and tries to perfect himself, to be perfect. But this is how bitterness arises, as we see in the second part of the parable of the prodigal son, who, after observing everything, ends up bitter and even a little envious of his brother, who, in his opinion, had life in abundance . This is the danger: simply following the law becomes impersonal, simply acting makes people hard and even bitter. In the end he cannot love this God who presents himself only with rules and sometimes even with threats. That is the danger.
Instead, the promise is: We can also see these regulations, not just as a code, as a set of rules, but as an expression of the will of God, in which God speaks to me, I speak to him. By entering this law, I enter into dialogue with God, I get to know the face of God, I begin to see God and so I am on the way to the Word of God personally, to Christ. And a true righteous person like Saint Joseph is like this: for him the law is not just the observance of rules, but presents itself as a word of love, an invitation to dialogue, and life according to the word enters into this dialogue and behind to find the love of God in the norms and in the norms, to understand that all these norms do not apply in themselves, but are rules of love, they serve to ensure that love grows in me. This is how we understand that ultimately all law is only love for God and neighbor. Once this was established, the entire law was complied with. When someone lives in this dialogue with God, a dialogue of love, in which he seeks the face of God, in which he seeks love and makes it clear that everything is dictated by love, he is on the way to Christ, he is really fair. Saint Joseph is a truly just man, therefore in him the Old Testament becomes the New, because in words he seeks God, the person, he seeks his love, and every observance is a life of love.
We see it in the example that this Gospel offers us. Saint Joseph, who is betrothed to Mary, learns that she is expecting a child. We can imagine his disappointment: he knew this girl and the depth of her relationship with God, her inner beauty, the extraordinary purity of her heart; He saw the love of God and the love of his word, his truth shining through in this girl and is now seriously disappointed. What to do? Here the law offers two possibilities in which the two paths appear, the dangerous, fatal and the auspicious. He can sue in court and thus expose Maria to shame and destroy her as a person. You can do this privately with a separation letter. And St. Joseph, a true just man, although he suffered greatly, comes to the decision to follow this path, which is a path of love in justice, of justice in love, and St. Matthew tells us that he fought internally with himself with the word. In this struggle, on this path to understand the true will of God, he found the unity between love and norm, between justice and love, and so on his way to Jesus he is open to the appearance of the angel, open to that God gives him the knowledge that it is a work of the Holy Spirit.
St. Hilary of Poitier in the 4th century, when dealing with the fear of God, said at the end: “All our fear is in love,” it is just an aspect, a nuance of love. So we can say for ourselves here: The whole law lies in love, it is an expression of love and must be fulfilled by entering into the logic of love. And here we must remember that for us Christians there is the same temptation, the same danger as in the Old Testament: a Christian can also come to an attitude in which the Christian religion is viewed as a package of rules, prohibitions and positive norms, regulations . One may come to the idea that it is only a matter of carrying out impersonal prescriptions and thus perfecting oneself, but in this way one empties one's personal fund of the Word of God and leads to a certain bitterness and hardness of heart. In the history of the church we see it in Jansenism. We all know this danger, we also know personally that we must overcome this danger again and again and find the way of life and the joy of faith in love for the person. Being righteous means finding this path, and so in reality we are always on the journey from the Old to the New Testament in search of the person, the face of God in Christ. That's exactly what Advent is: turning away from the pure norm towards an encounter with love, turning away from the Old Testament, which becomes the New.
This is therefore the first and fundamental element of the figure of Saint Joseph as he appears in today's Gospel. Now two very brief words about the second and third elements.
The second: He sees the angel in the dream and listens to his message. This requires an inner sensitivity to God, an ability to perceive the voice of God, a gift of discrimination that knows how to distinguish between dreams that are dreams and a true encounter with God. Only because Saint Joseph was already on the way to being the person of the Word, to the Lord, to the Savior, could he recognize; God was able to speak to him and he understood: This is not a dream, it is truth, it is the appearance of his angel. And so he was able to recognize and decide.
This sensitivity to God is also important for us, this ability to perceive that God is speaking to me and this ability to discern. Of course, God doesn't normally speak to us the way he spoke to Joseph through the angel, but he also has his own way of speaking to us. They are gestures of God's tenderness that we must perceive in order to find joy and consolation, they are words of invitation, of love, even of request when we meet people who are suffering, who need a word or a concrete gesture from me , an event. Here we must be sensitive, know the voice of God, understand that God is speaking to me now, and respond.
And so we arrive at the third point: Saint Joseph's response to the angel's word is faith and then obedience, fact. Faith: He understood that this was really the voice of God, it was not a dream. Faith becomes the foundation on which I can act and live. It means recognizing that this is the voice of God, an imperative of love that guides me on the path of life, and then doing the will of God. Saint Joseph was not a dreamer, even though the dream was the door through which God entered his life. He was a practical and sober man, a decisive man who was able to organize. I think it was not easy to find it in Bethlehem, because there was no room in the houses, the stable as a discreet and protected place and, despite the poverty, worthy of the birth of the Savior. Organizing the escape to Egypt, finding somewhere to sleep every day, living for a long time: this required a practical man with a sense of action who was able to respond to challenges and find ways to survive. And then on his return, the decision to return to Nazareth to establish the home of the Son of God here also shows that he was a practical man who lived as a carpenter and made everyday life possible.
So, on the one hand, Saint Joseph invites us to this inner journey in the Word of God in order to grow ever closer to the Lord as a person, but at the same time he also invites us to a sober life, to work and to daily service to fulfill our duty on a large scale Mosaic of history.
We thank God for the beautiful figure of Saint Joseph. Let us pray: “Lord, help us to be open to You, to find more and more Your face, to love You, to find love in the norm, to be rooted and fulfilled in love.” Open us to the gift of discernment, for the ability to listen to you and for the sobriety of living according to your will and our calling.” Amen!