Pope Benedict receiving Ashes on Ash Wednesday (In Italy it is custom to receive ashes on the top of the head.) |
"Believing in charity calls forth charity"
“We have come
to know and to believe in the love God has for us” (1 Jn 4:16)
Dear Brothers and Sisters,
The celebration of Lent, in the context of the Year of Faith,
offers us a valuable opportunity to meditate on the relationship between faith
and charity: between believing in God – the God of Jesus Christ – and love,
which is the fruit of the Holy Spirit and which guides us on the path of
devotion to God and others.
1. Faith as a response to the love of God
In my
first Encyclical, I offered some thoughts on the close relationship between
the theological virtues of faith and charity. Setting out from Saint John’s
fundamental assertion: “We have come to know and to believe in the love God has
for us” (1 Jn 4:16), I
observed that “being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty
idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon
and a decisive direction … Since God has first loved us (cf. 1 Jn 4:10), love is now no longer a mere
‘command’; it is the response to the gift of love with which God draws near to
us” (Deus
Caritas Est, 1). Faith is this personal adherence – which involves all
our faculties – to the revelation of God’s gratuitous and “passionate” love for
us, fully revealed in Jesus Christ. The encounter with God who is Love engages
not only the heart but also the intellect: “Acknowledgement of the living God is
one path towards love, and the ‘yes’ of our will to his will unites our
intellect, will and sentiments in the all-embracing act of love. But this
process is always open-ended; love is never ‘finished’ and complete”
(ibid., 17). Hence, for all
Christians, and especially for “charity workers”, there is a need for faith, for
“that encounter with God in Christ which awakens their love and opens their
spirits to others. As a result, love of neighbour will no longer be for them a
commandment imposed, so to speak, from without, but a consequence deriving from
their faith, a faith which becomes active through love” (ibid., 31a). Christians are people who have been
conquered by Christ’s love and accordingly, under the influence of that love –
“Caritas Christi urget nos”
(2 Cor 5:14) – they are
profoundly open to loving their neighbour in concrete ways (cf. ibid., 33). This attitude arises primarily
from the consciousness of being loved, forgiven, and even served by the Lord,
who bends down to wash the feet of the Apostles and offers himself on the Cross
to draw humanity into God’s love.
“Faith tells us that God has given his Son for our sakes and gives
us the victorious certainty that it is really true: God is love! … Faith, which
sees the love of God revealed in the pierced heart of Jesus on the Cross, gives
rise to love. Love is the light – and in the end, the only light – that can
always illuminate a world grown dim and give us the courage needed to keep
living and working” (ibid.,
39). All this helps us to understand that the principal distinguishing mark of
Christians is precisely “love grounded in and shaped by faith” (ibid., 7).
2. Charity as life in faith
The entire Christian life is a response to God’s love. The first
response is precisely faith as the acceptance, filled with wonder and gratitude,
of the unprecedented divine initiative that precedes us and summons us. And the
“yes” of faith marks the beginning of a radiant story of friendship with the
Lord, which fills and gives full meaning to our whole life. But it is not enough
for God that we simply accept his gratuitous love. Not only does he love us, but
he wants to draw us to himself, to transform us in such a profound way as to
bring us to say with Saint Paul: “it is no longer I who live, but Christ who
lives in me” (cf. Gal 2:20).
When we make room for the love
of God, then we become like him, sharing in his own charity. If we open
ourselves to his love, we allow him to live in us and to bring us to love with
him, in him and like him; only then does our faith become truly “active through
love” (Gal 5:6); only then does he abide in us (cf. 1 Jn 4:12).
Faith is knowing the truth and
adhering to it (cf. 1 Tim
2:4); charity is “walking” in the truth (cf. Eph 4:15). Through faith we enter into friendship
with the Lord, through charity this friendship is lived and cultivated (cf.
Jn 15:14ff). Faith causes us
to embrace the commandment of our Lord and Master; charity gives us the
happiness of putting it into practice (cf. Jn 13:13-17). In faith we are begotten as children
of God (cf. Jn 1:12ff);
charity causes us to persevere concretely in our divine sonship, bearing the
fruit of the Holy Spirit (cf. Gal
5:22). Faith enables us to recognize the gifts that the good and generous
God has entrusted to us; charity makes them fruitful (cf. Mt 25:14-30).
3. The indissoluble interrelation of faith and charity
In light of the above, it is clear that we can never separate, let
alone oppose, faith and charity. These two theological virtues are intimately
linked, and it is misleading to posit a contrast or “dialectic” between them. On
the one hand, it would be too one-sided to place a strong emphasis on the
priority and decisiveness of faith and to undervalue and almost despise concrete
works of charity, reducing them to a vague humanitarianism. On the other hand,
though, it is equally unhelpful to overstate the primacy of charity and the
activity it generates, as if works could take the place of faith. For a healthy
spiritual life, it is necessary to avoid both fideism and moral activism.
