The Pope's Sunday Homily, translated in full

I have translated the entire homily:

Dear sisters and brothers!

First of all I want to heartily welcome you all: I am happy to be able to be with you again, to celebrate Mass ("Gottesdienst" = "God's service") with you; that I am able to one more time visit those familiar sites that have shaped my life, my thinking and feeling; the places where I learned to believe and live.

It is an opportunity to thank all those people, living and passed on, who have guided and accompanied me. I thank God for my beautiful native land ("Heimat") and for the people who made it and make it home.

We have just heard the three readings that the liturgy selected for this Sunday. All three are marked by a dual topic. of which the accentuate one or the other aspect more, but in the end it is one unified theme. All three readings speak of God as the center of reality and as center of our own life. "Behold, God is here!" Isaiah calls out to us.

The Letter of St. James and the Gospel say the same thing in their own way. They want to lead us to God and thereby lead us on the right path. Tied to the topic of God is a social theme, our responsibility for one another, for the rule of justice and love in the world.

This is expressed dramatically where James, a close relative of Jesus, speaks to us. He is talking to a community, in which people are beginning to be prideful, because there too are rich and prominent people, while the care for the rights of the poor seems to atrophy. James lets the image of Jesus shine through in his words, of the God who became man and despite being of Davidic ie. royal descent, became a simple man among simple people, who did not ascend a throne but in the end died in the final poverty of the Cross.

Love of one's fellow man, which is primarily concern for justice, is the crucible of faith and love of God. James calls it the "royal law". He lets shine through Jesus' favorite term - the Kingdom of God, the Reign of God. This does not refer to just any kingdom that will appear one fine day but rather that God must become decisive for our lives and deeds.

This is what we ask for when we say: Thy kingdom come; we are not praying for something distant that we ourselves do not even want to experience in our lifetime. We rather pray that God's will may determine our lives now and that thereby God may reign in the world; we pray that love and what is right may become decisive in the order of the world. Such a plea is certainly directed first at God, but it also stirs our own heart. Do we even want that? Do we live with this orientation ?

James calls the "royal law", the law of God's Kingdom also the law of freedom: When all people think and live from God, then all become equal and all become free and then true brotherhood will develop (literally "siblinghood"). When Isaiah, in the first reading, talks about God, he simultaneously speaks about salvation for the suffering, and when James speaks of the social order as an urgen expression of our faith, he naturally also speaks of God whose children we are.

Now we have to turn to the Gospel which speaks of the healing of a deaf-mute by Jesus. Here we once again find two aspects of the same topic. Jesus turns to the suffering, to those who have been forced to the edge of society. He heals them and thereby enables them to co-exist and co-decide and leads them into equality and fraternity. This speaks to us all: Jesus shows us the direction for our own deeds.

This process has a deeper dimension which the Church Fathers pointed out with emphasis in their exegeses. It also concerns us very much today. The Fathers speak about and to the people of their age. But what they say concerns us today, in a new manner. There isn't just physical deafness that cuts off people from social life.

There is a hard-of-hearing towards God which we suffer from in this age. We simply cannot hear Him anymore - there are too many other frequencies in our ears. What is said about Him seems pre-scientific, no longer fitting for our time. With this hard-of-hearing, or even deafness, towards God we naturally lose our ability to speak with and to Him. Because of that, we lack a decisive perceptive faculty. Our internal senses are threatening to die off. With this loss in perception the radius of our relation to reality is drastically and dangerously curtailed.

The space of our live is reduced in a threatening manner. The Gospel tells us that Jesus put his fingers in the ears of the deaf man, with some saliva, and said "Ephata - open!" The Evangelist has preserved the original Aramaic word for us that Jesus spoke and thereby leads us straight into the moment it happened.

What is recounted is unique and still does not belong to a distant past: Jesus does the same in a new manner today, over and over again. In baptism, Jesus performs this gesture of touching and says Ephata - open yourself to be able to listen to God. By that he also gives us the ability to speak with/to God.

