Integral Trust: emblematic Action, which generates uncontaminated persons

(Jn 13:1-15)

According to a felicitous expression of Origen, Eucharist is the wound in Christ's side that is always open; but Vatican II did not spend a single word on the many Eucharistic devotions.

In order for us to fully understand his Person, the Council fathers were well aware that Jesus did not leave a statue or a relic. He preferred to express Himself in a ‘gesture’, which challenges us.

God does not identify persons in a standard way, nor does He superimpose His thoughts on people's history and sensibilities.

By bending over us, He himself transcends roles, the club’ spirit, the very ideas, and the certificates. Action - this one yes - “exemplary”.

In the supreme freedom of service, «washing» is a Baptismal figure: of the Son’s Person-Mission on behalf of mankind, all now ‘enabled’.

The Master unites to Himself a group of even unconvinced disciples, but ‘made pure’ - not because He aims to form a school distinct from others, or even unilateral one.

He calls by Name and creates assembly to introduce us into Love, through the passage from slavery to the freedom of the Gratis (descending).

Peter craves to command: he does not want to introduce himself into a logic that manifests God servant of all, independent of their past.

Lowering Himself to the level of the slave who puts down his clothes, Jesus wants to humanize us by recovering instead the opposites, rooted in each one... even admitting the contestation.

And He does not take off his apron: it is the only uniform that belongs to Him. That kind of clothing stays on Him - He wears it in Heaven too.

He did not play the role of the servant, to return to Heaven to be the master. He does not condition anyone.

The Life of the Father pursues us on every path, to make us feel adequate: One-Body with the Son.

This is the «service» of the disciples, to be carried out with life and the announcement of the «good news»: to make known that the Father is the unconditional Lover of woman and man.

Uniquely the esteem in which we hold His sons and their stories - without prejudice - leads to acts of conviviality and inexplicable recoveries.

Jesus washing ‘feet’ depicts the secret of the blissful life that expands the way of the I into the way of the Thou: in being genuine and free even to descend, to the point of bending down to serve.

Without labyrinths of norms or lofty cries of principle; without compromising the most genuine spontaneity and streamlining - without giving in to mistrust of the others’ imperfection.

In the Baptismal attitude... celebrating existence in all its forms, beyond boundaries; trusting in life, in its natural and opposite polarities.

By allowing for other developments and expansions.

Opening our eyes to the world - cornerstone of new relationships, replacing one-sided customs, or external fashions.

Embracing a richer destiny.

By loving contradictions.

A ban to perfection’s models and to the exasperation of "skills". Rather, the search for solutions that rely on, without interfering.

Rediscovering one's humanizing nature.

Recognizing diversity.

By approving, redeeming and evaluating ‘pure’ each particular path [the 'washed' feet of each one].

[Holy Thursday in Coena Domini, April 2, 2026]

Integral Trust: the emblematic Action, generating the undefiled

Jn 13:1-15 (.16-20)

Let us introduce the meaning of the Lord's washing of the feet, an emblematic gesture that the Synoptics evoke in the Breaking of Bread.

In ancient Israel, the patriarchal family, clan and community were the basis of social coexistence.

They guaranteed the transmission of the identity of the people, and provided protection for the afflicted.

Defending the clan was also a concrete way of confirming the First Covenant.

But at the time of Jesus, Galilee suffered both the segregation dictated by Herod Antipas' policy and the oppression of official religiosity.

The wimpy collaborationism of the ruler had accentuated the number of homeless and unemployed.

The political and economic conjuncture forced people to retreat into material and individual problems, or those of a small family.

At one time, the identity bond of clan and community guaranteed an internal character of a solidary nation, expressed in the defence and relief given to the less fortunate of the people.

Now, this fraternal bond was weakened, plastered over, almost contradicted - also because of the strict attitude of the religious authorities, fundamentalist and lovers of a saccharine purism, opposed to mixing with the less affluent classes.

The written and oral Law ended up being used not to favour the welcoming of the marginalised and needy, but to accentuate detachment and ghettoisation.

A situation that was leading the least protected sections of the population to collapse.

In short, the alliance-loving devotion between throne and altar - instead of strengthening the sense of community, was used to accentuate hierarchies; as a weapon that legitimised a whole mentality of exclusions (and confirmed the imperial logic of divide and rule).

Jesus, on the other hand, wants to return to the Father's Dream: the ineliminable one of fraternity, the only seal to salvation history.

According to a felicitous expression of Origen, the Eucharist is the wound in Christ's side that is always open; but Vatican II did not spend a single word on the multiple Eucharistic devotions.

In order for us to fully understand his Person, the Council fathers were well aware that Jesus did not leave a statue or a relic. He preferred to express himself in a gesture, which challenges us.

In the Jewish world, in the evening each family gathered around the table, and breaking bread was the most significant moment of their experience of conviviality - and memory of the handing over of self to others.

The one bread was divided and shared among all the family members - but even a poor hungry person could come to the door, which did not have to be locked.

Bread and wine, products that had assimilated the energies of heaven and earth, were recognised with spiritual sensitivity - gifts from the Creator for the life and joy of humanity.

In that culture, bread is basic food. But our life is only complete if there is also the element of celebration: there is wine.

Even today, bread is not cut with a knife, to respect its sacredness: only broken. It contains concrete existence.

That is why Jesus chose the banquet as a sign of his Person - life, word, risky business and new happiness, given in food.

At family dinners, bread and wine were not perceived in the same way as manna, that is, as raw, natural products. Nor was it nourishment to regain strength, and that's all.

In the wheat and grapes, all the varied contributions of the domestic hearth were also gathered.

Around the table, each man saw in the bread and wine the fruit of his labour: cleaning the soil, ploughing, sowing, sowing, reaping, pruning, harvesting and pressing.

The woman captured in the bread her labour: grinding, kneading, baking. Even minors could remember something of their own, because little boys would lend themselves (e.g. draw water).

Dinner was a celebration of harmony. The table was precisely a place where young people were educated in the perception of existing in unity, rather than in disinterest.

This was done with gratitude towards God's gifts and perception of one's own contribution, which had (really) reached its goal, in the spirit of synergy and singular commitment to communion.

Contributions, resources and skills agreed to put themselves in service, for the life of all.

In the Eucharistic gesture, Jesus says: new heavens and new earth do not correspond to the world in which each one hastens to reap for himself or his circle, in order to grab the maximum of resources.

His Kingdom? All invited and brothers in agreement, none master or ruler - destined to be in front or above [though quicker than the others] even in heaven.

Even the Apostles - called by Jesus with Himself but still remaining at a safe distance from Him (cf. e.g. Lk 9:10, 12) - are not the owners of the Bread, but those who are to give it to all (vv.13.16), to create abundance where there is none.

To animate the meetings on the theme of the Eucharist as a non-misleading icon, and to internalise how in the Catholic Church itself there has been a decisive evolution towards understanding the efficacy of the Sign, I use to compare two great works of art.

Raphael in the so-called Dispute of the Sacrament depicts a sacred and static world. Today we would say at a glance, almost plasticised.

An environment that seems all predictable and in any case characterised by a situated social, cultural and spiritual pattern; where everyone is placed according to origin, position, status, and rank.

Arcabas - a recently deceased French artist - paints a picture that seems devoid of exclusive, distinct and titled protagonists: as if cut above, or (better) focused on the simple gesture.

To put it eloquently: the garnish of lavish decorations or prominent roles is not about this life proposal!

In the contemporary painter's work, we grasp the sobriety of a Person and of a well-centred mission [which scratches, but makes one lose one's head far more than beautiful scripts].

For in the world of Love, the best is yet to come. In this way, we are relentlessly questioned.

Arcabas illustrates a simply laid table: a plate, certainly not from the best collection, a glass of wine with no frills; a tablecloth simply laid on the table and marked by its perfunctory folds, not even ironed, reminiscent of real everyday life.

And above all, the normal gesture of breaking bread, that of the step by step, with its crumbs that are neither fluffy nor white. To say: the Eucharistic Banquet is not for the hereafter - who knows when.

[For almost a thousand years, the Catholic Church celebrated with daily bread as the Orthodox Church still does, for example. As testimony, there are still very large dinner trays, today reduced to a saucer].

In short, here comes the 'Hour'... and the emblematic Action - in Jn, which does not formally recount the institution of the Eucharist.

Here is the meaning of breaking bread: what it entails to enter into co-existence, for the apostle overturns hierarchies and subverts the criteria of purity, uniformity, compactness, and glory.

In the Fourth Gospel, Christ proclaims only two Beatitudes:

"Verily, verily, I say unto you, there is no greater servant than his lord, nor greater sent than he that sent him. If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them" (Jn 13:16-17).

And to Thomas: "Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed" (Jn 20:29b) - this, not because effort is a means to accumulate sorrows and merits, and so please God.

The two Beatitudes of Jn guarantee the tracks on which the believer finds his full realisation and the wonder of happiness: the practice of charity that recovers all the being dispersed, including others, in the adventure of Faith.

Before and during ritual meals, the pious of Israel performed ablutions with water, to celebrate the separation between the sacred and the profane, between the pure and the impure.

At the head of the table, hands were washed by a servant or the youngest of the guests.

With Jesus, tradition is shattered from within - to the amazed. 

