1. "The Lord keeps faith forever" (Ps
146: 6).
It is precisely in order to sing of this fidelity of the
Lord recalled just now in the Responsorial Psalm that you are here for
your Jubilee today, dear brothers and sisters. I am therefore delighted
with your beautiful witness, which was expressed a few moments ago by
Bishop Fernando Charrier, whom I cordially thank. A respectful greeting
also goes to the dignitaries who have wished to show their participation
as representatives of various States and especially of the United Nations
Organizations and Offices for Food and Agriculture.
My thoughts turn next to the directors and members of the
National Farmers' Confederation and the other farmers' organizations
present here, as well as to the members of the bakers' federations, of the
food and agro-industrial cooperatives and of the Forest Union of Italy.
Your presence here in such numbers and variety, dear brothers and sisters,
gives us a vivid sense of the unity of the human family and of the
universal dimension of our prayer addressed to the one God, Creator of the
universe and faithful to man.
2. God's faithfulness! For
you, people of the agricultural world, it is a daily experience,
constantly repeated in the observation of nature. You know the language of
the soil and the seeds, of the grass and the trees, of the fruit and the
flowers. In the most varied landscapes, from the harshness of the
mountains to the irrigated plains under the most varied skies, this
language has its own fascination which you know so well. In this language,
you see God's fidelity to what he said on the third day of
creation: "Let the earth put forth vegetation, plants yielding
seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit (Gn 1: 11). In the
movement of nature, which is calm and silent but full of life, the
original pleasure of the Creator is still vibrant: "And God saw that
it was a good thing"! (Gn 1: 12).
Yes, the Lord keeps faith for ever. And you, experts
in this language of fidelity - a language that is ancient but ever new -
are naturally people of gratitude. Your prolonged contact with the wonder
of the earth's products lets you see them as an inexhaustible gift of
divine Providence. This is why your annual day is "thanksgiving day"
par excellence. This year it has an even higher spiritual value
since it is occurring during the Jubilee which celebrates the 2,000th
anniversary of Christ's birth.
You have come to give thanks for the fruits of the earth,
but first of all to acknowledge him as the Creator and, at the same time,
the most beautiful fruit of our earth, the "fruit" of Mary's womb, the
Saviour of humanity and, in a certain sense, of the "cosmos" itself.
Indeed, creation, as Paul says, "has been groaning in travail" and
cherishes the hope of being set free "from its bondage to decay"
(Rom 8: 21-22).
3. The "groaning" of the earth prompts us to think of your
work, dear men and women of agriculture, work that is so important and
yet not free from discomfort and hardship. The passage we heard from
the Book of Kings recalls a typical situation of suffering due to drought.
The prophet Elijah, exhausted from hunger and thirst, is both the agent
and the beneficiary of a miracle of generosity. It fell to a young widow
to rescue him, sharing with him her last handful of flour and the last
drops of her oil; her generosity touches God's heart, to the point that
the prophet can say: "The jar of meal shall not be spent, and the
cruse of oil shall not fail, until the day that the Lord sends rain upon
the earth".
The culture of the farming world has always been marked
by a sense of impending risk to the harvest, due to unforeseeable
climatic misfortunes. However, in addition to the traditional burdens,
there are often others due to human carelessness. Agricultural
activity in our era has had to reckon with the consequences of
industrialization and the sometimes disorderly development of urban areas,
with the phenomenon of air pollution and ecological disruption, with the
dumping of toxic waste and deforestation. Christians, while always
trusting in the help of Providence, must make responsibile efforts to
ensure that the value of the earth is respected and promoted.
Agricultural work should be better and better organized and
supported by social measures that fully reward the toil it involves and
the truly great usefulness that characterizes it.
If the world of the most
refined technology is not reconciled with the simple language of nature in
a healthy balance, human life will face ever greater risks, of which we
are already seeing the first disturbing signs.
4. Therefore, dear
brothers and sisters, be grateful to the Lord, but at the same time be
proud of the task that your work assigns to you.
