Chapter Two of Dilexit Nos

This is the third in a series of reflections by Nathaniel Marx on the final encyclical letter of Pope Francis, Dilexit Nos.

Actions Speak

It’s a pop song cliché that the words “I love you” aren’t very convincing. “Actions speak louder than love songs,” as John Legend tells it.¹ For Pope Francis, turning to the heart of Christ—“the symbol of the deepest and most personal source of his love for us” (DN 32)—means examining actions before words. “Christ showed the depth of his love for us not by lengthy explanations but by concrete actions” (DN 33).

Nevertheless, chapter two of Dilexit Nos resembles the second chapters of Laudato Si’ and Fratelli Tutti in turning to the word of God. The Gospel is where faith encounters Jesus and the truth that “he loved us” (DN 33). And while the four gospels relate the words of Jesus, they emphasize his deeds.

In Close Proximity

The actions of Christ culminate in his passion, death, and resurrection. He claims us as “his own,” not by grasping domination, but by emptying himself, “taking on the form of a slave” (Phil 2:7). On the cross, Jesus enacts the “mutual belonging typical of friends” in the most extraordinary way. Still, Francis doesn’t start with the dramatic actions of Holy Week but with the Lord’s Advent name, “Emmanuel.” The name signifies God’s desire for ordinary intimacy with us. “Jesus came to meet us, bridging all distances; he became as close to us as the simplest, everyday realities of our lives.” (DN 34).

In simplicity and friendship, then, Jesus “seeks people out” and meets them where they are. He finds them at their daily tasks (cf. Jn 4:4–42), afraid to be seen with him (cf. Jn 3:1–21), judged unworthy (cf. Lk 7:36–50), caught in sin (cf. Jn 8:2–11), or ignored by the roadside (cf. Mk 10:46–52). Jesus distances himself from no one. Instead, he reaches out to touch those whom others reject. He heals people “not from a distance but in close proximity” (Cf. Mt 8:3; 8:15; 9:29; Mk 7:33). In his whole ministry, “Christ shows that God is closeness, compassion, and tender love” (DN 35–36).

“Take Heart!”

Sadly, many people have reason to fear closeness at least as much as they desire it. “We find it hard to trust others because we have been hurt by lies, injuries, and disappointments” (DN 37). Francis does not explicitly cite the harm suffered by children and adults betrayed by leaders in the church. Yet we can imagine he has in mind the sexual abuse scandal when he refers later in Dilexit Nos to “‘certain situations [that] have become irremediable’” (DN 186). Betrayal is devastating, and Francis does not counsel blind trust in words of affection or authority. “There may be many people we distrust” and prudently keep at some distance from more intimate parts of our lives (DN 37).

With Jesus, however, we need not fear closeness. “Let him draw near and sit at your side,” Francis urges, and “do not hesitate because of your sins.” Jesus was not scandalized when “many sinners and tax collectors came and were sitting with him” (Mt 9:10). The real scandal, then and now, is that the “religious élite” manipulate “people deemed base and sinful” into believing themselves unworthy of genuine love (DN 37). Exploitation intrudes where God’s invitation to intimacy is contradicted.

Jesus, by contrast, assures us that we are beloved children of God. “Take heart, son!” he tells the paralytic (Mt 9:2); “Take heart, daughter!” he says to the woman suffering from hemorrhages (Mt 9:22). The English version of Dilexit Nos felicitously renders Jesus’s words of encouragement according to the NRSV translation of Matthew’s Gospel (DN 37). The heart is simultaneously a symbol of courage and closeness, for both depend on authentic love.

Jesus Learned Attention

Sometimes, Jesus’s actions of love don’t seem like actions at all. Looking, listening, and pondering all sound passive. But when Jesus “fixes his gaze upon you,” his loving attention actively compels you to make a decision about following him (DN 39). For the rich young man whom Jesus looked at and “loved” (Mk 10:21), the attention occasions grief. “Many possessions” keep him from possessing Christ alone in the mutual belonging of friendship. For Nathanael—initially “standing apart and busy about his own affairs”—merely being seen by Jesus is enough to upend his life and make him a disciple (DN 40; cf. Jn 1:45–50).