This process, the sacrament of baptism, is nothing magical. Baptism opens up a path. It leads us into the community of the listening and speaking - a community with Jesus himself who is the only person to have seen God and is able to tell us about HIm: Through faith, he wants to share with us this seeing of God, listening to God and speaking with the Father.

The path of being baptized must become a process of growth, in which we grow into life with God and thereby gain a new perspective on people and creation. The Gospel invites us to realize that there is a deficit in perception in us, a lack that at first we do not experience as one, because everything else insists on its urgency and logic; because everything is apparently happening normally, even when we no longer have ears and eyes for God and live without Him.

But, do things really continue normally when God is missing in our lives, in our world ? Before we investigate further, I want to tell you a bit about my experiences with encounters with the bishops of the world. The Catholic Church in Germany is marvelous in its social activities, in its readiness and willingness to help wherever help is needed. Time and again the bishops tell me with gratitude, recently from Africa, in their ad-limina-visits, about the magnanimity of the German Catholics and instruct me to pass on these thanks.

The Bishops from the Baltic states as well, who visited me recently, have told me about the great help German Catholics provided for them in the reconstruction of their Catholic churches which had been terribly damaged and destroyed in the decades of Communist rule. Once in a while, however, an African bishop will say: "When I suggest a social project in Germany, I find open doors immediately. But when I come with a project for Evangelization, I meet with reluctance."

Apparently, some people hold the opinion that social projects have to be advanced with the highest urgency; things having to do with God or even with the Catholic faith are of a more particular nature and not really all that important. But it is the experience of those very bishops that Evangelization must precede everything else; that the God of Jesus Christ must be known, believed and loved, that hearts must be converted in order for social matters to improve; in order for reconciliation to occur; in order for AIDS to be fought from its deeper roots and in order for the sick to be cared for with the necessary attention and love.

Social matters and the Gospel cannot be separated. Where we bring people just know-how, abilities, technical skills and equipment, we do not bring enough. Because then the technologies of violence soon begin to dominate and the ability to destroy, to kill becomes the foremost ability to gain power which supposedly will bring law and order at some point but simply cannot do it, one simply moves further and further away from reconciliation and common effort for justice and love.

The standards by which technology is put into the service of law and love are lost, but those standards are crucial: standards that aren't just theories but lighten up the heart and thereby lead reason and deeds on the right path. The peoples of Africa and Asia admire our technological achievements and our science but at the same time they are horrified by a kind of reason that totally eliminates God from the field of perception of man and views this as the highest form of reason that we want to force on other cultures.

They don't see a threat to their identity in the Christian faith but in the despise of God and in cynicism that views the mockery of the sacred as a right of freedom and views usefulness for future success as the sole standard for scientific research.

Dear friends! This cynicism is not the kind of tolerance and cultural openness peoples wait for and we all wish for. The kind of tolerance we are in dire need of includes the awe of God - the awe for what is sacred to others. This awe for the sacred has as prerequisite that we once more learn the awe of God.

This awe can be regenerated in the Western world only if the faith in God grows again, if God becomes present for us and in us. We do not force this faith on anyone - that kind of proselytizing is against what is Christian. Faith can only happen in freedom. But the freedom of man is what we appeal to open itself for God; to seek Him; to listen to Him.

We who are here, ask the Lord with all our hearts that he speaks his EPHATA to us once more; that he may heal our hard-of-hearing for God, His deeds and His Word; that he may make us seeing and hearing. We ask him to help us to rediscover the words of prayer to which he invites us in the liturgy, whose ABC he gave to us in the Our Father.

The world needs God. We need God. Which God? In the first reading the prophet says to an oppressed people: The vengeance of God will come. We can well imagine how the people imagined that. But the prophet himself then says what this vengeance consists in: in the healing mercy of God. The final exegesis of the words of the prophet we find in Him who died on the Cross - in Jesus, the Son of God who became human.

His "vengeance" is the Cross: the no to violence, the "love to the end". This God is who we need. We do not violate the respect for other religions and cultures, their awe for their own faith, when we loudly and unmistakably confess the God who puts His suffering against violence; who puts up against evil and its power his mercy as a border and its overcoming.

Him we ask to be among us and to help us be credible witnesses for Him. Amen.