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| JUBILEE | 2000 |
Lent 2000
by Pope John Paul II
I am with you always, to the close of the age (Mt 28:20).
Dear Brothers and Sisters,
1. This year, the celebration of Lent, a time of conversion and reconciliation, takes on a
particular character, occurring as it does during the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000. The
time of Lent is in fact the culminating point of the journey of conversion and
reconciliation which the Jubilee, the year of the Lord’s favour, offers to all the
faithful, so that they can renew their fidelity to Christ and proclaim his mystery of
salvation with renewed ardour in the new millennium. Lent helps Christians to enter more
deeply into this “mystery hidden for ages” (Eph 3:9): it leads them to come face
to face with the word of the living God and urges them to give up their own selfishness in
order to receive the saving activity of the Holy Spirit.
2. We were dead through sin (cf. Eph 2:5): this is how Saint Paul describes the situation
of man without Christ. This is why the Son of God wished to unite himself to human nature,
ransoming it from the slavery of sin and death.
This is a slavery which man experiences every day, as he perceives its deep roots in his
own heart (cf. Mt 7:11). Sometimes it shows itself in dramatic and unusual ways, as
happened in the course of the great tragedies of the twentieth century, which deeply
marked the lives of countless communities and individuals, the victims of cruel violence.
Forced deportations, the systematic elimination of peoples, contempt for the fundamental
rights of the person: these are the tragedies which even today humiliate humanity. In
daily life too we see all sorts of forms of fraud, hatred, the destruction of others, and
lies of which man is both the victim and source. Humanity is marked by sin. Its tragic
condition reminds us of the cry of alarm uttered by the Apostle to the nations: “None
is righteous, no, not one” (Rom 3:10; cf. Ps 14:3).
3. In the face of the darkness of sin and man’s incapacity to free himself on his
own, there appears in all its splendour the saving work of Christ: “God appointed him
as a sacrifice for reconciliation, through faith, by the shedding of his blood, and so
showed his justness” (Rom 3:25). Christ is the Lamb who has taken upon himself the
sin of the world (cf. Jn 1:29). He shared in human life “unto death, even death on a
cross” (Phil 2:8), to ransom mankind from the slavery of evil and restore humanity to
its original dignity as children of God. This is the paschal mystery in which we are
reborn. Here, as the Easter Sequence says, “Death with life contended, combat
strangely ended.” The Fathers of the Church affirm that in Christ Jesus, the devil
attacks the whole of humanity and ensnares it in death, from which however it is freed
through the victorious power of the Resurrection. In the Risen Lord death’s power is
broken and mankind is enabled, through faith, to enter into communion with God. To those
who believe, God’s very life is given, through the action of the Holy Spirit, the
“first gift to those who believe” (Eucharistic Prayer IV). Thus the redemption
accomplished on the Cross renews the universe and brings about the reconciliation of God
and man, and of people with one another.
4. The Jubilee is the time of grace in which we are invited to open ourselves in a
particular way to the mercy of the Father, who in the Son has stooped down to man, and to
reconciliation, the great gift of Christ. This year therefore should become, not only for
Christians but also for all people of good will, a precious moment for experiencing the
renewing power of God’s forgiving and reconciling love. God offers his mercy to
whoever is willing to accept it, even to the distant and doubtful. The people of our time,
tired of mediocrity and false hopes, are thus given an opportunity to set out on the path
that leads to fullness of life. In this context, Lent of the Holy Year 2000 is par
excellence “the acceptable time . . . the day of salvation” (2 Cor 6:2), the
particularly favourable opportunity “to be reconciled to God” (2 Cor 5:20).
During the Holy Year the Church offers various opportunities for personal and community
reconciliation. Each Diocese has designated special places where the faithful can go in
order to experience a particular presence of God, by recognizing in his light their own
sinfulness, and though the Sacrament of Reconciliation to set out on a new path of life.
Particular significance attaches to pilgrimage to the Holy Land and to Rome, which are
special places of encounter with God, because of their unique role in the history of
salvation. How could we fail to set out, at least spiritually, to the Land which two
thousand years ago witnessed the passage of the Lord? There “the Word became
flesh” (Jn 1:14) and “increased in wisdom and in stature, and in favour with God
and man” (Lk 2:52); there he “went about all the cities and villages . . .
preaching the gospel of the Kingdom and healing every disease and every infirmity”
(Mt 9:35); there he accomplished the mission entrusted to him by the Father (cf. Jn 19:30)
and poured out the Holy Spirit upon the infant Church (cf. Jn 20:22).
