CTS Diaconal Ordinations
Jerusalem, St. Savior's, June 15, 2025
Prv 9:22-31; Rom 5:1-5; Jn 16:12-15
Most Reverend Father Custos,
Dear ordinands,
Dear brothers and sisters,
The Lord give you peace!
“He will take of what is mine and proclaim it to you” (John 16:14, 15). This expression appears twice in today’s Gospel, the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity.
It is primarily a reference to the relationship between the persons of the Trinity. To understand what Jesus wants to tell us with this expression, we should take a step back and look at a passage from the Old Testament in which we see an opposite situation to what Jesus is talking about.
The passage takes us back to the moment of creation in the book of Genesis. The passage is well known: God gives man the entire creation that he has just come out of his hands and, with the commandment of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, asks him to remain in a meek attitude, the attitude of a man who owns nothing but accepts everything as a gift. The childlike attitude of a person who knows that he does not possess everything. Basically, God says to Adam: everything is entrusted to you, but know that this creation does not belong to you, but to my work, the work of the Creator, and you are my creature.
At a certain point, as we know, the serpent appears and enters a dialog with the woman. He takes up the words of God, but he does not do so in accordance with God's thoughts. He adds his own words: small, insidious words that are enough to generate in the woman's suspicion that God is different from what he had shown himself to be in the garden.
God had said that man may eat from all the trees in the garden except one (“You may eat from all the trees in the garden, but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” - Gen. 2:16-17). The serpent asks if it is true that they are not allowed to eat from any tree in the garden (“Is it true that God said: You must not eat from any tree in the garden?” - Gen 3:1). The words change slightly, but the meaning changes completely.
The serpent wants to separate humanity from its Creator, and he does this by speaking words that create a lie in the human heart, a distorted image of God. But it is not just a distorted image of God. For it corresponds to a distorted image of man, who ceases to see himself as a creature and lives in the delusion that he can live without reference to the Creator, who presumes to be free only without God. A man who claims to decide his fate and that of the world only on the basis of his own power, only based on himself. This lie remains deeply rooted in people’s minds, and it spreads quickly, as only lies can. Thus, man becomes unable to bear the burden of truth (“Many things I still have to say to you, but for the moment you are not able to bear the burden” - John 16:12) and becomes a slave to a lie from which he alone cannot free himself.
It seems to me that this is exactly what we are experiencing in these dramatic and tiring times. We are being drawn into an ever-increasing spiral of violence. We are caught in a vicious circle from which we cannot free ourselves, in which the feeling of power and the demonstration of strength, the presumption to save ourselves through our powerful means and our human strategies, in short, the power of deception and lies blinds us. We delude ourselves into believing that we are strong, but in reality, we are weak, unable to think of ourselves within God’s plan, and we are lost, or will be lost, behind our mendacious human power strategies, which are short-lived and only bring death.
What can bring people back to the truth about themselves, to the truth about God instead? This is what Jesus describes in today’s Gospel. The Spirit does not do what the serpent did: he adds nothing to Jesus’ words and takes nothing away. He does not add his own words to them, because he lives in the same reality as Jesus, because he knows that they are true words, that they are sufficient for the salvation of man. These words are also his own. Then he can take them, because in the Trinity everything is common, and we give honor to each other by taking from each other without fear. If everything is in common, I can take what belongs to the other and take nothing away from him, on the contrary: in doing so, I confirm the truth of the communion that unites us.
For man this way of living is a burden, a hardship: if someone takes something away from us, we feel inadequate, defrauded. In the Trinity, the opposite is the case. Then it is God’s work to slowly introduce us to this new way of living and thinking, that of communion. Humanity that listens to the lying words of the serpent eventually finds itself isolated, poor and scattered. And unfortunately, we see this more and more every day. The humanity that accepts the words of Jesus, the words that the Spirit takes up and brings to life in us, finds the truth about itself and the truth about God. The truth of community and mutual love that makes humanity rich in goodness, in relationships, in life. How much we need this truth for our Holy Land, for our relationships, for our ecclesial and civil communities!
But the expression with which we began our reflections (“He will take what is mine and proclaim it to you”) is also a strong indication of the ministry you will begin with your ordination to the diaconate.
Serving is characteristic of diaconal ministry. And this passage also says something about the style that should characterize your ministry.
“He will take from what is mine”: Your ministry should do nothing other than, in a sense, “extend” the ministry of Christ. It is not a ministry that you simply do. That will start from you and has you as its center of reference. Nor will it emanate from your superiors, to whom you have rendered obedience. The center of your ministry is Christ alone. The style of your ministry will have to be derived from your intimate relationship with Him.
The first ministry to which you are called is the ministry of the Word of God, which you can also proclaim during liturgical celebrations. It is precisely God’s Word, not your own word. You need to know how to ruminate it over, how to let it grow and mature within you, how to make it your own without superimposing yourself on it, but rather making it shine in your life in all its brightness.
And then you will be called to serve at the Eucharistic table, where Christ becomes the broken bread for the life of the world, where His death and resurrection become the source of reconciliation and shape the life of the Christian community. You will not be good servants, true deacons, if you do not also know how to die for love. If your service is not characterized by your wholehearted and boundless self-giving.
But it would be too little if your service were only to concentrate on how you can experience it inwardly.
“And he will proclaim it to you”: Your ministry must become a proclamation, a testimony. You must go out of yourself. You will have to ruminate the Word of God, we said, but then you must bring it into the life of the world to make it become proclamation. You must participate in the breaking of bread at the Eucharistic table and then become those who give your lives at the service of the world. In short, you will not have to be like the man in Genesis who presumes to be able to live and act in the world only out of himself and to act without God. You must adopt the style of the persons of the Most Holy Trinity. You must know how to share everything in communion, in mutual love, to make humanity rich in goodness, in relationships, in life.
Here you must always be aware of this consciousness. That you are called to a service, a service that is not yours, that does not belong to you. It is Christ’s. And it now belongs to the Church, in which this service finds its full and complete expression. So, this service is summarized in obedience to the Church. The Church entrusts it to you today, with serene confidence in your full willingness to become yourselves a visible and credible expression of Christ’s desire to serve and the world, loving it.
May the intercession of the Immaculate Virgin intercede for you and accompany you on your not easy but wonderful journey together with Christ and the Church. Amen.
