The Lord Is Close to His Creatures, Entering into Space and Time

Benedict XVI

The Lord Is Close
to His Creatures, Entering
into Space and Time

General Audience,
Wednesday, November 9, 2005
Holy Father’s Address

It is called “the great Hallel,” the solemn and magnificent praise that Judaism sang during the Passover liturgy. We are speaking of Psalm 136, the first part of which we have listened to just now, according to the division proposed by the Liturgy of Vespers (cf v. 1-9).
Let us consider first of all the refrain: “His mercy endures forever.” At the center of the sentence rings the word “mercy,” a legitimate but limited translation of the original Hebrew word hesed. In fact, it is part of the characteristic language used by the Bible to express the alliance between the Lord and His people. The term tries to express the attitudes that are established within this relationship: the faithfulness, loyalty, love, and, evidently, mercy of God.

God and His Creatures
We have here the summary portrait of the profound and interpersonal bond the Creator establishes with His creature. Within this relationship, God does not appear in the Bible as an impassive, implacable Lord, nor as a dark and inscrutable being, like Fate, against whose mysterious force it is useless to fight. Instead, He manifests Himself as a person who loves His creatures, watches over them, follows them along the road of history, and suffers because of the unfaithfulness with which the people often oppose His hesed, His merciful and fatherly love.
The first visible sign of this divine charity–says the Psalmist–can be sought in creation. Then, history will form the scene. The gaze, overflowing with admiration and wonder, falls first of all on creation: the heavens, earth, waters, sun, moon, and stars.
Even before discovering the God who reveals Himself in the history of a people, there is a cosmic revelation, open to all, offered to all of humanity by the one Creator, “God of gods” and “Lord of lords” (cf. v. 2-3).
As Psalm 19 sings, “The heavens proclaim the glory of God and the firmament shows forth the work of His hands. Day unto day takes up the story and night unto night makes known the message” (v. 2-3). Thus, there is a divine message, secretly incised in creation and sign of the hesed, the loving faithfulness of God, who gives His creatures being and life, water and food, light and time.

Greatness and Beauty
We need to have clear eyes to contemplate this divine unveiling, remembering the admonition of the Book of Wisdom: “For from the greatness and the beauty of created things their original author, by analogy, is seen.” (Wis 13:5; Rom 1:20). Prayerful praise flowers from the contemplation of the “marvelous works” of God (cf. Ps 136:4) unfurled in creation, becoming a joyful hymn of praise and thanksgiving to the Lord.
So from created works, we ascend to the greatness of God, His loving mercy. This is what the Fathers of the Church teach us, in whose voice reverberates the constant Christian Tradition.
Thus, Saint Basil, in one of the initial pages of his first homily on Hexaemeron, in which he comments on the story of creation, according to the first chapter of Genesis, stops to dwell upon the wise action of God, acknowledging in the divine goodness the propelling center of creation. Here are some expressions taken from the long reflection of the saintly Bishop of Caeserea of Cappadocia: “‘In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.’ My word surrenders, overwhelmed by amazement at this thought” (1,2,1: On Genesis [Homilies on Hexaemeron V], Milan, 1990, pp. 9-11). In fact, even if “some, misled by the atheism they carried within, imagined the universe void of guidance and order, in the hands of chance,” the sacred writer instead “immediately cleared our minds with the name of God at the beginning of the story, saying, ‘In the beginning God created.’ And what beauty in this order!” (1,2,4: ibid., p. 11). “If therefore the world has a principle, and it was created, seek the one who began it, and who is its Creator… Moses came before you with his teaching, impressing on our souls as a seal and phylactery the most holy name of God, when he said, ‘In the beginning God created.’ The blessed nature, the goodness without envy, He who is the object of the love of all reasonable beings, the beauty more desirable than any other, the principle of beings, the source of life, the light of the intellect, the inaccessible wisdom, He, in short, ‘in the beginning, created the heavens and the earth’” (1,2,6-7: ibid., p. 13).

The Word of God
I find that the words of this fourth century Father of the Church are of a surprising modernity when he says, “some, misled by the atheism they carried within, imagined the universe void of guidance and order, in the hands of chance.” There are so many such people today! Misled by atheism, they hold and try to demonstrate that it is scientific to think that everything lacks guidance and order, and is in the hands of chance. The Lord wakes up our sleeping reason with the Sacred Scripture, and tells us that in the beginning, there was the creating Word. In the beginning, the creating Word–this Word that created everything, that created this intelligent project that is the cosmos–is also love.
Therefore, let us be awakened by this Word of God; let us pray that it clear our minds, too, so that we may perceive the message of creation–inscribed also in our hearts–that the principle of everything is the creating Wisdom, and this Wisdom is love, is goodness: “His mercy is everlasting.”