Christ’s attention is compelling because his concern is sincere. “Many a page of the Gospel illustrates how attentive Jesus was to individuals and above all to their problems and needs” (DN 40). Jesus is the ultimate manifestation of God’s eternal attentiveness, proof that “the LORD hears the poor and does not spurn those in bondage” (Ps 69:34; cf. Ps 34:18). Human attentiveness, however, is learned, even by the Son of God. Strikingly, Francis describes Jesus as the pupil of his mother in the school of human attention.

In his humanity, Jesus learned this from Mary, his mother. Our Lady carefully pondered the things she had experienced; she “treasured them… in her heart” (Lk 2:19, 51) and, with Saint Joseph, she taught Jesus from his earliest years to be attentive in this same way. (DN 42; cf. DN 19)

There is a lesson for us in the attentiveness that Jesus learned. “Prayer consists of attention,” Simone Weil asserts in a famous essay. The “real object” of school studies and all contemplative effort is to “develop that faculty of attention which, directed toward God, is the very substance of prayer.”²

Attentive prayer could hardly be a retreat into passivity for Weil, the social activist. “Not only does the love of God have attention for its substance; the love of our neighbor, which we know to be the same love, is made of this same substance.” Real attention to one who is suffering is so difficult as to be a “miracle,” according to Weil.³ The capacity for such attention therefore requires human cooperation with divine grace, modeled precisely on the kenosis of Christ. The Son of God “emptied himself” (Phil 2:7) in fulfillment of God’s eternal love for his people. The same Son of Mary learned how to look at God’s sinful and suffering people “in a certain way.”

This way of looking is first of all attentive. The soul empties itself of all its own contents in order to receive into itself the being it is looking at, just as he is, in all his truth.⁴

Jesus Wept

When Jesus receives us into himself, Francis says, he calls us to the “better place” of his own heart and “invites us to find fresh strength and peace” there (DN 43). His heart is the place to lay down our cares only because he has completely taken them up there. Scripture testifies that “Jesus was not indifferent to the daily cares and concerns of people,” but felt compassion for their hunger and weariness (DN 44; cf. Mk 8:2–3).

If daily needs were not too insignificant to elicit the Lord’s compassion, his friends’ anxiety and grief in the face of death stirred “profound emotions” in his heart. His words of lament over Jerusalem and his words of consolation to Martha and Mary convey deep feeling. Even more, the tears of Jesus are “the sign of inner turmoil” (DN 45; cf. Lk 19:41–42; Jn 11:33–35). In all of this, the symbol of the heart as the seat of emotion proves more than compatible with Christ’s holiness and with the courage, intimacy, and integrity that his Sacred Heart signifies for us.

The Most Eloquent Word of Love

“At first glance,” Francis admits, “all this may smack of pious sentimentalism” (DN 46). Above all, we suspect emotional manipulation in the gospel accounts of Christ’s Passion, which vividly portray Jesus’s “anguish over his impending violent death at the hands of those whom he had loved so greatly” (DN 45; cf. Mk 14:33–34; 15:34). Does this merely represent an early effort to tug at our heartstrings?

Francis insists that the anguish of Christ “is supremely serious and of decisive importance, and finds its most sublime expression in Christ crucified.” If Christ’s words and tears are not the outward manifestation of heartfelt love, then his violent death makes no sense as a sacrifice to redeem the very people who reject him.

The cross is Jesus’ most eloquent word of love. A word that is not shallow, sentimental or merely edifying. It is love, sheer love. (DN 46)

The eloquence of the cross explains why Francis did not take the title of his encyclical from the words of Jesus but from the words of Paul.

Christ’s self-offering on the cross became the driving force in Paul’s life, yet it only made sense to him because he knew that something even greater lay behind it: the fact that “he loved me.” At a time when many were seeking salvation, prosperity, or security elsewhere, Paul, moved by the Spirit, was able to see farther and to marvel at the greatest and most essential thing of all: “Christ loved me.” (DN 46)

No love song could speak louder.

1. John Legend, “Actions,” track 2 on Bigger Love, Sony, 2020. (Apple Music) (Spotify) ↩︎
2. Simone Weil, “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God,” in Waiting for God, tr. Emma Craufurd (HarperCollins, 2009), pp. 105–116, at 105–106. ↩︎
3. Weil, “Right Use of School Studies,” 114. ↩︎
4. Weil, “Right Use of School Studies,” 115. ↩︎