For a Jew, washing others was something he had to refuse to do, even if enslaved, lest he dishonour the people. 

Instead, the Messiah prostrates himself and has the freedom to wash [not even his hands, but] his feet.

An absurd revelation of the Face of God, which crumbles countless mannerisms, hopes of artificial prestige; and acts of submission, grotesque acknowledgements - advanced by church princes.

Here is not only an invitation to serve one's neighbour... a gesture to imitate that proclaims the humble service character of the ministry.

It is also a sign of the purification of his own - like a new baptism that makes one immediately part of God's world.

This 'washing' is a figure of the Person and Mission of the Son on behalf of mankind, all of whom are now enabled to pass from this set-up to the Father's Kingdom.

And in the same way to pass the neighbour, the multitudes.

The Master unites a group of even unconvinced disciples to himself, but made pure - not because he aims to form a school distinct from others, or even one-sided.

He calls by Name and creates Assembly to introduce us into Love, into the passage from slavery to the freedom of the Free, which descends.

God does not identify people, nor does He superimpose His own thoughts on people's history and sensibilities.

By stooping, he crosses roles, club spirit, ideas themselves, and certificates. An initiative - this one - exemplary.

Indeed, in his Exodus, he traces the new path of the people, even of those who are against - and this baffles, it seems unacceptable. 

Peter is eager to command: he is not up to introducing himself into a logic that manifests even in community leaders a God who is a servant of men, independent of their origins, or their backgrounds.By lowering himself to the level of the slave who lays down his garments, the Lord wants to humanise us, recovering instead the opposites, rooted in a particular way and in each person.

He even admits contestation - highlighting it and healing it.

That is, unless one remains like Judas stubbornly attached to external seductions and false spiritual guides: to the clichés of social belonging-approval, and self-interest.

Finally, Jesus does not take off his apron, before putting his clothes back on: it is the only uniform that belongs to him.

That kind of dress stays with him: he wears it even in Paradise.

He does not play the part of the caretaker, to return to heaven to lord it over us. He does not condition anyone.

The Life of the Father pursues us on every path, to make us feel adequate: One-Body-Only with the Son, to whom he has delivered everything into his hands (v.3).

Total bloom for us too; indestructible, eminent, in itself devoid of occult deadly germs.

His Trust is passed on in salvation history; it is unfolded to the undecided and imperfect, his kinsmen in the Son.

Ready to lift us up to an existence that no longer extinguishes being - and us eager to make it flourish, instead of boycotting or borrowing it.

Adopted sons: not a diminution, but the distinguished recognition of an equality that does not jar.

In ancient times, when a ruler designated a successor to the throne, he not infrequently appointed as dignitary a valiant more trustworthy than his kinsman in the natural line (often scheming, spoilt, fed up with his own prosperity).

God does not force us together. By bending, it overrides the spirit of marginalisation, parties, characters; all salvation.

This is the 'service' of the disciples, to be performed with life and the proclamation of the good news: to make known that the Father is not the selective God of religion, but the unconditional lover of woman and man.

Love is communicated from peer to peer and has the same pace as life: it cannot be bridled by inherited opinions or fixed conventions, nor subjected to casuistic narratives.

Only the awareness of a freedom that remains will lead to gestures of clear-cut completeness.

Not for opportunist and individual advantage: for the sake of Joy in fullness of being and intensity of relationship.

In any external circumstance, only the esteem that the Father accords to each one leads the children and their stories towards acts of conviviality and inexplicable recoveries.

Jesus washing feet depicts the secret of the blissful life that expands the way of the I into that of the Thou: in being genuine and free even to descend, even to bend down to serve.

Without labyrinths of norms or lofty cries of principle; without compromising the most genuine spontaneity and slenderness - without yielding to mistrust of the imperfection of others.

Overriding the typical interdiction respectability, therefore without the usual rigmarole - so beloved of the owners, always distanced and apprehensive, on any front.

Herein arises frankness in the baptismal attitude... celebrating existence in all its forms, beyond boundaries; trusting in life, in its natural and opposite polarities.

Allowing for other developments and expansions. Opening one's eyes to the world - the cornerstone of new relationships, replacing one-sided customs, or external fashions.

Embracing a richer destiny; loving contradictions.

A ban on models and the exaggeration of 'capabilities'.

Rather, the search for solutions that trust, without interfering. By rediscovering its humanising nature.

Recognising diversity.

Approving, redeeming and evaluating 'pure' each particular path [the 'washed' feet of each].

To internalise and live the message:

How do you live your responsibility and personality in Christ according to vv.3-4?

After the Eucharist, do you do as Jesus did, or do you immediately lay down your apron?

Communion:

Root of being, dreaming energy that reinterprets history

Jn 13:16-20 (.21-38)

An 'envoy' is no more than the one who sends him (v.16). The new CEI translation specifies that Jesus does not elect Twelve Apostles as if they were leaders and phenomena destined to have fabulous positions.

His own are quite ordinary people, sent to proclaim; not directors provided with office, but with a humble charge: to be themselves and wash the feet of others. This is their fabric.

The ministerial Church is not that of characters with titles and roles, but of authentic service, not of manner: resigned and non-conformist.

We can only become a continuation of the Mystery that envelops the Person of Christ if we are aware that we are not dual photocopies, nor 'more' than others - let alone the Master.

In I Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed), Manzoni narrates that the marquis who succeeds Don Rodrigo ('a good man, not an original') serves the guests at Renzo and Lucia's wedding table.Then, however, he withdraws to dine aloof with Don Abbondio: 'he had as much humility as it took to put himself below those good people, but not to be their equal'.

It used to be done this way: social etiquette dictated it.

A mannered style, whereby, in order to please, one accepted to adapt to (extemporary) gestures of alms and benevolence, among very good people - obviously safeguarding the protagonism of positions.

But aligning ourselves with the models does not bring us out of the usual cages; on the contrary, it hides us in the illusion of a change that in reality is not taking place, because the bogus order remains, despite the altruism of appearances - worn for the sake of good intentions.

The portent to which we are called and sent is not to make room for convenient sentiments, but to move from our external summit to the level of others and to stand elbow to elbow, to give everyone the emotion of feeling adequate.

From service to Communion: a unique climate of energy [not always 'according to etiquette' but authentically ours and dreaming] that develops flourishes, triggering impossible recoveries.

From here, we read history anew.

Yet we wonder with what energies to implement it, if at times we ourselves feel incomplete, uncertain in operating; not up to the mark.

In the context of the washing of the feet, Jesus reminds us that the disciple should have no illusions: he will not have a splendid career, worldly recognition, or less persecution from the Master as a dowry.

According to an ancient mentality, to mistreat an ambassador or messenger was to offend those he represented; to accept him was to honour him.

Here we come to the root of the unveiling mission: welcoming the sent one honours Christ, and in him God himself (v.20).

The apostles are "sent" in this sense, like the Son by the Father. Within this flow, we become a revealing light, fully, without closures.

In short, one of the ways of washing one another's feet (v.14) is precisely to come and feel properly 'sent' - picturing Jesus, and God himself, passing through us.

It is the way of blessedness (v.17) - that of the living Lord - that is the core of the "outgoing Church": adding to beautiful and practical teachings the essential dimension.

Such is the plausible and amiable path, evangelising our Roots. Who does not ask for "resilience" in relationships, only from the "inferiors" of the world.

Salvation in a divine dimension, which takes on value; operated from within the conscience which finds esteem and face, and free ferment that opens hope, orienting.

The deep being of the Friend who has the freedom to come down is expressed in the action. He reveals himself to be the promoter of the unfortunate, not the subtle prevaricator.

Making each exodus, our vocational trait carries within it a precious treasure chest, the awareness of the intimate Source of the apostolate, and its precious concatenation that transforms the past into the future.

The resulting sense of completeness and radical meaning is effective. 

It is for those who discover, encounter, feel alive, their own missionary Source - and bear witness to it.

By simply and naturally expressing himself - without forcing or artificiality - he is at the same time for the brothers to be recognised.

In short, the service of the ministerial community is not in the dimension of servitude, but of a flow of primal energies, of fabric; wave upon genuine wave.

In all of this, development after development, we re-actualise the epiphany of the Logos in Christ, in the today of being people (shaky yet convinced, tenacious) bound by a fraternal figure of weight.

"I Am" of Ex 3:14 becomes - effortlessly - the communal and welcoming People of the servants filled with self-given dignity.

The eternal element of the Word is preserved and developed by his envoys and by the ministerial, "apostolic" church: both in its original and founding character, and in its connection to the history of each individual.

To internalise and live the message:

What does it mean for you to move from serving to communion? Do you consider this an annoying excess?

Is it enough for you to make others feel good at times, as a protagonist and in a complacent manner, or do you strive to make them feel adequate?

Year of Grace and fraternity: the seal to salvation history

Lk 4:16-21 (14-37)

Jesus' transgressions and ours (reinforcing the plot)

(Lk 4:14-21)

"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, therefore he has anointed me to proclaim the Good News to the poor" (Lk 4:18).

In ancient Israel, the patriarchal family, clan and community were the basis of social coexistence.

They guaranteed the transmission of the identity of the people and provided protection for the afflicted.

