Homily at the Orthodox Divine Liturgy
During the 14th Plenary Session of
the Joint International Commission of Theological Dialogue between the Roman
Catholic and Orthodox Churches
Manoppello Sanctuary, September 18, 2016.
Eminences, Excellences, Reverend Fathers, Dear
brothers and sisters in Christ,
On this Sunday after the feast of the
Exaltation of the Holy Cross, we heard the words of our Lord and Saviour Jesus
Christ addressed to each one of us: “If
anyone wishes to come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and
follow me” (Mk 8:34). By His sacrifice on the Cross, our Lord and Saviour
has offered himself once for all for the salvation of all, as we read in the
Epistle to the Hebrews: “having been
offered once to bear the sins of many” (Hb 9:28).
The mystery of our salvation has been
accomplished by the sacrifice of Christ on the Golgotha and through His
Resurrection. This event became the foundation of our faith as well as the
central event of our ecclesial life. Through baptism, which is our
incorporation to Christ and our entrance into this ecclesial life, we have
participated in mystery in the death of Christ and in His Resurrection, and we
have “put on Christ” (Ga 3:27).
Therefore, we can appropriate to ourselves the words of Saint Paul in today’s
epistle: “I have been crucified with
Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me; and the life I
now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave
himself for me” (Ga 2:20).
As Saint John Chrysostom has noted, our Lord
and Saviour Jesus Christ does not oblige us, neither constrain us to be saved,
but invites us, through our free-will, to participate in His heritage. “If anyone wishes to come after me…” He
says! In order to follow Him, we need to renounce to three things: first to
deny ourselves, secondly to take our cross, and thirdly to follow Him.
To deny ourselves means to leave out our
individualism, our egoism, and our egocentrism, which according to His
Beatitude Archbishop Anastasios of Albania is the greatest problem and danger
in the ecclesial life. To take our cross means to be ready to die for Christ,
to be a martyr, that is to be a witness for Christ and for His Gospel. We must
therefore be courageous in the testimony we bring about Christ in our
contemporary society. To follow Christ means to practice and to incarnate in
our life all the Christian virtues, so that we might say that is no longer we
who live, but Christ who lives in us (Ga 2:20).
Thus, by choosing freely to follow Christ,
putting aside our egoism and egocentrism, being ready to witness Christ by
every little deed in our daily life and reflecting thus the image of Christ
around us, we will progress with Him on the path towards His Kingdom.
Today, with the blessing and on the invitation
of His Eminence Archbishop Bruno Forte, the local archpastor of the local Roman
Catholic diocese, we, the Orthodox members of the Joint International
Commission of Theological Dialogue between the Roman Catholic and the Orthodox Churches
have the great blessing to celebrate this Divine Liturgy here, in this
sanctuary of Manoppello, where the holy relic of the image of Christ not made
by human hands is kept since the beginning of the XVIth century.
According to some scholars, this veil
corresponds to the soudarion, the
cloth mentioned in the Gospel of John, that had been wrapped around Jesus’ head
and that was lying separate from the linen in the empty tomb, after His
Resurrection (Jn 20:7). According to another tradition, recorded in the Acta Pilati, this would be the holy face
of Christ printed on a veil, the veil of Veronica. On the way to the Golgotha,
Veronica encountered Christ and gave him a veil to wipe off the blood and
sweat, and the image of His face was then imprinted on the cloth.
Venerating this holy relic of the Passion and
of the Resurrection of Christ, which unites East and West, Jerusalem and
Manopello, we are invited to encounter Christ by being His true disciples, by
denying ourselves, taking our cross and following Him. We are called to receive
Him in the Eucharist, and therefore, the sad situation that we, divided
Christians, cannot share the same Chalice, as it is the case today at this
Divine Liturgy, is a scandal and a wound in the Body of Christ that must be
healed.
A very important and significant event in that
perspective was the lifting up of the anathemas of 1054 between the Churches of
Rome and Constantinople at the end of the Second Vatican Council on December 7,
1965. Since that significant event, our Churches are now standing in the
situation they were before the imposition of the anathemas, that is a state of
rupture of communion (akoinonesia),
due to historical events and theological disputes. This state of rupture of
communion has to be resolved through the theological dialogue our Churches have
engaged into since 1980, which has precisely as a goal the restauration of the
full communion between our sister Churches, through the resolution of
theological disagreements.
As the Holy and Great Council of the Orthodox
Church has declared last June, “the
Orthodox Church, which prays unceasingly for the union of all, has always
cultivated dialogue with those estranged from her, (…) she has played a leading
role in the contemporary search for ways and means to restore the unity of
those who believe in Christ. (…) The contemporary bilateral theological
dialogues of the Orthodox Church and her participation in the Ecumenical
Movement rest on this self-consciousness of Orthodoxy and her ecumenical
spirit, with the aim of seeking the unity of all Christians on the basis of the
truth of faith and Tradition of the ancient Church of the seven Ecumenical
Councils” (Relations, 4-5). This is why the Holy and Great Council has also
underlined that “the Orthodox Church considers
all efforts to break the unity of the Church, undertaken by individuals or
groups under the pretext of maintaining or allegedly defending true Orthodoxy,
as being worthy of condemnation” (Ibid.,
22).
Eminences, Excellences, Reverend Fathers, Dear
brothers and sisters in Christ,
It is in this spirit that we, the Orthodox
members of the Joint International Commission of Theological Dialogue between
the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church have come together with our
Roman Catholic brothers and sisters to Chieti, and are now working together
towards a common understanding of synodality and primacy, one of the most
delicate questions in the relationship between our two sister Churches.
May the Lord, whose image not made by human
hands we venerate and who invites all of us to deny ourselves, take our cross
and follow him, inspire our work for the unity and the glory of His Church, and
for the salvation of His people. To Him, glory and adoration to the ages of
ages. Amen.
— Archbishop
Job of Telmessos
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