Focusing on God's love and thirst

In his Lenten Message for 2007, Pope Benedict XVI invites Christians to reflect on the mysterious depth of Christ's love for mankind, exhibited on the Cross. The theme of this year's Lenten Message is "They shall look on Him whom they have pierced". The Pope, in this message, followed the lead he had given in his encyclical Deus caritas est and concentrated on God's love.

The tone and content of the message is consequently different from similar messages in previous years. In such messages for Lent the Popes have usually concentrated on almsgiving and other works of charity and on the social commitment of Christians. In this year's message, however, Pope Benedict moved the emphasis from the horizontal dimension of love to its vertical dimension and places his focus squarely on God.

As Archbishop Josef Cordes, the president of the Pontifical Council Cor Unum, noted when presenting the message to the press, this year's Lenten message has "not an anthropocentric but a theocentric emphasis". Archbishop Cordes suggested that the Pope had concentrated on the "theocentric" dimension of faith in his message because "God seems to be the great missing presence of our time, whether man knows it or not".

Archbishop Cordes indicated that this was why the Pope's Lenten Message concentrates on the love of God rather than on almsgiving and corporal works of mercy. "The absence of God," he said, "is worse than material poverty because it kills all sure hope and leaves man alone with his pain and grief".

Retracing the theme of his encyclical Deus caritas est, the Pope observes that God's love for mankind includes the two forms of love: agape and eros.

Agape, the Pope explains, is "the self-giving love of one who looks exclusively for the good of the other. The word eros, on the other hand, denotes the love of one who desires to possess what one lacks and yearns for union with the beloved."

God's love for man is clearly agape, in that man has nothing to give back to God, except what God has given him. "But God's love is also eros," the Pope continues, in that the Almighty "awaits the 'Yes' of his creatures, as a young bridegroom that of his bride".

Quoting Pseudo-Dionysius, a Byzantine theologian and mystic who lived between the fifth and sixth centuries, the Pope says: "Eros is indeed that force that does not allow the lover to remain in himself but moves him to become one with the beloved.

"Is there more 'mad eros' than that which led the Son of God to make himself one with us even to the point of suffering as his own the consequences of our offences?"

This Lent, "let us look at Christ pierced on the cross!" the Pope wrote. "On the cross, it is God himself who begs the love of his creature: He is thirsty for the love of every one of us... In all truth, only the love that unites the free gift of oneself with the impassioned desire for reciprocity instils a joy, which eases the heaviest of burdens... The response the Lord ardently desires of us is above all that we welcome his love and allow ourselves to be drawn to him."

The Pope's message, which can be downloaded from the Vatican's Web-site (www.vatican.va) emphasises the vertical aspect of the relationship between God and humans. It uses this emphasis to move on to the horizontal aspect, i.e. love for one another.

"Accepting his love, however, is not enough," Benedict XVI continues. "We need to respond to such love and devote ourselves to communicating it to others. Christ 'draws me to himself' in order to unite himself to me, so that I learn to love the brothers with his own love." During Lent, the Pope concludes, the faithful should strive to respond more completely to God's love, "to come out of ourselves in order to open ourselves, in trustful abandonment, to the merciful embrace of the Father". Our response, the Pope adds, will impel us towards charity for others, and lead us "to fight every form of contempt for life and human exploitation and to alleviate the tragedies of loneliness and abandonment of so many people".

The Pope concludes: "May Lent be for every Christian a renewed experience of God's love given to us in Christ, a love that each day we, in turn, must "re-give" to our neighbour, especially to the one who suffers most and is in need. Only in this way will we be able to participate fully in the joy of Easter."

The Pope did not forget the importance of loving our neighbour. He gave this duty and need an added dimension thus strengthening it in the process.