God doesn’t exist to grant victories or to be useful by providing wealth or power, Pope Leo XIV said.
Through Jesus, he serves humanity by offering himself in a way that transforms human hearts so that they may then be inspired to love others unconditionally, in turn, he said in his homily during Mass of the Lord’s Supper in the Basilica of St. John Lateran.
“Jesus purifies not only our image of God – from the idolatry and blasphemy that have distorted it – but also our image of humanity,” he said April 2, Holy Thursday. “For we tend to consider ourselves powerful when we dominate, victorious when we destroy our equals, great when we are feared.”
However, he said, “Christ offers us the example of self-giving, service and love” so that humankind can learn how to love according to what true love is.
In fact, he said, learning to act like Jesus “is the work of a lifetime.”
The Lord loves not because those he reaches out to are good or pure, Pope Leo said, but simply because “he loves us first.”
“His love is not a reward for our acceptance of his mercy; instead, he loves us, and therefore cleanses us, thereby enabling us to respond to his love,” he said. “He does not ask us to repay him, but to share his gift among ourselves.”
“In him, God has given us an example – not of how to dominate, but of how to liberate; not of how to destroy life, but of how to give it,” Pope Leo said.
“As humanity is brought to its knees by so many acts of brutality, let us too kneel down as brothers and sisters alongside the oppressed,” he said. “In this way, we seek to follow the Lord’s example.”
The pope’s words came during a Mass that commemorates Jesus’s institution of the Eucharist and the priesthood, and includes the traditional foot-washing ritual, which reflects the call to imitate Christ by serving one another.
Pope Leo returned to an earlier practice of washing the feet of 12 priests from the Diocese of Rome in the Basilica of St. John Lateran, which is the cathedral of the Diocese of Rome. The pope poured water from a golden pitcher onto the foot of each priest, wiped each foot dry with a towel and then gently kissed each foot.
Pope Francis had departed from the norm after his election in 2013 by celebrating the Mass in one of Rome’s “peripheries,” such as prisons or nursing homes, and by washing the feet of men, women and their infants, Muslims or people of no faith, as a sign of his dedication to serve everyone unconditionally.
Pope Francis’ss predecessors had always chosen either 12 priests, laymen or boys from the diocese for the ritual held either in the Basilicas of St. John Lateran or of St. Peter.
By choosing 12 priests, 11 of whom he ordained last year, Pope Leo highlighted the Mass’ commemoration of the institution of the Eucharist and of holy orders.
“The intrinsic bond between these two sacraments reveals the perfect self-gift of Jesus, the high Priest and living, eternal Eucharist,” he said in his homily.
“Beloved brothers in the priesthood, we are called to serve the people of God with our whole lives,” he said.
Jesus’s disciples were astonished by their master’s gesture and, like Peter, “we too must ‘learn repeatedly that God’s greatness is different from our idea of greatness … because we systematically desire a God of success and not of the Passion,’” he said, quoting Pope Benedict XVI.
“We are always tempted to seek a God who ‘serves’ us, who grants us victory, who proves useful like wealth or power. Yet we fail to perceive that God does indeed serve us through the gratuitous and humble gesture of washing feet,” he said. “This is the true omnipotence of God.”
Earlier in the day, Pope Leo urged Catholics to reject comfort, power and domination and instead embrace a mission rooted in self-giving love, even when it requires risk, vulnerability and suffering.
During the chrism Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica, he called on the faithful in his homily to overcome fear and a sense of powerlessness in responding to the world’s crises.
“In this dark hour of history, it has pleased God to send us to spread the fragrance of Christ where the stench of death reigns,” he said. “Let us renew our ‘yes’ to this mission that calls for unity and brings peace.”
While grounding his remarks in the teaching of his predecessors, saints and clergy, the pope in this homily placed particular emphasis on the Church’s mission through his own eyes as a missionary.
The first step of accepting the Christian mission, he said, is to risk leaving behind what is familiar and certain, in order to venture into something new.
“Every mission begins with that kind of self-emptying in which everything is reborn,” he said.
It is through this self-emptying that Christians encounter the love of Christ, the pope said.
At the heart of his first Holy Thursday homily as pope, he reflected on the nature of Christian love, saying it is rooted not in power, but in self-giving.
“Jesus’s journey reveals to us that the willingness to lose oneself, to empty oneself, is not an end in itself, but a condition for encounter and intimacy,” Pope Leo said. “Love is true only when it is unguarded.”
He said true peace is not found in remaining comfortable, but in embracing the risk and detachment that mission requires. Calling it a “fundamental secret of mission,” the pope said “everything is restored and multiplied if it is first let go, without fear,” a process repeated “in every new beginning, in every new sending forth.”
God calls upon the faithful to take risks, so “no place becomes a prison, no identity a hiding place,” he said. Every mission requires reconciliation with the past, with the “gifts and limitations of the upbringing we have received,” the pope said.
Once the faithful are able to detach from what is familiar and comfortable, Pope Leo said they must then “encounter” the other through selfless service and the sharing of life. This detachment, he said, creates the conditions for authentic encounter rather than control.
He emphasized that it is a priority that “neither in the pastoral sphere nor in the social and political spheres can good come from abuse of power.”
He pointed to the example of missionaries, a role he held as an Augustinian in Peru, whose work must be rooted in service, dialogue and respect.
Rather than seeking to “reconquer” increasingly secular societies, the pope said Catholics must approach as guests, not to impose, but to listen and accompany.
The Church’s mission, the pope said, is guided by the Holy Spirit, and the faithful must not try to control it but instead follow its lead, entering each culture with humility and “respecting the mystery that every person and every community carries within them.”
In his third point, the pope explained that this mission is not a “heroic adventure” reserved only for a few, but rather the “living witness of a Body with many members,” and every mission includes rejection and suffering.
He recalled that the people of Nazareth were filled with rage when they heard Jesus’s words and drove him out of the town. Every Christian must “pass through” a trial just as Jesus did, the pope said.
“The cross is part of the mission: the sending becomes more bitter and frightening, but also more freeing and transformative,” he said.
A successful mission is not about the results, but rather about the disciple’s faithfulness and hope in God. Jesus embarked on a journey “in a world torn apart by the powers that ravage it,” Pope Leo said.
“Within it arises a new people, not of victims, but of witnesses,” he said.