Work in such a way
that you resist the temptations of a productivity and profit that are
detrimental to the respect for nature. God entrusted the earth to human
beings "to till it and keep it" (cf. Gn 2: 15). When this
principle is forgotten and they become the tyrants rather than the
custodians of nature, sooner or later the latter will rebel.
See also the earlier speech of the Pope from the day before.
But you understand clearly, dear friends, that this
principle of order, which applies to agricultural work as well as to every
other area of human activity, is rooted in the human heart. The
"heart" itself is therefore the first ground to be cultivated.
It was not by chance that, when Jesus wanted to explain the work of
God's word, he used the parable of the sower as an illuminating example
taken from the farming world. God's word is a seed meant to bear abundant
fruit, but unfortunately it often falls on unsuitable ground, where stones
or weeds and thorns - various terms for our sins - prevent it from taking
root and growing (cf. Mt 13: 13-23, par.). Thus, a Father of
the Church gives the following advice precisely to a farmer: "So
when you are in the field and are looking at your farm, consider that you
too are Christ's field and devote attention to yourself as you do to your
field. The same beauty that you require your peasant to give to your
field, give to God in the cultivation of your heart ..." (St Paulinus of
Nola, Letter 39, 3 to Aper and Amanda).
It is because of this "cultivation of the spirit" that you
are here to celebrate the Jubilee today. You present to the Lord, even
before your professional efforts, the daily work of purifying your
heart: a demanding task, which we will never succeed in doing on our
own. Our strength is Christ, who, as the Letter to the Hebrews just
reminded us, "appeared once for all at the end of the age to put away sin
by the sacrifice of himself" (Heb 9: 26).
5. This sacrifice, offered once and for all on Golgotha, is
made real for us every time we celebrate the Eucharist. Here Christ makes
himself present with his body and blood to become our food.
How significant it must be for you, men and women of the
agricultural world, to contemplate on the altar this miracle which crowns
and exalts the very wonders of nature. Is not a miracle worked each day
when a seed becomes an ear of corn and so many grains from it ripen to be
ground and made into bread? Is not the cluster of grapes that hangs on the
branch of the vine one of nature's miracles? All this already mysteriously
bears the mark of Christ, since "all things were made through him, and
without him was not anything made that was made" (Jn 1: 3).
But greater still is the event of grace in which the Word and the Spirit
of God make the bread and wine, "fruit of the earth and work of human
hands", the Body and Blood of the Redeemer. The Jubilee grace that you
have come to implore is none other than a superabundance of Eucharistic
grace, the power that raises us and heals us from within by grafting us on
to Christ.
6. The attitude that we should take towards this grace is
suggested to us by the Gospel example of the poor widow who puts her small
coins into the treasury but in fact gives more than everyone else, since
she is not giving out of her abundance, but is putting in "her whole
living" (Mk 12: 44).
Thus this unknown woman is following in the footsteps of the
widow of Zarephath, who opened her home and her table to Elijah. Both are
sustained by their faith in the Lord. Both draw from faith the strength
for heroic charity.
They invite us to open our Jubilee celebration to the
horizons of love and to see all the poor and needy of this world. What we
do for the least of them we will have done for Christ (cf. Mt
25: 40).
And how could we forget that the sphere of agricultural work
involves human situations that deeply challenge us? Entire peoples, who
depend primarily on farming in economically less developed regions, live
in conditions of poverty. Vast regions have been devastated by frequent
natural disasters. And sometimes these misfortunes are accompanied by the
consequences of war, which not only claims victims, but sows destruction,
depopulates fertile lands and even leaves them overrun with weapons and
harmful substances.
7. The Jubilee began in Israel as a great time for
reconciliation and the redistribution of goods. To accept this message
today certainly cannot mean limiting oneself to a small donation. We must
contribute to a culture of solidarity which, at the political and economic
level, both national and international, encourages generous and effective
initiatives for the benefit of less fortunate peoples.
Today we want to remember all these brothers and sisters in
our prayer, with the intention of expressing our love for them in active
solidarity, so that everyone without exception can enjoy the fruits of
"mother earth" and live lives worthy of God's children.
