At Wednesday’s audience, Pope Francis says we have access to the Trinity through prayer, thanks to Jesus.
By Christopher Wells
“It is Jesus who opened the sky to us and projected us into a relationship with God,” Pope Francis said at Wednesday’s general audience. “Jesus has revealed to us the identity, this identity of God, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.”
The Holy Father continued his ongoing catechesis on prayer, focusing this week and the next, on the relationship between prayer and the Trinity. It is thanks to Jesus Christ, said the Pope, “that prayer opens us to the immense sea of God as love.”
Our poverty before God
The Pope noted that not all prayers are the same and suggests that “perhaps sometimes God does not conform to our prayers, we are not even aware of them.” He quotes the words of Saint Francis of Assisi in the song of the sun: “No man is worthy to mention your name”; as well as the words of the centurion of the Gospel: “Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof,” which we repeat at every Mass.
“There are no obvious reasons” why “humanity should be so loved by God” or why it should listen to our prayers, the Pope said. He noted that throughout history, people have seen gods or deities as distant and indifferent, without worrying about human affairs. “In any case,” he said, “it is we who try to convince the divinity and be pleasing to his eyes.”
“A God who loves humanity”
Only through Jesus do we have the “courage” to believe in a God who loves humanity, the Pope said. We see the love of God in the parables of the merciful father and the shepherd who goes in search of the lost sheep.
But Pope Francis said, “We could not have conceived or included these stories if we had not known Jesus.”
It is through his life, and his will to die for us, that Jesus shows us “the extent to which God is our Father … the fatherhood that is closeness, compassion, and tenderness.”
We cannot understand the mutual love of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit in the Trinity, said Pope Francis, and without Jesus we could not have begun to understand “that this divine love would expand, landing on our shores human “.
Quoting the catechism, Pope Francis explained: “The sacred humanity of Jesus is, therefore, the way in which the Holy Spirit teaches us to pray to God, our Father.” This, he concluded, “is the grace of our faith. We really could not expect a higher vocation: the humanity of Jesus puts at our disposal the very life of the Trinity. “