Defending the clan was also a concrete way of confirming the First Covenant.

But at the time of Jesus, Galilee suffered both the segregation dictated by Herod Antipas' policy and the oppression of official religiosity.

The spineless collaborationism of the ruler had accentuated the number of homeless and unemployed.

The political and economic situation forced people to retreat to material and individual problems or to the immediate family.

At one time, the identity bond of clan and community guaranteed an (internal) character of a nation in solidarity, expressed in the defence and relief given to the less affluent of the people.

Now, this fraternal bond was weakened, a little congealed, almost contradicted - not least because of the strict attitude of the religious authorities, fundamentalist and lovers of a saccharine purism, opposed to mixing with the less affluent classes.

The Law [written and oral] ended up being used not to favour the welcoming of the marginalised and needy, but to accentuate detachment and ghettoisation.

Situations that were driving the least protected sections of the population to collapse.

In short, traditional devotion - loving the alliance between throne and altar - instead of strengthening the sense of community was used to accentuate hierarchies; as a weapon that legitimised a whole mentality of exclusions (and confirmed the imperial logic of divide and rule).

Jesus, on the other hand, wants to return to the Father's Dream: the ineliminable one of fraternity, the only seal to salvation history.

For this reason, his not fleeting criterion was to connect the Word of God to the life of the people, and in this way overcome divisions.

Thus, according to Lk the first time Jesus enters a Synagogue he messes up.

He does not go to pray, but to teach what God's Grace is (undefiled by chicanery and false teachings) in people's real existence.

He chooses a passage that precisely reflects the situation of the people of Galilee, oppressed by the power of the rulers, who were making the weak suffer confusion and poverty.

But his first Reading disregards the liturgical calendar.

Then he dares to preach in his own way and personalising the passage from Isaiah, from which he allows himself to censor the verse announcing God's vengeance.

So he doesn't even proclaim the expected passage of the Law.

And He poses as if He were the master of the place of worship - in fact He is: the Risen One who 'sits' is teaching His [still Judaizing] people.

Moreover - we understand from the tone of the Gospel passage - for the Son of God, the Spirit is not revealed in the extraordinary phenomena of the cosmos, but in the Year of Grace ("a year acceptable to the Lord": v.19).

It is divine because it is personal and social, the new energy that creates the authentic man.

This is the platform that works the turning point.

It becomes an engine, a motive and context, for a transformation of the soul and of relationships - at that time weighed down by even theological servility [of merits].

In a warp of vital relationships, the better understanding of the Gift becomes a springboard for a harmonious future of liberation and justice.

Christ believes that the Father's Kingdom arises by making the present, then mired in oppression, anguish and slavery, grow from within.

The Tao Tê Ching (XLVI) says: "When the Way is in force in the world, swift horses are sent to fertilise the fields".

The emancipation offered by the Spirit is addressed not to the great, but precisely to those who suffer forms of need, defect and penury: in Jesus... now all open to the jubilee figure of the new Creation.

In short, there seems to be total antagonism and unsuitability between the Lord and the practitioners of traditional religion - heavy, selective, devoted to legalisms and reprisals; pyramidal, with no way out.

Obviously, both leaders and habitualists ask themselves - on a ritual and venerable basis: is it possible that the divine likeness could manifest itself in a man who is considerate towards the less affluent, who disregards official customs, does not believe in retaliation, and displays forms of uncontrolled spontaneity?

It is a reminder for us. The person of true Faith does not allow himself to be conditioned by habitual, useless and quiet conformities.

Common thinking - habituated and agreed upon but subtly competitive - becomes a backwards energy, too normal and swampy; not propulsive for the personal and social soul.If, on the other hand, we allow ourselves to be accompanied by the Dream of a super-eminent gestation from the Father, we will be animated through the royal and sacred Presence that directs us to fly over repetitions, or selections, marginalisations and fallacious recriminations.

As if we shift our being into a horizon and a world of friendly relations that then acts as a magnet to reality and anticipates the future.

Like the Master and Lord, instead of reasoning with induced thoughts and being sequestered by the heaviness of rejections and fears, we begin to think with the images of personal Vocation, with the empathic codes of our bursting Call.

The unknown evolutionary resources that are triggered, immediately unravel a network of paths that the "locals" may not like, but avoid the perennial conflict with missionary identity and character.

The unrepeatable and wide-ranging Vision-Relation (v.18a) - without reduction - then becomes strategic, because it possesses within itself the call of the Quintessence, and all the resources to solve the real problems.

To listen to the proclamation of the Gospels (v.18b) is to listen to the echo of oneself and the little people: an intimate and social choice.

And to be in it without the dead leaves of one-sidedness - to wander freely in that same Call; not neglecting precious parts of oneself, nor amputating eccentricities, or the intuition proper to the subordinate classes.

This is to be able to manifest the quiet Root (but in its energetic state), our Character (in the lovable, non-separatist Friend) - to avoid stultifying it with another bondage.

All in the instinct to be and do happy, never allowing themselves to be imprisoned by the craving for security on the side; stagnant pursuit.

The Kingdom in the Spirit (cf. vv.14.18) - who knows what we need - has ceased to be a goal of mere future.

It is the surprise that Christ arouses in us around his proposal with the extra gear.

He does not neglect us: he extinguishes the accusatory brooding and redesigns creatively.

It still gives birth and motivates, it recovers the dispersions, and strengthens the plot.

To internalise and live the message:

How do I link the Faith with the cultural and social situation?

What is Christ's Today with your Today, in the Spirit?

What is your form of apostolate that frees the brothers from the debasement of dignity and promotes them?

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me (et vult Cubam)

3. "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me; therefore he has anointed me, and sent me forth to proclaim a glad message" (Lk 4:18). Every minister of God must make these words spoken by Jesus of Nazareth his own in his own life. Therefore, being here among you, I want to bring you the good news of hope in God. As a servant of the Gospel, I bring you this message of love and solidarity that Jesus Christ, with his coming, offers to people of all times. It is neither an ideology nor a new economic or political system, but a path to peace, justice and genuine freedom.

4. The ideological and economic systems that have succeeded one another in recent centuries have often emphasised confrontation as a method, because they contained in their programmes the seeds of opposition and disunity. This has deeply conditioned the conception of man and relations with others. Some of these systems have also claimed to reduce religion to the merely individual sphere, stripping it of any social influence or relevance. In this sense, it is good to remember that a modern state cannot make atheism or religion one of its political orders. The State, far from any fanaticism or extreme secularism, must promote a serene social climate and adequate legislation that allows each person and each religious denomination to freely live their faith, express it in the spheres of public life and be able to count on sufficient means and space to offer their spiritual, moral and civic riches to the life of the nation.

On the other hand, in various places, a form of capitalist neo-liberalism is developing that subordinates the human person and conditions the development of peoples to the blind forces of the market, burdening the less favoured peoples with unbearable burdens from its centres of power. As a result, unsustainable economic programmes are often imposed on nations as a condition for receiving new aid. Thus we see, in the concert of nations, the exaggerated enrichment of the few at the cost of the increasing impoverishment of the many, so that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

5. Dear brothers: the Church is a teacher in humanity. Therefore, in the face of these systems, it proposes the culture of love and life, restoring to humanity the hope and transforming power of love, lived in the unity willed by Christ. This is why it is necessary to walk a path of reconciliation, dialogue and fraternal acceptance of one's neighbour, whoever they may be. This can be said of the Church's social gospel.

The Church, in carrying out her mission, proposes to the world a new justice, the justice of the Kingdom of God (cf. Mt 6:33). On several occasions I have referred to social issues. It is necessary to continue talking about it as long as there is injustice in the world, however small it may be, since otherwise the Church would not prove faithful to the mission entrusted to it by Jesus Christ. What is at stake is man, the person in the flesh. Although times and circumstances change, there are always people who need the voice of the Church to acknowledge their anguish, pain and misery. Those who find themselves in such situations can be assured that they will not be defrauded, for the Church is with them and the Pope embraces, with his heart and his word of encouragement, all those who suffer injustice.

(John Paul II, after being applauded at length, added)

I am not against applause, because when you applaud the Pope can rest a little.

The teachings of Jesus retain their vigour intact on the threshold of the year 2000. They are valid for all of you, my dear brothers. In the search for the justice of the Kingdom, we cannot stop in the face of difficulties and misunderstandings. If the Master's invitation to justice, service and love is accepted as Good News, then the heart widens, criteria are transformed and the culture of love and life is born. This is the great change that society awaits and needs; it can only be achieved if first the conversion of each person's heart takes place as a condition for the necessary changes in the structures of society.

6. "The Spirit of the Lord has sent me to proclaim release to the captives (...) to set at liberty those who are oppressed" (Lk 4:18). The good news of Jesus must be accompanied by a proclamation of freedom, based on the solid foundation of truth: "If you remain faithful to my word, you will indeed be my disciples; you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free" (John 8: 31-32). The truth to which Jesus refers is not just the intellectual understanding of reality, but the truth about man and his transcendent condition, his rights and duties, his greatness and limitations. It is the same truth that Jesus proclaimed with his life, reaffirmed before Pilate and, by his silence, before Herod; it is the same truth that led him to the saving cross and glorious resurrection.

