Jesus the Advocate

“Jesus is our advocate.” Pope Francis used this metaphor to explain the role of the Saviour as humanity’s defender to the eighty thousand faithful gathered this morning, Wednesday 17th, in St Peter’s Square to attend the General Audience. “When someone is summoned to appear before a judge or goes on trial,” said the Pope, “the first thing they do is look for a lawyer to defend them.

We have one who always defends us; he defends us from the devil’s threats; he defends us from ourselves, from our sins.” And he urged us not to be afraid to turn to Him, both to ask for forgiveness and mercy and to ask to be defended, for “He is our advocate: He always defends us! Do not forget that.”

Referring next to the event of the Ascension, as recounted by the evangelist Luke, the Pope presented the figure of Jesus as that of ‘a lead climber when scaling a mountain, who has reached the summit and draws us to Himself by leading us to God’. He thus shows us the path to follow. ‘In Christ, true God and true man, our humanity has been led to God; He has opened a way for us’ and He intercedes for us. ‘This,’ he explained, ‘is a first important point: Jesus is the one and only eternal Priest who, through his Passion, passed through death and the tomb, who rose again and ascended into Heaven; he is with God the Father, where he intercedes for us for ever.”

And this, he went on to explain, remains true even when we cannot see him. Indeed, the Ascension ‘does not signify Jesus’ absence, but tells us that he is alive amongst us in a new way; he is no longer in a specific place in the world as he was before the Ascension; now he is in the Lordship of God, present in every place and at all times, close to each one of us’. Hence the certainty that ‘in our lives we are never alone: we have this Advocate who awaits us, who defends us’.

As he greeted the groups present, the Pope addressed special words to the young people, recalling that ‘you cannot understand a young person without enthusiasm!’. He then expressed his solidarity with a group of workers in difficulty from Sassari, although they were not present at the Audience due to a delay in their flight. Finally, he offered a prayer to God for the victims of the earthquakes in Iran and Pakistan and expressed his closeness to them.