Thank you also for taking up this task with such generosity and enthusiasm, in and out of season, and for the duration. Tonight in this basilica, in the Great Jubilee of this year of grace 2000, we gather as disciples of Jesus Christ. Our scriptures remind us what it means to live the Gospel of Life as servants of the One who is the way, the truth, and the life. It means conversion, one of the preeminent themes of the Jubilee Year. Our first reading tonight tells the story of Jonah, and his ministry of calling people to conversion.
Conversion is always conversion to the truth.
We exist because of the love of God, who created us and gave us a destiny that is forever. And human history, in all its dimensions, is the dramatic playing out of God's love achieving its divine purpose. God first binds himself to the drama of history through the patriarchs and prophets of old. Then comes a new and decisive manifestation of God's ever-present involvement in history, that moment when God gives his only Son for the world's salvation. This is the stunning, stupendous, defining, unrepeatable moment we celebrate in the Great Jubilee of the year 2000.