“Let us pray for peace, at a moment in history that seems marked by a growing loss of the value of human dignity and in which war has come back into fashion”. This was the appeal made by Pope Leo XIV at the end of today’s Audience, during his greetings to Portuguese pilgrims. “May the humanity of Jesus, who reveals the Father, help us to find paths of justice and reconciliation”, the Pope said, having once again devoted his catechesis — delivered in the Paul VI Audience Hall — to the conciliar constitution Dei Verbum on Divine Revelation.
During his greetings, reference was also made to the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. “Let us ask the Lord to bestow the gift of His Spirit upon all the Churches scattered throughout the world so that, through it, Christians may overcome division and form strong bonds of unity”, he urged the Italian-speaking faithful. Shortly before, Pope Leo XIV had greeted German-speaking pilgrims, encouraging them to pray that “all His disciples may find unity, so that the world may believe in Him and in His revelation”.
Reciprocity and communion. “Jesus Christ reveals the Father through His humanity”: this was the core of the catechesis, centred on the word “reciprocity” as the secret of the relationship between the Son and the Father, and between ourselves and God through the Son. “Precisely because He is the incarnate Word who dwells among men, Jesus reveals God to us through His true and integral humanity”, Pope Leo XIV explained. “To see Jesus is to see His Father”, the Council says. “For this reason, Jesus perfected revelation by fulfilling it through his whole work of making Himself present and manifesting Himself: through His words and deeds, His signs and wonders, but especially through His death and glorious resurrection from the dead and final sending of the Spirit of truth”.
“To know God in Christ, we must accept His integral humanity”,
the Pope urged. “God’s truth is not fully revealed where it takes something away from the human, just as the integrity of Jesus’ humanity does not diminish the fullness of the divine gift. It is the integral humanity of Jesus that tells us the truth of the Father”.
Jesus has a body. “It is not only the Death and Resurrection of Jesus that save us and call us together, but His very person: the Lord who becomes incarnate, is born, heals, teaches, suffers, dies, rises again and remains among us”, the Pontiff warned.
“To honour the greatness of the Incarnation, it is not enough to consider Jesus as a channel for the transmission of intellectual truths”,
the Pope observed. “If Jesus has a real body, the communication of God’s truth takes place in that body, with its own way of perceiving and feeling reality, with its own way of inhabiting the world and passing through it”.
“Jesus reveals the Father to us by involving us in His own relationship with Him”, Pope Leo recalled. “In the Son sent by God the Father, man might in the Holy Spirit have access to the Father and come to share in the divine nature”, he continued, citing the conciliar text. “Therefore, we reach full knowledge of God by entering into the Son’s relationship with His Father, by virtue of the action of the Spirit”.
Children in the Son. “Thanks to Jesus, we know God as we are known by Him”: these words were devoted to the centrality of the mediation of the Son. “In Christ, God has communicated Himself to us and, at the same time, He has manifested to us our true identity as His children, created in the image of the Word. This eternal Word enlightens all men, revealing their truth in the gaze of the Father”.
“Your Father, who sees in secret, will reward you”, Jesus says, according to the Gospel of Matthew, adding that “your Father knows what you need”. “Jesus Christ is the place where we recognise the truth of God the Father, while at the same time discovering ourselves known by Him as His children in the Son, called to the same destiny of fullness of life”, the Pontiff commented, citing Saint Paul: “When the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, so that we might receive adoption as children. And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’”.
It is Jesus Himself, in other words, who “invites us to share his perception of reality: ‘Look at the birds of the air’, he says, ‘they neither sow, nor reap, nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?’”. “By following the path of Jesus to the very end, we come to the certainty that nothing can separate us from God’s love”, the Pontiff concluded. “Through Jesus, the Christian knows God the Father and entrusts himself to Him with confidence”.
