Jesus ‘brings us to his heart, brings us with him to heart of God,’ archbishop tells congress in Ocean City

OCEAN CITY (OSV News) — In just 45 minutes, Archbishop Richard G. Henning presented salvation history according to sacred Scripture in an engaging keynote address Oct. 5, during the Eucharistic Congress sponsored by the Catholic Diocese of Wilmington.

More than 2,000 people packed the hall at the Roland E. Powell Convention Center in Ocean City to begin their celebration of the Eucharist as the source and summit of their Catholic faith.

Archbishop Henning, who is currently head of the Diocese of Providence, R.I., but will be installed Oct. 31 as leader of the Archdiocese of Boston, greeted the large and diverse crowd in both English and Spanish. Many wore headphones, allowing them to hear the address translated.

“My goal today is not actually to tell you anything new,” he said. “It is rather to remind you of what you already know.”

Applying his extensive background in Scripture studies, he traced the “central place of the Eucharist in God’s plan for salvation and in the life of the church,” he said prior to the Congress.

“We believe that the Eucharist is the source and summit of the church’s life, and so I’d like to look at our holy Scriptures, the word of God, to try to understand maybe a little bit of what we mean when we say source and summit,” he said.

Besides crediting the Bible as a “library, not just a book,” Archbishop Henning said “there’s a tremendous richness, a variety of treasure in the Holy Scriptures.”

He said the book of Genesis “is very much misunderstood,” yet it is “a theological, philosophical reflection of the nature of God and what it means to be human.”

Extending motifs of the Garden of Eden, the sacrifice of Isaac, the maternal nature of the love of God, and challenges posed by the Old Testament prophets to the New Testament Gospels and letters of St. Paul, Archbishop Henning used slides and word pictures to capture the imagination of his hearers.

In Genesis, Archbishop Henning said, “(The) picture we get of God is that God is a faithful God. And so, we will see over the course of the Scriptures that no matter how often we sin or stray from God, God does not give up (on) us.”

“God pursues us. God is ever and always trying to draw us back to his heart. But we have to contrast that with our continual failure ourselves to respond in fidelity and love. So, God is faithful, but the scriptures show us we are not,” he said.

God tried to bridge this gap throughout the course of history, and finally introduced the “notion of covenant,” which is repeated and amplified through Noah, Moses, King David and finally, Jesus. He also employed the prophets, who “remind God’s people over and over again of God’s desire to walk with us,” he said.

“God is not going to leave us on our own, leave us to our own devices, leave us stuck in that trap where he cannot bridge the gap between us,” he said. “And so what does he do? He comes to us, he gives us the gift of his beloved son — the same language as we heard back in Genesis — his beloved Son, who tells us the kingdom of God has drawn near. The reign of God, the presence of God is right here, right now.”

“Jesus becomes the partner with God,” he said. “He is the faithful descendant of Abraham as promised. He is the faithful Israelite who lives the law of God. He is the royal Son of David who is going to bring God’s people to salvation. He is the one who fulfills even that covenant of Noah, the renewal, the recreation, the renewal of creation itself — all of this now in this person of Jesus, who is fully human and fully divine.

“It is God giving to us his own heart and giving us now that partner who can do for us what we could not do for ourselves, the one who will return that perfect love and trust.”

Archbishop Henning stressed the importance of understanding the symbolism of the “heartbeat of the father” and the intimacy with Jesus as the word of God. “So God now becomes human to be that faithful partner for us and with us,” he said.

He implored his listeners to understand the full import of the “achingly beautiful lines of holy Scripture “when the heavens open and the father says, ‘This is my beloved son,’ as “Jesus offers himself in perfect and absolute trust” in partnership with God.

“But it’s not just between Jesus and the father,” Archbishop Henning said. “That’s why it’s good news, because you and I — who are still mortal creatures, who are still sinners — this Jesus draws us to himself. He brings us to his heart, and brings us with him to the heart of God.”

This partnership manifests itself as the church, who gathers to receive Jesus in the Eucharist.

“The church is born from the side of Christ. It is born from the gift of the Eucharist … the source and summit, a new covenant, a renewed humanity,” Archbishop Henning said, adding that the “whole point of the Eucharist was to draw us to the heart of God. … The whole point of our salvation is that we couldn’t pull it off. We could not find our way back to God. We couldn’t even reconcile ourselves or be one with one another, until he does it for us. He gives us this gift of grace, and so we live, we pray, we exist through Christ our Lord.”

Claire Stevens of St. Benedict-St. Elizabeth Parish in Ridgely thought Archbishop Henning’s address was “wonderful.”

“I thought it was like a whole course in salvation history from the point of view of God wanting to have a partnership with humans,” Stevens told The Dialog, newspaper of the Wilmington Diocese. “It was great. It was better than a sermon or a homily; it was more like a class in theology.”

Sister Virginia Peckham, who serves with the Little Sisters of Mary and Jesus in Salisbury, smiled as she said, “I loved the talk. I just love the way he made the connection between the Old Testament and the New Testament.”

“And I love the image of the garden and our partnership with God in the garden,” Sister Virginia said. “And I also love that image of God the Father putting Jesus on his breast, listening to his heart.”

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