Freedom that is not grounded in truth conditions man to such an extent that it sometimes makes him an object rather than a subject of the social, cultural, economic and political context, leaving him almost totally deprived of initiative with regard to personal development. At other times, this freedom is of an individualistic type and, not taking into account the freedom of others, locks man into his own selfishness. The conquest of freedom in responsibility is an indispensable task for every person. For Christians, the freedom of God's children is not only a gift and a task; its attainment also implies an invaluable witness and a genuine contribution to the liberation of the whole human race. This liberation is not reduced to social and political aspects, but reaches its fullness in the exercise of freedom of conscience, the basis and foundation of other human rights.

(Responding to the invocation raised by the crowd: "The Pope lives and wants us all to be free!", John Paul II added:)

Yes, live with that freedom to which Christ has set you free.

For many of today's political and economic systems, the greatest challenge continues to be to combine freedom and social justice, liberty and solidarity, without any of them being relegated to a lower level. In this sense, the Social Doctrine of the Church constitutes an effort of reflection and a proposal that seeks to enlighten and reconcile the relationship between the inalienable rights of every man and social needs, so that the person may fulfil his deepest aspirations and his own integral realisation according to his condition as a child of God and citizen. Consequently, the Catholic laity must contribute to this realisation through the application of the Church's social teachings in different environments, open to all people of good will.

7. In the Gospel proclaimed today, justice appears intimately linked to truth. This is also observed in the lucid thinking of the Fathers of the Fatherland. The Servant of God Father Félix Varela, animated by Christian faith and fidelity to his priestly ministry, sowed in the hearts of the Cuban people the seeds of justice and freedom that he dreamed of seeing germinate in a free and independent Cuba.José Martí's doctrine of love among all men has profoundly evangelical roots, thus overcoming the false conflict between faith in God and love and service to the homeland. Martí writes: 'Pure, disinterested, persecuted, martyred, poetic and simple, the religion of the Nazarene has seduced all honest men... Every people needs to be religious. It must be so not only in its essence, but also in its utility... A non-religious people is doomed to die, for nothing in it nourishes virtue. Human injustice despises it; heavenly justice must guarantee it'.

As you know, Cuba possesses a Christian soul, and this has led it to have a universal vocation. Called to overcome isolation, it must open up to the world, and the world must draw closer to Cuba, to its people, to its children, who undoubtedly represent its greatest wealth. The time has come to take the new paths that the times of renewal in which we live demand, as we approach the Third Millennium of the Christian era!

8. Dear brothers: God has blessed this people with authentic formers of the national conscience, clear and firm exponents of the Christian faith, which is the most valid support of virtue and love. Today the Bishops, together with priests, consecrated men and women and the lay faithful, strive to build bridges to bring minds and hearts closer together, propitiating and consolidating peace, preparing the civilisation of love and justice. I am here among you as a messenger of truth and hope. This is why I wish to repeat my appeal to let Jesus Christ enlighten you, to accept without reserve the splendour of his truth, so that all may follow the path of unity through love and solidarity, avoiding exclusion, isolation and confrontation, which are contrary to the will of the God-Love.

May the Holy Spirit enlighten with his gifts all those who have different responsibilities towards this people, whom I hold in my heart. May the "Virgen de la Caridad de El Cobre", Queen of Cuba, obtain for her children the gifts of peace, progress and happiness.

This wind today is very significant, because the wind symbolises the Holy Spirit. "Spiritus spirat ubi vult, Spiritus vult spirare in Cuba'. The last words are in Latin because Cuba also belongs to the Latin tradition. Latin America, Latin Cuba, Latin language! "Spiritus spirat ubi vult et vult Cubam". Goodbye.

(John Paul II, homily "José Martí" Square Havana 25 January 1998)

Person, extemporaneity, synagogues

Two Names of God

(Lk 4:21-30)

Today's Gospel - taken from the fourth chapter of St Luke - is a continuation of last Sunday's Gospel. We are still in the synagogue of Nazareth, the town where Jesus grew up and where everyone knew him and his family. Now, after a period of absence, He has returned in a new way: during the Sabbath liturgy He reads a prophecy from Isaiah about the Messiah and announces its fulfilment, implying that the word refers to Him, that Isaiah has spoken of Him. This fact provokes the bewilderment of the Nazarenes: on the one hand, "all bore witness to him and were amazed at the words of grace that came out of his mouth" (Lk 4:22); St Mark reports that many said: "Where do these things come from him? And what wisdom is that which has been given him?" (6:2). On the other hand, however, his villagers know him all too well: 'He is one like us,' they say, 'His claim can only be a conceit' (cf. The Infancy of Jesus, 11). "Is not this the son of Joseph?" (Lk 4:22), as if to say: a carpenter from Nazareth, what aspirations could he have?

Precisely knowing this closure, which confirms the proverb 'no prophet is welcome in his own country', Jesus addresses the people in the synagogue with words that sound like a provocation. He cites two miracles performed by the great prophets Elijah and Elisha in favour of non-Israelites, to show that sometimes there is more faith outside Israel. At that point the reaction is unanimous: everyone gets up and throws him out, and even tries to throw him off a cliff, but He, with sovereign calm, passes through the midst of the angry people and leaves. At this point the question arises: why did Jesus want to provoke this rupture? In the beginning, people admired him, and perhaps he could have gained a certain consensus... But this is precisely the point: Jesus did not come to seek the consensus of men, but - as he will say at the end to Pilate - to 'bear witness to the truth' (Jn 18:37). The true prophet obeys no one but God and puts himself at the service of truth, ready to pay for it himself. It is true that Jesus is the prophet of love, but love has its truth. Indeed, love and truth are two names of the same reality, two names of God. In today's liturgy these words of St Paul also resonate: "Charity ... does not boast, is not puffed up with pride, is not disrespectful, does not seek its own interest, is not angry, does not take account of evil received, does not rejoice in injustice but rejoices in the truth" (1 Cor 13:4-6). Believing in God means renouncing one's prejudices and accepting the concrete face in which He revealed Himself: the man Jesus of Nazareth. And this way also leads to recognising and serving him in others.

In this, Mary's attitude is illuminating. Who more than she was familiar with the humanity of Jesus? But she was never scandalised by it as were the people of Nazareth. She kept the mystery in her heart and was able to welcome it again and again, on the path of faith, until the night of the Cross and the full light of the Resurrection. May Mary also help us to tread this path faithfully and joyfully.

[Pope Benedict, Angelus 3 February 2013].

Jesus is annoying and generates suspicion in those who love outward schemes, because he proclaims only jubilee instead of harsh confrontation and vengeance. 

In the synagogue, her village is puzzled by this overly understanding love - just what we need.

The place of worship is where believers have been brought up backwards!

Their surly character is the unripe fruit of a hammering religiosity, which denies the right to express ideas and feelings.

The "synagogical" code has produced fake believers, conditioned by a disharmonious and split personality.

Even today and from an early age, this intimate laceration manifests itself in the over-controlling of openness to others.

Consequence: an accentuation of youthful uncertainty - under which who knows what broods - and a rigid adult character.

In short, religious hammering that does not make the leap of Faith blocks us, prevents us from understanding, and pollutes all of life.

Even in Jesus' time, archaic teaching exacerbated nationalism, the very perception of trauma or violation, and paradoxically, the very caged situations from which they wanted to escape.

Exclusive spirituality: it is empty - crude or sophisticated.

Selective thinking is the worst disease of worldviews - which are then always telling us how we should be.

Thus in concrete life, not a few believers prefer to have friends without conformist blindness or the same bonds of belonging.

On closer inspection, even the most devout secular realities manifest an accentuated and strange dichotomy of relationships - tribal and otherwise.

Pope Francis expressed it crisply:

"It is a scandal to have people who go to church, who are there every day and then live hating others and speaking ill of people: it is better to live as an atheist than to give a counter-witness to being a Christian".

The real world awakens and stimulates flexibility of standards, it does not inculcate some old-fashioned, hypnosis-like truism.

Today's global reality helps to blunt the edges of conventicle [which have their own regurgitations, in terms of seduction and sucking].

In the face of such beliefs and illusions, the Prophet marks distance; he works to spread awareness, not reassuring images - nor disembodied ideas.

'But critical heralds violently irritate the crowd of regulars, who suddenly turn from curiosity to vindictive indignation.

As in the small town, so - we read in a watermark - in the Holy City [Mount Zion] from which they immediately want to throw you down (Lk 4:29).

Wherever there is talk of the real person and eternal dreams: his, not others'.

In the hostility that surrounds them, the Lord's intimates openly challenge normalised beliefs, acquired from the environment and not reworked.

For them, it is not just the calculated analogy to a mean outline that counts. They see other goals and do not just want to 'get there'.

If they are overpowered, they leave behind them that trail of insight that will sooner or later make both harmful clansmen and useless opportunists reflect.

Thus, in Friends and Brothers it is the Risen One himself who escapes. And they resume their journey, crossing those who want to do away with them (v. 30) for reasons of self-interest or neighbourhood advantage.

At all times, witnesses make people think: they do not seek compliments and pleasant results, but they recover the opposite sides and accept others' happiness.

They know that Oneness must run its course: it will be wealth for all, and on this point they do not let themselves be inhibited by the nomenclature.