I too hope, precisely during Lent of the year 2000, to be a pilgrim in the Holy Land, to
the places where our faith began, in order to celebrate the two-thousandth Jubilee of the
Incarnation. I invite all Christians to accompany me with their prayers, while I myself,
on the various stages of the pilgrimage, shall ask for forgiveness and reconciliation for
the sons and daughters of the Church and for all humanity.
5. The path of conversion leads to reconciliation with God and to fullness of new life in
Christ. A life of faith, hope and love. These three virtues, known as the
“theological” virtues because they refer directly to God in his mystery, have
been the subject of special study during the three years of preparation for the Great
Jubilee. The celebration of the Holy Year now calls every Christian to live and bear
witness to these virtues in a fuller and more conscious way.
The grace of the Jubilee above all impels us to renew our personal faith. This consists in
holding fast to the proclamation of the Paschal Mystery, through which believers recognize
that in Christ crucified and risen from the dead they have been given salvation. Day by
day they offer him their lives; they accept everything that the Lord wills for them, in
the certainty that God loves them. Faith is the “yes” of individuals to God, it
is their “Amen.”
For Jews, Christians and Muslims alike, Abraham is the exemplar of the believer: trusting
in the promise, he follows the voice of God calling him to set out on unknown paths. Faith
helps us to discover the signs of God’s loving presence in creation, in people, in
the events of history and above all in the work and message of Christ, as he inspires
people to look beyond themselves, beyond appearances, towards that transcendence where the
mystery of God’s love for every creature is revealed.
Through the grace of the Jubilee, the Lord likewise invites us to renew our hope. In fact,
time itself is redeemed in Christ and opens up to a prospect of unending joy and full
communion with God. For Christians, time is marked by an expectation of the eternal
wedding feast, anticipated daily at the Eucharistic table. Looking forward to the eternal
banquet “the Spirit and Bride say: ‘Come’ ” (Rev 22:17), nurturing the
hope that frees time from mere repetition and gives it its real meaning. Through the
virtue of hope, Christians bear witness to the fact that, beyond all evil and beyond every
limit, history bears within itself a seed of good which the Lord will cause to germinate
in its fullness. They therefore look to the new millennium without fear, and face the
challenges and expectations of the future in the confident certainty which is born of
faith in the Lord’s promise.
Through the Jubilee, finally, the Lord asks us to rekindle our charity. The Kingdom which
Christ will reveal in its full splendour at the end of time is already present where
people live in accordance with God’s will. The Church is called to bear witness to
the communion, peace and charity which are the Kingdom’s distinguishing marks. In
this mission, the Christian community knows that faith without works is dead (cf. Jas
2:17). Thus, through charity, Christians make visible God’s love for man revealed in
Christ, and make manifest Christ’s presence in the world “to the close of the
age.” For Christians, charity is not just a gesture or an ideal but is, so to speak,
the prolongation of the presence of Christ who gives himself.
During Lent, everyone — rich and poor — is invited to make Christ’s love
present through generous works of charity. During this Jubilee Year our charity is called
in a particular way to manifest Christ’s love to our brothers and sisters who lack
the necessities of life, who suffer hunger, violence or injustice. This is the way to make
the ideals of liberation and fraternity found in the Sacred Scripture a reality, ideals
which the Holy Year puts before us once more. The ancient Jewish jubilee, in fact, called
for the freeing of slaves, the cancellation of debts, the giving of assistance to the
poor. Today, new forms of slavery and more tragic forms of poverty afflict vast numbers of
people, especially in the so-called Third World countries. This is a cry of suffering and
despair which must be heard and responded to by all those walking the path of the Jubilee.
How can we ask for the grace of the Jubilee if we are insensitive to the needs of the
poor, if we do not work to ensure that all have what is necessary to lead a decent life?
May the millennium which is beginning be a time when, finally, the cry of countless men
and women — our brothers and sisters who do not have even the minimum necessary to
live — is heard and finds a benevolent response. It is my hope that Christians at
every level will become promoters of practical initiatives to ensure an equitable
distribution of resources and the promotion of the complete human development of every
individual.
6. “I am with you always, to the close of the age.” These words of Jesus assure
us that in proclaiming and living the Gospel of charity we are not alone. Once again,
during this Lent of the year 2000, he invites us to return to the Father, who is waiting
for us with open arms to transform us into living and effective signs of his merciful
love.
To Mary, Mother of all who suffer and Mother of Divine Mercy, we entrust our intentions
and our resolutions. May she be the bright star on our journey in the new millennium.
With these sentiments I invoke upon everyone the blessings of God, One and Triune, the
beginning and the end of all things, to whom we raise “to the close of the age”
the hymn of blessing and praise in Christ: “Through him, with him, in him, in the
unity of the Holy Spirit, all glory and honour is yours, Almighty Father, for ever and
ever. Amen.”
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