General Audience,
Wednesday, November 16, 2005
Holy Father’s Address

Our reflection returns to the hymn of praise of Psalm 136 that the Liturgy of Vespers proposes in two parts, following the specific distinction that the composition offers on the thematic level. In fact, the celebration of the works of the Lord is delineated in two spheres, those of space and time.

The history of salvation
The first part (cf. v. 1-9), the object of our meditation last week, focused on the divine acts displayed in creation: they gave rise to the wonders of the universe. Thus, this part of the Psalm proclaims faith in God the creator, who reveals Himself through His cosmic creatures. Now, instead, the Psalmist’s joyful song, called by Jewish tradition “the great Hallel,” the highest praise raised up to the Lord, leads us to a different horizon, that of history. We know that biblical Revelation repeatedly proclaims that the saving presence of God is manifested in a particular way in the history of salvation (cf. Deut. 26:5-9; Gen. 24:1-13).
Thus, the person in prayer sees unfolding before him the liberating actions of the Lord, the heart of which is the fundamental event of the exodus from Egypt. This is profoundly connected to the troubled journey in the Sinai Desert, ending ultimately in the Promised Land, the divine gift that Israel continues to experience in all the pages of the Bible.
The celebrated crossing of the Red Sea, “divided in two,” almost ripped apart and overcome like a vanquished monster (cf. Ps 136:13), gives birth to a people that is free and called to a mission and a glorious destiny (cf. v. 14-15; Ex. 15:1-21), which will have its Christian reading in the full liberation from evil with the grace of baptism (cf. 1 Cor 10:1-4). Thus, the itinerary in the desert begins. The Lord is portrayed as a warrior who, continuing the work of liberation begun in the crossing of the Red Sea, fights in defense of His people, striking their adversaries. The desert and the sea, then, represent the passage through evil and oppression, to receive the gift of freedom and the Promised Land (cf. Ps 136:16-20).
In the closing, the Psalm turns to the land the Bible exalts enthusiastically as “a good country, a land with streams of water, with springs and fountains welling up in the hills and valleys, a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, of olive trees and of honey, a land where you can eat bread without stint and where you will lack nothing, a land whose stones contain iron and in whose hills you can mine copper.” (Deut 8:7-9).

The divine gift
This emphatic celebration, which goes beyond the reality of that land, seeks to exalt the divine gift. A gift that permits the people to be free, a gift that is born–as repeated in the antiphon punctuating every verse–of the hesed of the Lord, that is, of His “mercy,” of His faithfulness to the commitment made in the alliance with Israel, of His love that continues to be revealed through His “remembering us” (cf. Ps 136:23). In the time of “our abjection,” in successive trials and oppressions, Israel will always discover the saving hand of the God of freedom and love. In the time of hunger and misery, as well, the Lord will enter upon the scene to give food to all flesh, confirming His identity as creator (cf. v. 25).

The supreme sign of His love
Thus, Psalm 136 intertwines two modalities of the one divine Revelation, the cosmic (cf. . 4-9) and the historical (cf. v. 10-25). Certainly, the Lord is transcendent as creator and arbiter of being; but He is also near His creatures, entering into space and time. In fact, His presence among us reaches its apex in the Incarnation of Christ.
This is what the Christian reading of the Psalm proclaims clearly, as attested by the Fathers of the Church who see the summit of the history of salvation and the supreme sign of the merciful love of the Father in the gift of His Son, as Savior and Redeemer of humanity (cf. Jn 3:16).
Thus, Saint Cyprian, beginning his treatise on The Works of Charity and Almsgiving, contemplates with wonder the works God has done in Christ His Son for His people, breaking into a passionate acknowledgment of His mercy. “Dearest brothers, many and great are the benefits of God, that the generous and copious goodness of God the Father and Christ has done and will always do for our salvation. In fact, to preserve us, to give us a new life and to enable us to be redeemed, the Father sent His Son. The Son, who was sent, also wanted to be called the Son of Man, to make us the sons of God: He humiliated Himself, to raise up the people lying in the dirt; He was wounded to heal our wounds; He became a slave to lead to freedom those of us who were slaves. He accepted death, to be able to offer immortality to mortals. These are the many and great gifts of divine mercy” (1: Treatises: Series of Patristic Texts, CLXXV, Rome, 2004, p. 108).