Another Day's Reflections on the Papal Lenten Retreat

The Papal Lenten Retreat is about to come to a end. I have posted on what has been said at them here at Another Day On the Pope's Lenten Retreat . Thanks again to the Ratzinger Forum for the translation from the Italian Vatican Radio News Service.

In the Old Testament, full communication between man and God - considered an unapproachable Presence - was impossible, but Christ, dying for mankind, has allowed man to come close to the Lord. Since then, the way to God is shown us through faith, hope and charity. These were the central considerations in the final meditations on St. Paul's Letter to the Hebrews offered today by Cardinal Albert VanHoye, on the sixth day of the annual Lenten spiritual exercises for the Holy Father and the Roman Curia.

Christians have always lived a privileged condition compared to the relationship with God that the Jews of the Old Testament had. The condition is having discovered the nearness and fatherhood of God, not his distant and unsayable power, as in the Old Testament. Cardinal VanHoye said that the last chapters, starting from Chapter 10, of the Letter to the Hebrews, contain the heart of this question.

As Christians, he said, we have the right of entry to the heavenly sanctuary, and not only 'trust' that we have it, as some translations put it: It is our right to be part of the divine family founded on the blood shed by Jesus. It is this supreme sacrificial offering, the retreat master said, that marks the profound innovation of Christianity compared to the Old Alliance, when the acient Jews, with their rigid rituality, interposed innumerable degrees of separation between man and God. "I

n the Old Alliance, there was a separation even between the people and their priests. The people were never authorized to enter the Temple itself - they could only be in the courtyards. "And then came the separation between the priests and their High Priest. The priests could enter the temple, but not its holiest part. Tthere was also a separation between the priest and his offering. The priest could not offer himself because he was not worthy nor able. He had to offer an animal as a sacrificial victim, but an animal cannot sanctify the priest.

Finally, there was the separation between the sacrificial victim and God. An animal cannot enter into communion with God. "Now, however, through Christ's offering of himself, all believers have the right to enter the sanctuary - not the false sanctuaries, made by the hands of man, but the true sanctuary, which is intimacy with God." What St. Paul affirms in the Letter to the Hebrews, said Cardinal VanHoye, is the existence not of distance but of confidence between man and God, a trust obtained by the redemptive death of Christ and his glorified humanity. Such confidence invites us to 'come close' to God with a pure heart, to do that which in the past was inconceivable and forbidden.

The Alliance is new because it was created by Christ's death - it did not exist before that. Compared to the ancient Jews, to find the will of God means, for the Christian, no longer conforming to a fixed code, but to search for 'continuous creation' - a fact, said the cardinal, that the priest with his pastoral responsibilities should always be conscious of doing. Since the novelty of Christianity is an inexhaustible fountain, it should always be proclaimed to the world, based on the virtues of faith, hope and charity rather than on moralizing sermons: "Sometimes, Christian preachers make too many moral exhortations and not enough theological ones, which are more important. St. Paul names the theological virtues - faith, hope and charity.

He could have named the moral or cardinal virtues but he did not, because they do not have a direct bearing on the New Alliance. The ancient Jews were concerned above all with observing well all the commandments and traditions. The New Alliance does not insist so much on the laws to follow but exhorts us to have faith, hope and charity." With the second morning meditation, the Jesuit cardinal concluded his reflections on the Letter to the Hebrews and its solemn closing centered on the Resurrection and the eternal Alliance. He reviewed the successive levels of learning Christian doctrine, starting from initial understanding of the Resurrection of Jesus as a simple restitution of life by the Father to his Son, to seeing it as the fruit of intervention by the Holy Spirit, the vital breath of God.

Cardinal VanHoye dwelt on the link made by Paul's Letter between the Vital Spirit and Blood, the latter already considered holy by the ancients and the Bible as the bearer of the breath of life. This was correct intuition, he said, because science has shown that blood serves to oxygenate the body, and so it does bring the 'breath' of respiration to the cells. "Just as we breath the air to oxygenate our blood and make it capable of renewing life in all the cells of our body, Christ during his Passion breathed in the Holy Spirit through his intense prayer. To conquer his human fear of death, He prayed, and received the Holy Spirit, which entered his humanity and made him offer his own life as a gift of love. We might say that in the Passion, the Blood of Christ was permeated by the Holy Spirit, thereby acquiring the capacity to communicate new life and establish the New Alliance."

Reflecting on the new relationship thus established between God and man through Christ, St. Paul also had another intuition, Cardinal VanHoye pointed out, that expressed a truth of Christianity that had never been expressed till then: He not only wished all Christians to do the will of God but also that God himself does with us what is pleasing to him: "This indicated, I think, the most profound element of the New Alliance - the fact that what we receive is God's own action. In the Old Alliance, God prescribed what had to be done, through an external law. This kind of alliance did not work, because man is not capable by his own powers to fulfill the will of God. That is why the Lord had to establish a New Alliance.

He promised to write his law in the heart of man, giving him a new heart with his Spirit... "And so, the New Alliance does not only consist of receiving the laws of God within our heart, but also to receive his action in us." The Cardinal said that even in the Gospel of St. John, Christ speaks of his own works as a gift of the Father. The same must be said for Christians, who have been accompanied since the foundation of the Church by the certainty, expressed by Jesus, of being able to perform works even greater than he did - which means, works fulfilled by Christ through man's intelligence, generosity and dedication." (The Lenten exercises will come to a close tomorrow morning. Traditionally, the Holy Father offers a concluding reflection. By tradition, during the whole retreat, he sits in an adjoining room with the door opening towards the front of the chapel, from where the retreat master addresses the rest of the retreatants.) .