Though surrounded by the envious and deadly hatred of cunning idiots and established synagogues, they proclaim Love in Truth - neither burine hoaxes (approved as empty) nor ulterior motives (solid utility).

In fact, without milking and shearing the unwary, such missionaries give impetus to the courage and growth of others, to the autonomy of choices.

All this, favouring the coexistence of the invisible and despised; in an atmosphere of understanding and spontaneity.They love the luxuriance of life, so they discriminate between religion and Faith: they do not stand as repeaters of doctrines, prescriptions, customs.

Based on the Father's personal experience, the inspired faithful value different approaches, creating an unknown esteem.

They confront young sectarian monsters [the Pontiff would say], old marpions and their fences, with an open face, advocating new attitudes - different ways of relating to God.

Not to add proselytes and consider themselves indispensable.

Even though 'at home' (v. 24) they are inconvenient characters for the ratified mentality, the none-Prophets make Jesus' personalism survive, wrenching it from those who want it dormant and sequestered.

Like Him, at the risk of unpopularity and without begging for approval.

With the scars of what is gone, for a new Journey.

To internalise and live the message:

In the 'homeland' are you considered a local nobody, or a prophet? A ratified character, or uncomfortable? In the way, or unpopular?

Is your testimony transgressive or conformist? Does Jesus' personalism survive, wresting it from those who want it dormant and sequestered?

God wants faith, they want miracles: God for their own benefit

Last Sunday, the liturgy had proposed to us the episode in the synagogue of Nazareth, where Jesus reads a passage from the prophet Isaiah and at the end reveals that those words are fulfilled "today", in Him. Jesus presents Himself as the one on whom the Spirit of the Lord rested, the Holy Spirit who consecrated Him and sent Him to fulfil the mission of salvation on behalf of humanity. Today's Gospel (cf. Lk 4:21-30) is a continuation of that story and shows us the amazement of his fellow citizens at seeing that one of their countrymen, "the son of Joseph" (v. 22), claims to be the Christ, the Father's envoy.

Jesus, with his ability to penetrate minds and hearts, immediately understands what his countrymen think. They believe that, since He is one of them, He must prove this strange "claim" of His by performing miracles there, in Nazareth, as He did in the neighbouring countries (cf. v. 23). But Jesus does not want and cannot accept this logic, because it does not correspond to God's plan: God wants faith, they want miracles, signs; God wants to save everyone, and they want a Messiah for their own benefit. And to explain God's logic, Jesus brings the example of two great ancient prophets: Elijah and Elisha, whom God had sent to heal and save people who were not Jewish, from other peoples, but who had trusted his word.

Faced with this invitation to open their hearts to the gratuitousness and universality of salvation, the citizens of Nazareth rebel, and even assume an aggressive attitude, which degenerates to the point that "they got up and drove him out of the town and brought him to the edge of the mountain [...], to throw him down" (v. 29). The admiration of the first instant has turned into aggression, a rebellion against Him.

And this Gospel shows us that Jesus' public ministry begins with a rejection and a threat of death, paradoxically precisely from his fellow citizens. Jesus, in living the mission entrusted to him by the Father, knows well that he must face fatigue, rejection, persecution and defeat. A price that, yesterday as today, authentic prophecy is called upon to pay. The harsh rejection, however, does not discourage Jesus, nor does it stop the journey and fruitfulness of his prophetic action. He goes on his way (cf. v. 30), trusting in the Father's love.

Even today, the world needs to see in the Lord's disciples prophets, that is, people who are courageous and persevering in responding to the Christian vocation. People who follow the 'thrust' of the Holy Spirit, who sends them to announce hope and salvation to the poor and excluded; people who follow the logic of faith and not of miracles; people dedicated to the service of all, without privileges and exclusions. In a nutshell: people who are open to accepting the Father's will within themselves and are committed to faithfully witnessing it to others.

Let us pray to Mary Most Holy, that we may grow and walk in the same apostolic ardour for the Kingdom of God that animated Jesus' mission.

[Pope Francis, Angelus 3 February 2019].

Liberation from quietism and automatic mentality

(Lk 4:31-37)

In the third Gospel, the Lord's first signs are the quiet escape from death threats (waved by his people!) and the healing of the possessed.

In this way of narrating the story of Jesus, Lk indicates the priorities that his communities lived: first of all, it was necessary to suspend the intimate struggles, inculcated by the Judaizing tradition and its "knowing how to be in the world".

In the stubborn and conformist village of Nazareth, the Master fails to communicate his newness, and is forced to change residence.

He did not resign, indeed: Capernaum was at the crossroads of important roads, which facilitated contact and dissemination.Among people from all walks of life, the Son of God desired to create a consciousness that was highly critical of the homologised doctrines of religious leaders.

He did not mechanically quote the - modest - teachings of the authorities, but started from his own life experience and living relationship with the Father.

He did not seek support, neither for safe living nor for the proclamation - thus creating unclouded minds and an unusual thrill.

In this way, in souls he suspended the usual doubts of conscience, the usual battles inoculated by the customary-doctrinal-moral cloak, and his inner lacerations.

In a transparent and totally non-artificial way, Christ [in his] still escapes evil and struggles against the plagiarising, reductive forces of our personality.

In the mentality of automatisms without personal faith, at that time it seemed that one almost had to submit to the powers of external conviction.

All this to avoid being marginalised by the 'nation' [and by 'groups' governed by conformity].

This also applies to us.

The duty to participate in collective rituals - here the Sabbath in the synagogue - runs the risk of dampening the intimate nostalgia for "ourselves" that provides nourishment for vocational exceptionality.

Originality of the history of salvation we could become, without the ball and chain of certain rules of quiet living, at the minimum - rhythm of customary social moments and symbolic days [sometimes emptied of meaning].

(All in the scruffy, mechanical ways that we know by heart, and no longer want, because we feel they do not make us reach a higher level).

The Master in us still faces the power that reduces people to the condition of ease without originality: a grey and perpetual trance allergic to differences.

Apathy that produces swamps and anticipated camps, where no one protests, but neither does it astonish.

In the Gospel, the person who suddenly sparks sparks was always a quiet assembly-goer, who wearily dragged his spiritual life in small, colourless circles, lacking in breath and rhythm.

But the Word of the Lord has a real charge in it: the power of the bliss of living, of creating, of loving in truth - which does not hate eccentric characteristics.

Where such an Appeal comes in, all the demons you don't expect are unmasked and leap out of their lairs [previously simulated, agreed upon, artificially homologated].

Whoever encounters Christ is overthrown from the abulic seat, sitting there; he sees his certainties thrown to the wind

Revolt that allows hidden or repressed facets to play their part - even if they are not 'as they should be'.

In short, the Gospel invites us to embrace all that is within us, as it is, unabated; multiplying our energies - for within lurks the best of our Call to personal Mission.

In Christ, our multifaceted (albeit contradictory) faces can take the field together, no longer repressing the precious territories of soul, essence, character, of another persuasion - even a distant or unrepeatably singular one.

The habitué of the assemblies is indeed inconvenienced and questioned, but at least he does not remain dumbfounded as before: he makes a conspicuous advance from his slumbering, ritualistic existence - bent, repetitive, dull and fake.

He is freed face to face from all the propaganda and platitudes that previously kept him quiet, subjugated, on the leash of the 'authorities' and the conservative environment that repelled all enthusiasm.

The dirge of sacred place and time was a litany that all in all could have fit, but Jesus' critical proposal restores consciousness and freedom from inculcated territories, instilling esteem, capacity for thought and will to do.

Now no longer on the sidelines, but in the midst of the people (v.35).

From the weariness of purely cultic habituation, and even through a protest that breaks apathy, the divine Person and his Call awaken us. They force a life of saved, of new witness that seemed impossible.

Unceremoniously and to make us run free of the hypocrisies concealed within, the Lord also brings out all the rages, disagreements and alienations.

It is no longer enough to make up the numbers (lined up and covered), one must now choose.

The difference between common religiosity and Faith? The astonishment of a profound, personal, unexpected Happiness.

Indeed, away from habitual and mental burdens, we extinguish wars with ourselves and go hand in hand even with our faults - discovering their hidden fruitfulness.

To internalise and live the message:

Has the encounter with the living Jesus in the Church freed you from forms of alienation and returned you to yourself, or has it made you go back to asking for support, sacred confirmations and quiet - as if you were frequenting a relaxation zone?

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

St John begins his account of how Jesus washed his disciples' feet with an especially solemn, almost liturgical language. "Before the feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart out of this world to the Father, having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end" (Jn 13: 1). Jesus' "hour", to which all his work had been directed since the outset, had come. John used two words to describe what constitutes the content of this hour: passage (metabainein, metabasis) and agape - love. The two words are mutually explanatory; they both describe the Pasch of Jesus: the Cross and the Resurrection, the Crucifixion as an uplifting, a "passage" to God's glory, a "passing" from the world to the Father. It is not as though after paying the world a brief visit, Jesus now simply departs and returns to the Father. The passage is a transformation. He brings with him his flesh, his being as a man. On the Cross, in giving himself, he is as it were fused and transformed into a new way of being, in which he is now always with the Father and contemporaneously with humankind. He transforms the Cross, the act of killing, into an act of giving, of love to the end. With this expression "to the end", John anticipates Jesus' last words on the Cross: everything has been accomplished, "It is finished" (19: 30). Through Jesus' love the Cross becomes metabasis, a transformation from being human into being a sharer in God's glory. He involves us all in this transformation, drawing us into the transforming power of his love to the point that, in our being with him, our life becomes a "passage", a transformation. Thus, we receive redemption, becoming sharers in eternal love, a condition for which we strive throughout our life.