The Christian life consists in continuously scaling the mountain
to meet God and then coming back down, bearing the love and strength drawn from
him, so as to serve our brothers and sisters with God’s own love. In sacred
Scripture, we see how the zeal of the Apostles to proclaim the Gospel and awaken
people’s faith is closely related to their charitable concern to be of service
to the poor (cf. Acts 6:1-4).
In the Church, contemplation and action, symbolized in some way by the Gospel
figures of Mary and Martha, have to coexist and complement each other (cf.
Lk 10:38-42). The relationship
with God must always be the priority, and any true sharing of goods, in the
spirit of the Gospel, must be rooted in faith (cf. General
Audience,
25 April 2012). Sometimes we tend, in fact, to reduce the term “charity” to
solidarity or simply humanitarian aid. It is important, however, to remember
that the greatest work of charity is evangelization, which is the “ministry of
the word”. There is no action more beneficial – and therefore more charitable –
towards one’s neighbour than to break the bread of the word of God, to share
with him the Good News of the Gospel, to introduce him to a relationship with
God: evangelization is the highest and the most integral promotion of the human
person. As the Servant of God Pope Paul VI wrote in the Encyclical Populorum
Progressio, the proclamation of Christ is the first and principal
contributor to development (cf. n. 16). It is the primordial truth of the love
of God for us, lived and proclaimed, that opens our lives to receive this love
and makes possible the integral development of humanity and of every man (cf.
Caritas
in Veritate, 8).
Essentially, everything
proceeds from Love and tends towards Love. God’s gratuitous love is made known
to us through the proclamation of the Gospel. If we welcome it with faith, we
receive the first and indispensable contact with the Divine, capable of making
us “fall in love with Love”, and then we dwell within this Love, we grow in it
and we joyfully communicate it to others.
Concerning the relationship
between faith and works of charity, there is a passage in the Letter to the Ephesians which provides
perhaps the best account of the link between the two: “For by grace you have
been saved through faith; and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God;
not because of works, lest anyone should boast. For we are his workmanship,
created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we
should walk in them” (2:8-10). It can be seen here that the entire redemptive
initiative comes from God, from his grace, from his forgiveness received in
faith; but this initiative, far from limiting our freedom and our
responsibility, is actually what makes them authentic and directs them towards
works of charity. These are not primarily the result of human effort, in which
to take pride, but they are born of faith and they flow from the grace that God
gives in abundance. Faith without works is like a tree without fruit: the two
virtues imply one another. Lent invites us, through the traditional practices of
the Christian life, to nourish our faith by careful and extended listening to
the word of God and by receiving the sacraments, and at the same time to grow in
charity and in love for God and neighbour, not least through the specific
practices of fasting, penance and almsgiving.
4. Priority of faith, primacy of charity
Like any gift of God, faith and charity have their origin in the
action of one and the same Holy Spirit (cf. 1 Cor 13), the Spirit within us that cries out
“Abba, Father” (Gal 4:6), and
makes us say: “Jesus is Lord!” (1
Cor 12:3) and “Maranatha!” (1
Cor 16:22; Rev
22:20).
Faith, as gift and response, causes us to know the truth of Christ
as Love incarnate and crucified, as full and perfect obedience to the Father’s
will and infinite divine mercy towards neighbour; faith implants in hearts and
minds the firm conviction that only this Love is able to conquer evil and death.
Faith invites us to look towards the future with the virtue of hope, in the
confident expectation that the victory of Christ’s love will come to its
fullness. For its part, charity ushers us into the love of God manifested in
Christ and joins us in a personal and existential way to the total and
unconditional self-giving of Jesus to the Father and to his brothers and
sisters. By filling our hearts with his love, the Holy Spirit makes us sharers
in Jesus’ filial devotion to God and fraternal devotion to every man (cf.
Rom 5:5).
The relationship between these two virtues resembles that between
the two fundamental sacraments of the Church: Baptism and Eucharist. Baptism
(sacramentum fidei) precedes
the Eucharist (sacramentum
caritatis), but is ordered to it, the Eucharist being the fullness of the
Christian journey. In a similar way, faith precedes charity, but faith is
genuine only if crowned by charity. Everything begins from the humble acceptance
of faith (“knowing that one is loved by God”), but has to arrive at the truth of
charity (“knowing how to love God and neighbour”), which remains for ever, as
the fulfilment of all the virtues (cf. 1 Cor 13:13).
Dear brothers and sisters, in this season of Lent, as we prepare
to celebrate the event of the Cross and Resurrection – in which the love of God
redeemed the world and shone its light upon history – I express my wish that all
of you may spend this precious time rekindling your faith in Jesus Christ, so as
to enter with him into the dynamic of love for the Father and for every brother
and sister that we encounter in our lives. For this intention, I raise my prayer
to God, and I invoke the Lord’s blessing upon each individual and upon every
community!
BENEDICTUS PP. XVI
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