"Drink Directly From the Source of Life"

MUNICH, Germany, SEPT. 12, 2006 (Zenit) - Here is a translation of the homily Benedict XVI delivered on Sunday evening in the cathedral in Munich, during the celebration of Vespers attended by first communicants, young families, and pastoral and liturgical collaborators of the Church.

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Dear First Communicants!
Dear Parents and Teachers!

The reading we have just heard is from the final book of the New Testament, the Book of Revelation. The seer is helped to lift his eyes upward, toward heaven, and forward, toward the future. But in doing so, he speaks to us about earth, about the present, about our lives.

In the course of our lives, all of us are on a journey, we are traveling toward the future. Naturally, we want to find the right road: to find true life, and not a dead end or a desert. We don't want to end up saying: I took the wrong road, my life is a failure, it went wrong. We want to find joy in life; we want, in the words of Jesus, "to have life in abundance."

But let us listen to the seer of the Book of Revelation. What is he saying? He is talking about a reconciled world. A world in which people "of every nation, race, people and tongue" (7:9) have come together in joy. How can this happen? What road do we take to get there?

First and most important: these people are living with God; God himself has "sheltered them in his tent" (cf. 7:15), as the reading says. What do we mean by "God's tent"? Where is it found? How do we get there?

The seer might be alluding to the first chapter of the Gospel according to John, where we read: "The Word became flesh and pitched his tent among us" (1:14). God is not far from us, he is not somewhere out in the universe, somewhere that none of us can go. He has pitched his tent among us: In Jesus he became one of us, flesh and blood just like us. This is his "tent."

And in the Ascension, he did not go somewhere far away from us. His tent, he himself in his Body, remains among us and is one of us. We can call him by name and speak at ease with him. He listens to us and, if we are attentive, we can also hear him speaking back.

Let me repeat: In Jesus, it is God who "camps" in our midst. But let me also repeat: Where does this happen? Our reading gives us two answers to this question. It says that the men and women at peace "have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb" (7:14).

To us this sounds very strange. In his cryptic language, the seer is speaking about baptism. His words about "the blood of the Lamb" allude to Jesus' love, which he continued to show even up to his violent death.

This love, both divine and human, is the bath into which he plunges us at baptism -- the bath with which he washes us, cleansing us so that we can be fit for God and capable of living in his company. The act of baptism, however, is just a beginning. By walking with Jesus, in faith and in our life in union with him, his love touches us, purifies us and enlightens us.

For the ancient world, white was the color of light. The white robes mean that in faith we become light, we set aside darkness, falsehood and every sort of evil, and we become people of light, fit for God.

The baptismal gown, like your first-Communion robes, is meant to remind us of this, and to tell us: by living as one with Jesus and the community of believers, the Church, you have become a person of light, a person of truth and goodness -- a person radiant with goodness, the goodness of God himself.

The second answer to the question: "Where do we find Jesus?" is also given by the seer in cryptic language. He tells us that the Lamb leads the great multitude of people from every culture and nation to the sources of living water.

Without water, there is no life. People who lived near the desert knew this well, and so springs of water became for them the symbol par excellence of life. The Lamb, Jesus, leads men and women to the sources of life. Among these sources of life are the sacred Scriptures, in which God speaks to us and teaches us the right way to live.

The true source is Jesus himself, in whom God gives us his very self. He does this above all in holy Communion. There we can, as it were, drink directly from the source of life: He comes to us and makes each of us one with him. We can see how true this is: Through the Eucharist, the sacrament of communion, a community is formed which spills over all borders and embraces all languages -- the universal Church, in which God speaks to us and lives among us. This is how we should receive holy Communion: seeing it as an encounter with Jesus, an encounter with God himself, who leads us to the sources of true life.

Dear parents! I ask you to help your children to grow in faith, I ask you to accompany ...