This essential process of Jesus' hour is portrayed in the washing of the feet in a sort of prophetic and symbolic act. In it, Jesus highlights with a concrete gesture precisely what the great Christological hymn in the Letter to the Philippians describes as the content of Christ's mystery. Jesus lays down the clothes of his glory, he wraps around his waist the towel of humanity and makes himself a servant. He washes the disciples' dirty feet and thus gives them access to the divine banquet to which he invites them. The devotional and external purifications purify man ritually but leave him as he is replaced by a new bathing: Jesus purifies us through his Word and his Love, through the gift of himself. "You are already made clean by the word which I have spoken to you", he was to say to his disciples in the discourse on the vine (Jn 15: 3). Over and over again he washes us with his Word. Yes, if we accept Jesus' words in an attitude of meditation, prayer and faith, they develop in us their purifying power. Day after today we are as it were covered by many forms of dirt, empty words, prejudices, reduced and altered wisdom; a multi-facetted semi-falsity or falsity constantly infiltrates deep within us. All this clouds and contaminates our souls, threatens us with an incapacity for truth and the good. If we receive Jesus' words with an attentive heart they prove to be truly cleansing, purifications of the soul, of the inner man. The Gospel of the washing of the feet invites us to this, to allow ourselves to be washed anew by this pure water, to allow ourselves to be made capable of convivial communion with God and with our brothers and sisters. However, when Jesus was pierced by the soldier's spear, it was not only water that flowed from his side but also blood (Jn 19: 34; cf. I Jn 5: 6-8). Jesus has not only spoken; he has not left us only words. He gives us himself. He washes us with the sacred power of his Blood, that is, with his gift of himself "to the end", to the Cross. His word is more than mere speech; it is flesh and blood "for the life of the world" (Jn 6: 51). In the holy sacraments, the Lord kneels ever anew at our feet and purifies us. Let us pray to him that we may be ever more profoundly penetrated by the sacred cleansing of his love and thereby truly purified!

If we listen attentively to the Gospel, we can discern two different dimensions in the event of the washing of the feet. The cleansing that Jesus offers his disciples is first and foremost simply his action - the gift of purity, of the "capacity for God" that is offered to them. But the gift then becomes a model, the duty to do the same for one another. The Fathers have described these two aspects of the washing of the feet with the words sacramentum and exemplum. Sacramentum in this context does not mean one of the seven sacraments but the mystery of Christ in its entirety, from the Incarnation to the Cross and the Resurrection: all of this becomes the healing and sanctifying power, the transforming force for men and women, it becomes our metabasis, our transformation into a new form of being, into openness for God and communion with him. But this new being which, without our merit, he simply gives to us must then be transformed within us into the dynamic of a new life. The gift and example overall, which we find in the passage on the washing of the feet, is a characteristic of the nature of Christianity in general. Christianity is not a type of moralism, simply a system of ethics. It does not originate in our action, our moral capacity. Christianity is first and foremost a gift: God gives himself to us - he does not give something, but himself. And this does not only happen at the beginning, at the moment of our conversion. He constantly remains the One who gives. He continually offers us his gifts. He always precedes us. This is why the central act of Christian being is the Eucharist: gratitude for having been gratified, joy for the new life that he gives us.

Yet with this, we do not remain passive recipients of divine goodness. God gratifies us as personal, living partners. Love given is the dynamic of "loving together", it wants to be new life in us starting from God. Thus, we understand the words which, at the end of the washing of the feet, Jesus addresses to his disciples and to us all: "A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; even as I have loved you, that you also love one another" (Jn 13: 34). The "new commandment" does not consist in a new and difficult norm that did not exist until then. The new thing is the gift that introduces us into Christ's mentality. If we consider this, we perceive how far our lives often are from this newness of the New Testament and how little we give humanity the example of loving in communion with his love. Thus, we remain indebted to the proof of credibility of the Christian truth which is revealed in love. For this very reason we want to pray to the Lord increasingly to make us, through his purification, mature persons of the new commandment.

In the Gospel of the washing of the feet, Jesus' conversation with Peter presents to us yet another detail of the praxis of Christian life to which we would like finally to turn our attention. At first, Peter did not want to let the Lord wash his feet: this reversal of order, that is, that the master - Jesus - should wash feet, that the master should carry out the slave's service, contrasted starkly with his reverential respect for Jesus, with his concept of the relationship between the teacher and the disciple. "You shall never wash my feet", he said to Jesus with his usual impetuosity (Jn 13: 8). His concept of the Messiah involved an image of majesty, of divine grandeur. He had to learn repeatedly that God's greatness is different from our idea of greatness; that it consists precisely in stooping low, in the humility of service, in the radicalism of love even to total self-emptying.
And we too must learn it anew because we systematically desire a God of success and not of the Passion; because we are unable to realize that the Pastor comes as a Lamb that gives itself and thus leads us to the right pasture.

When the Lord tells Peter that without the washing of the feet he would not be able to have any part in him, Peter immediately asks impetuously that his head and hands be washed. This is followed by Jesus' mysterious saying: "He who has bathed does not need to wash, except for his feet" (Jn 13: 10). Jesus was alluding to a cleansing with which the disciples had already complied; for their participation in the banquet, only the washing of their feet was now required. But of course this conceals a more profound meaning. What was Jesus alluding to? We do not know for certain. In any case, let us bear in mind that the washing of the feet, in accordance with the meaning of the whole chapter, does not point to any single specific sacrament but the sacramentum Christi in its entirety - his service of salvation, his descent even to the Cross, his love to the end that purifies us and makes us capable of God. Yet here, with the distinction between bathing and the washing of the feet, an allusion to life in the community of the disciples also becomes perceptible, an allusion to the life of the Church. It then seems clear that the bathing that purifies us once and for all and must not be repeated is Baptism - being immersed in the death and Resurrection of Christ, a fact that profoundly changes our life, giving us as it were a new identity that lasts, if we do not reject it as Judas did. However, even in the permanence of this new identity, given by Baptism, for convivial communion with Jesus we need the "washing of the feet". What does this involve? It seems to me that the First Letter of St John gives us the key to understanding it. In it we read: "If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just, and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness" (1: 8ff.). We are in need of the "washing of the feet", the cleansing of our daily sins, and for this reason we need to confess our sins as St John spoke of in this Letter. We have to recognize that we sin, even in our new identity as baptized persons. We need confession in the form it has taken in the Sacrament of Reconciliation. In it the Lord washes our dirty feet ever anew and we can be seated at table with him.

But in this way the word with which the Lord extends the sacramentum, making it the exemplum, a gift, a service for one's brother, also acquires new meaning: "If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another's feet" (Jn 13: 14). We must wash one another's feet in the mutual daily service of love. But we must also wash one another's feet in the sense that we must forgive one another ever anew. The debt for which the Lord has pardoned us is always infinitely greater than all the debts that others can owe us (cf. Mt 18: 21-35). Holy Thursday exhorts us to this: not to allow resentment toward others to become a poison in the depths of the soul. It urges us to purify our memory constantly, forgiving one another whole-heartedly, washing one another's feet, to be able to go to God's banquet together.

Holy Thursday is a day of gratitude and joy for the great gift of love to the end that the Lord has made to us. Let us pray to the Lord at this hour, so that gratitude and joy may become in us the power to love together with his love. Amen.

[Pope Benedict, Homily in Coena Domini 20 March 2008]

1. “I have longed to eat this Passover with you before I suffer” (Lk 22:15).

With these words, Christ declares the prophetic meaning of the Passover Meal which he is about to celebrate with the disciples in the Upper Room in Jerusalem.

In the First Reading from the Book of Exodus, the liturgy shows how the Passover of the Old Covenant provides the context for the Passover of Jesus. For the Israelites, the Passover was a remembrance of the meal eaten by their forefathers at the time of the Exodus from Egypt, the liberation from slavery. The sacred text prescribed that some of the lamb’s blood should be placed on the doorposts and the lintel of the houses. And it went on to stipulate how the lamb was to be eaten: “your loins girded, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand; and you shall eat it in haste... For I will pass through the land of Egypt that night, and I will strike down all the first-born... The blood shall be a sign for you, upon the houses where you are; and when I see the blood, I will pass you by, and no plague shall fall upon you to destroy you” (Ex 12:11-13).

The blood of the lamb won for the sons and daughters of Israel liberation from the slavery of Egypt, under the leadership of Moses. The remembrance of so extraordinary an event became a festive occasion for the people, who thanked the Lord for freedom regained, a divine gift and an enduringly relevant human task: “This day will be for you a memorial day, and you shall keep it as a feast to the Lord” (Ex 12:14). It is the Passover of the Lord! The Passover of the Old Covenant!

