meditation of the day

The Everlasting Substance of Priestly Ministry

I have no silver and gold, but I give you what I have, in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth: rise and walk (Acts 3:6). This validly describes the substance of priestly ministry for all ages. Our task is not to change the world materially. In a time when we sense so deeply the material need…a time in which only what is quantifiable matters—that is, something you can reckon and calculate and take in hand as a fact—we have to resist the temptation to transform the priesthood too into social service and political action, so as finally to give something tangible, something “real,” so to speak. Gradually we notice that man hungers not only for bread and money, but also in fact hungers for a word, for the word in which we give a piece of ourselves, in which we give love—the real gift by which man lives…. We have—and this is the greatness of the priestly mission—more to give…. To give the name of Jesus Christ is the everlasting substance of priestly ministry.

Again and again it moves me deeply while distributing Holy Communion when I can say and must say: “The Body of Christ.” When we give people something that is infinitely more than all that I myself am and have. When I can give them much more than I could ever give as a man, when I have the privilege of placing the living God himself onto their hands and into their heart. And it is an unheard-of thing to be able to say in the sacrament of reconciliation, “I absolve you.”… This is precisely what it means to give the name of Jesus, to give Jesus himself, and to say: “You are free; your guilt does not matter anymore, the burden of your past has been taken from you, you can stand and go your way and can go to God and can leap and sing praise.” And what an unheard-of thing it is also to have the privilege at the hour of death of giving the anointing that leads to resurrection, to make the resurrection present as the one real answer to death, so that in this hour, too, in which the final earthly lameness occurs, we can say: “Stand up. You will rise, and you will go your way, and you will look into the eyes of your God, and you will praise him, and no one will ever take your freedom from you again.”

To give the name of Jesus. This presupposes, of course, that we ourselves are standing in the name of Jesus, that he is invoked over us. And here the most profound mystery of priestly ordination becomes visible. No one can speak in the name of Jesus on his own. He alone can empower us to do so. I have put my words in your mouth, God said to Jeremiah at the beginning of his vocation (Jer 1:9). This is exactly what he is saying [at ordination]: “I put my words in your mouth. You will and may speak my words. You will say: This is my Body! This is my Blood! And you will say: I absolve you!”

Pope Benedict XVI

Benedict XVI († 2022) reigned as pope from 2005 until 2013. / From Teaching and Learning the Love of God: Being a Priest Today: Selected Writings, Michael J. Miller, Tr. © 2017, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, CA. www.ignatius.com. Used with permission.