2. “I have longed to eat this Passover with you before I suffer” (Lk 22:15). In the Upper Room, Christ ate the Passover Meal with his disciples in obedience to the Old Covenant prescriptions, but he gave the rite new substance. We have heard how Saint Paul explains it in the Second Reading, taken from the First Letter to the Corinthians. This text, which is thought to be the oldest account of the Lord’s Supper, recalls that Jesus, “on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, ?This is my body which is [given] for you. Do this in remembrance of me’. In the same way also the cup at the end of the meal, saying, ?This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me’. For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes” (1 Cor 11:23-26).

These are solemn words which hand on for all time the memorial of the institution of the Eucharist. Each year, on this day, we remember them as we return spiritually to the Upper Room. This evening I re-evoke them with particular emotion, because fresh in my mind and heart is the image of the Upper Room, where I had the joy of celebrating the Eucharist during my recent Jubilee pilgrimage to the Holy Land. This emotion is still stronger, because this year is the Year of the Jubilee of the two thousandth anniversary of the Incarnation. Seen in this light, our celebration this evening takes on an especially profound meaning. In the Upper Room, Jesus filled the old traditions with new meaning and foreshadowed the events of the following day, when his Body, the spotless body of the Lamb of God, was to be sacrificed and his Blood poured out for the world’s redemption. The Word took flesh precisely with this event in view, looking to the Passover of Christ, the Passover of the New Covenant!

3. “As often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes” (1 Cor 11:26). The Apostle urges us to make constant memorial of this mystery. At the same time, he invites us to live each day our mission as witnesses and heralds of the love of the Crucified Lord, as we await his return in glory.

But how are we to make memorial of this saving event? How are we to live as we await Christ’s return? Before instituting the Sacrament of his Body and Blood, Christ bent down and knelt, as a slave would do, to wash the disciples’ feet in the Upper Room. We watch him as he accomplishes this gesture, which in the Hebrew culture was the task of servants and the humblest persons in the household. Peter at first refuses, but the Master convinces him, and he too in the end, together with the other disciples, allows his feet to be washed. Immediately afterwards, however, clothed once more and seated at table, Jesus explains the meaning of his gesture: “You call me Teacher and Lord; and you are right, for so I am. If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you ought also wash one another’s feet” (Jn 13:12-14). These are words which link the Eucharistic mystery to the service of love, and may therefore be seen as a preparation for the institution of the ministerial priesthood.

In instituting the Eucharist, Jesus gives the Apostles a share as ministers in his priesthood, the priesthood of the new and eternal Covenant. In this Covenant, he and he alone is always and everywhere the source and the minister of the Eucharist. The Apostles in turn become ministers of this exalted mystery of faith, destined to endure until the end of the world. At the same time they become servants of all those who will share in so great a gift and mystery.

The Eucharist, the supreme Sacrament of the Church, is joined to the ministerial priesthood, which also comes to birth in the Upper Room , as the gift of the great love of the One who, knowing “that his hour had come to depart from this world to the Father [and] having loved his own who were in the world. . . loved them to the end” (Jn 13:1).

The Eucharist, the priesthood and the new commandment of love! This is the living memorial which we have before our eyes on Holy Thursday.

“Do this in memory of me”: this is the Passover of the Church! This is our Passover!

[Pope John Paul II, Homily in Coena Domini 20 April 2000]

This is touching. Jesus washing the feet of his disciples. Peter did not understand anything, he refused. But Jesus explained. Jesus - God - did this! And He Himself explains to the disciples: 'Do you understand what I have done for you? You call me the Master and the Lord, and rightly so, for I am. If therefore I, the Lord and Master, have washed your feet, you too must wash one another's feet. For I have given you an example, that you also should do as I have done' (Jn 13:12-15). It is the example of the Lord: He is the most important and washes the feet, because among us the one who is the highest must be at the service of others. And that's a symbol, that's a sign, isn't it? Washing feet is: 'I am at your service'. And we too, among ourselves, it is not that we must wash each other's feet every day, but what does this mean? That we must help one another. Sometimes I have been angry with one, with another ... but ... let it be, let it be, and if he asks you for a favour, do it. To help one another: this is what Jesus teaches us and this is what I do, and I do it from my heart, because it is my duty. As a priest and as a bishop I must be at your service. But it is a duty that comes from my heart: I love it. I love this and I love doing it because the Lord has taught me so. But you too, help us: always help us. Each other. And so, by helping each other, we will do each other good. Now we are going to do this ceremony of washing our feet and we think, each of us think: "Am I really willing, am I willing to serve, to help the other?" Let us only think this. And we think that this sign is a caress from Jesus, which Jesus does, because Jesus came precisely for this: to serve, to help us.

QUESTION FROM A YOUNG MAN:

Thank you Father for coming today. But I want to know one thing: why did you come here today to Casal del Marmo? Enough, just that.

ANSWER FROM THE POPE:

It's a feeling that came from the heart; I felt that. Where are those who will perhaps help me more to be humble, to be a servant as a bishop must be. And I thought, I asked: "Where are those who would like a visit?" And they told me 'Casal del Marmo, maybe'. And when they told me that, I came here. But from the heart came that alone. The things of the heart have no explanation, they only come. Thank you, eh!

FINAL SALUTES

Now I take my leave. Thank you so much for your welcome. Pray for me and do not let hope be stolen from you. Always ahead! Thank you very much!

[Pope Francis, homily during the Lord's Supper, "Casal del Marmo" Penal Institute for Minors in Rome, 28 March 2013]

Palm Sunday and the Passion of the Lord [29 March 2026]

May God bless us and may the Virgin Mary protect us! We enter Holy Week, of which Palm Sunday already gives us a foretaste of the joy and sorrow, the mystery of love and hatred that leads to death: the whole Passion, death and resurrection of Christ. To relive is not merely to remember, but also to open our hearts ever more to this mystery of salvation.

*First Reading from the Book of the Prophet Isaiah (50:4–7)

Isaiah was certainly not thinking of Jesus Christ when he wrote this text, probably in the 6th century BC, during the exile in Babylon. Let me explain: since his people were in exile, in very harsh conditions, and could easily have succumbed to discouragement, Isaiah reminds them that they are always God’s servants. And that God is counting on them, his servants (that is, his people), to bring his plan of salvation for humanity to fulfilment. The people of Israel are therefore this Servant of God, nourished every morning by the Word, yet also persecuted precisely because of their faith and capable, despite everything, of withstanding all trials. In this text, Isaiah clearly describes the extraordinary relationship that unites the Servant (Israel) with his God. Its main characteristic is listening to the Word of God, ‘the open ear’, as Isaiah puts it. ‘Listening’ is a word that has a very particular meaning in the Bible: it means to trust. We usually contrast these two fundamental attitudes between which our lives constantly oscillate: trust in God, a serene surrender to his will because we know from experience that his will is always good; or mistrust, suspicion of God’s intentions, and rebellion in the face of trials—a rebellion that can lead us to believe that God has abandoned us or, worse still, that He might take some satisfaction in our sufferings.

The prophets repeat: “Listen, Israel” or: “Will you listen to the Word of God today?” And on their lips, the exhortation “listen” always means: trust in God, whatever happens. And Saint Paul explains why: We know that all things work together for good for those who love God (Rom 8:28).

From every evil, from every difficulty, from every trial, God brings forth good; to every hatred he opposes an even stronger love; in every persecution, he grants the strength of forgiveness; and from every death, he brings forth life, the resurrection. It is a story of mutual trust. God trusts his Servant and entrusts him with a mission; in turn, the Servant accepts the mission with trust. And it is precisely this trust that gives him the strength needed to remain steadfast even in the opposition he will inevitably encounter. Here the mission is that of a witness: “So that I may sustain with my words those who are weary,” says the Servant. In entrusting him with this mission, the Lord also grants the necessary strength and the appropriate language: “The Lord God has given me the tongue of a disciple.” And even more: he himself nourishes this trust, which is the source of all boldness in the service of others: “The Lord God makes my ear attentive”, which means that listening (in the biblical sense, that is, trust) is itself a gift from God. Everything is a gift: the mission, the strength, and even the trust that makes one unshakeable. This is precisely the hallmark of the believer: to recognise everything as a gift from God. He who lives in this permanent gift of God’s strength can face anything: “I did not resist, I did not turn back.” Faithfulness to the mission received inevitably entails persecution. True prophets, those who truly speak in the name of God, are rarely appreciated during their lifetime. In concrete terms, Isaiah says to his contemporaries: hold fast. The Lord has not abandoned you; on the contrary, you are on a mission for him. Do not be surprised, then, if you are mistreated. Why? Because the Servant who truly listens to the Word of God—that is, who puts it into practice—soon becomes a thorn in the side. His very conversion calls others to conversion. Some heed this call… others reject it and, convinced of their own righteousness, persecute the Servant. And every morning the Servant must return to the source, to the One who enables him to face everything. Isaiah uses a somewhat strange expression: “I set my face like flint” to express resolve and courage. Isaiah was speaking to his people, persecuted and humiliated during the exile in Babylon; but, naturally, when one re-reads the Passion of Christ, this text stands out in all its clarity: Christ corresponds perfectly to this portrait of the Servant of God. Listening to the Word, unshakeable trust and thus the certainty of victory even in the midst of persecution: all this characterised Jesus precisely at the moment when the acclamations of the crowd on Palm Sunday marked and hastened his condemnation.

*Responsorial Psalm (21/22)

Psalm 21 (22) begins with the famous cry: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”. This phrase has often been taken out of context and interpreted as a cry of despair, whereas in reality the psalm must be read in its entirety. Indeed, after describing suffering and anguish, it ends with a great song of thanksgiving: “You have answered me! I will proclaim your name to my brothers and sisters’. The one who at first feels forsaken ultimately recognises that God has saved him and has not left him alone. Some images in the psalm seem to describe the crucifixion: ‘They have pierced my hands and my feet’, ‘they divide my garments’, ‘a band of evildoers surrounds me’. This is why the New Testament applies this psalm to the Passion of Jesus. However, the text originated in a specific historical context: the return of the people of Israel from the Babylonian exile. The exile had been like a death sentence for the people, who had risked disappearing; the return to their own land is therefore likened to the liberation of a condemned man who had narrowly escaped death. The image of the crucifixion serves to express the humiliation, violence and sense of abandonment experienced by the people, but the focus of the psalm is not suffering but rather the salvation received. The cry “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” is therefore not a cry of despair or doubt, but the prayer of one who suffers and continues to turn to God with trust. Even in the midst of trial, Israel does not cease to pray and to remember the covenant and the blessings received from the Lord. For this reason, the psalm can be likened to a votive offering: in times of danger, God’s help is invoked, and once saved, thanks are given publicly. The psalm recalls the tragedy endured, but above all proclaims gratitude towards God who has delivered his people. The final verses thus become a great hymn of praise: the poor shall be satisfied, those who seek the Lord shall praise him, and all nations shall acknowledge his lordship. God’s salvation will also be proclaimed to future generations. For this reason, in Christian tradition, this psalm has been recognised as a prophecy of Christ’s Passion: on the cross, Jesus echoes the first verse of the psalm, but just as for Israel, so too for him the final word is not suffering, but salvation and life.

*Second Reading from the Letter of Saint Paul the Apostle to the Philippians (2:6–11)

During the exile in Babylon, in the 6th century BC, the prophet Isaiah had bestowed upon the people of Israel the title of Servant of God. Their mission, amidst the trials of exile, was to remain faithful to the faith of their fathers and to bear witness to it among the pagans, even at the cost of humiliation and persecution. Only God could give them the strength to fulfil this mission. When the early Christians were confronted with the scandal of the cross, they sought to understand Jesus’ destiny and found the explanation in the words of St Paul: Jesus ‘emptied himself, taking the form of a servant’. He too faced opposition, humiliation and persecution, drawing his strength from the Father and living in total trust in Him. Although he was of divine nature, Jesus did not seek glory and honours. As Paul says, “though he was in the form of God, he did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited”. Precisely because he is God, he claims nothing for himself, but lives in gratuitous love and becomes man to show mankind the way to salvation. His exaltation is not a deserved reward, but a free gift from God. God’s logic is not that of merit or calculation, but that of grace, which is always a free gift. According to Paul, God’s plan is a plan of love: to bring humanity into his life, into his joy and into his communion. This gift is not earned, but received with gratitude. When man demands or claims, he closes himself off from grace, as happened symbolically with the sin in the Garden of Eden. Jesus, on the other hand, lives in the opposite attitude: the total acceptance of the Father’s will, what Paul calls obedience. For this reason, God exalted him and gave him the Name that is above every name: the name of Lord, a title which in the Old Testament belonged only to God. Before him “every knee shall bow”, to quote the words of the prophet Isaiah (Is 45:23). Jesus lived his entire life in humility and trust, even in the face of human violence and death. His obedience – which literally means “to place one’s ear before the word” – expresses a total and trusting listening to the Father’s will. For this reason, Paul’s hymn concludes with the Church’s profession of faith: “Every tongue shall confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father”. In Christ, the glory of God is fully manifested, that is, the revelation of his infinite love. Seeing Jesus love to the very end and give his life, one can recognise, like the centurion beneath the cross, that he is truly the Son of God.

*The Passion of Jesus Christ according to Saint Matthew (26:14–27:66)

Every year, on Palm Sunday, the liturgy reads the account of the Passion from one of the three Synoptic Gospels; this year it is that of Matthew. The four accounts of the Passion are similar in broad outline, but each evangelist highlights certain particular aspects. Matthew, in particular, recounts certain episodes and details that the others do not mention. First of all, Matthew is the only one to specify the exact sum for which Judas betrays Jesus: thirty pieces of silver, which according to the Law was the price of a slave. This detail shows the contempt with which men treated the Lord. Later, Judas himself, overcome with remorse, returns the money to the chief priests, saying that he has handed over an innocent man to his death. They, however, do not wish to take responsibility for it. Judas throws the coins into the temple and hangs himself; the priests use that money to purchase the potter’s field, intended for the burial of foreigners, later called the ‘Field of Blood’, thus fulfilling a prophetic word. During the trial before Pilate, Matthew recounts a unique episode: the intervention of Pilate’s wife, who sends word to her husband not to have anything to do with ‘that righteous man’, for she has suffered greatly in a dream because of him. Pilate himself appears unsettled and, seeing that the crowd is growing ever more agitated, performs the symbolic gesture of washing his hands, declaring himself innocent of that man’s blood. The crowd replies: ‘Let his blood be on us and on our children.’ Pilate then releases Barabbas and hands Jesus over to be crucified. At the moment of Jesus’ death, Matthew also recounts that the veil of the temple is torn, but adds extraordinary details: the earth trembles, the rocks split, the tombs open, and many righteous people rise and appear in the holy city after Jesus’ resurrection. Finally, Matthew highlights the authorities’ concern to guard the tomb, fearing that the disciples might steal the body and claim that Jesus has risen; this very message is what they will spread after Easter. The account highlights a great paradox: the blindness of the religious authorities, who persecute Jesus, whilst some pagans, almost unwittingly, bestow upon him the highest titles. Pilate’s wife calls him ‘righteous’, Pilate has ‘King of the Jews’ written on the cross, and even the title ‘Son of God’, initially used to mock him, ultimately becomes a true profession of faith when the Roman centurion exclaims: ‘Truly this man was the Son of God’. This confession already foreshadows the opening of salvation to the pagans and shows that Christ’s death is not a defeat, but a victory. Matthew highlights the contrast between the weakness of the condemned man and his true greatness: it is precisely in his apparent powerlessness that Jesus manifests the greatness of God, who is infinite love. And in this light, we come to understand ever more deeply the significance of Christ’s Passion, which we shall relive visually this week and in particular during the Holy Triduum: Holy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday, and above all in the outpouring of Easter joy at Christ’s Resurrection.

+Giovanni D’Ercole

5th Lent Sunday (year A)  [22 March 2026]

May God bless us and may the Virgin protect us! This Sunday touches upon the theme of death and of life that does not die. In the face of such fear of dying, may this word of salvation kindle within us the invincible hope of living eternally in God, who is Love

*First Reading from the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel (37:12–14)

This text is very brief, but it is clear that it forms a single unit: it is framed by two similar expressions; at the beginning, ‘Thus says the Lord God’, and at the end, ‘The word of the Lord’. A frame that is evidently intended to give solemnity to what it encloses. Whenever a prophet deems it necessary to specify that he is speaking on behalf of the Lord, it is because his message is particularly important and difficult to hear. Today’s message is therefore what lies within this framework: a promise repeated twice and addressed to God’s people, for God says “O my people”; on both occasions the promise concerns two points: firstly, “I will open your graves”; secondly, “I will bring you back to the land of Israel”, or “I will let you rest in your own land”, which amounts to the same thing. These expressions allow us to situate the historical context: the people are in exile in Babylon, at the mercy of the Babylonians, annihilated (in the true sense of the word, reduced to nothing), as if dead; this is why God speaks of graves. The expression ‘I will open your graves’ therefore means that God will raise up his people. Reading chapter 37 of the Book of Ezekiel, we see that this brief text follows a vision of the prophet known as ‘the vision of the dry bones’ and provides an explanation of it: the prophet sees a vast army of the dead, lying in the dust; and God says to him: your brothers are so desperate in their exile that they believe themselves to be dead, finished… well, I, God, will raise them up. This entire vision and its explanation thus evoke the captivity of the exiled people and their restoration by God. For the prophet Ezekiel, it is a certainty: the people cannot be wiped out, because God has promised them an eternal Covenant that nothing can destroy; therefore, whatever the defeats, the ruptures, the trials, it is known that the people will survive and regain their land, because this is part of the promise. “I will open your graves… O my people, and bring you back to the land of Israel”: ultimately, there is nothing surprising about these words; Israel has always known that its God is faithful; and the expression “You shall know that I am the Lord” precisely means that it is through his faithfulness to his promises that the true God is recognised. But why repeat almost the same things twice? In reality, the second promise does not merely repeat the first, but expands upon it:  It continues: I will open your graves and bring you out of your tombs and let you rest in your own land, and you shall know that I am the Lord: all this  is a return to the situation prior to the disaster of the Babylonian exile. In this second promise there is much more, something new and never seen before: “I will put my Spirit within you, and you shall live”; here the New Covenant is announced: from now on the law of love will no longer be written on tablets of stone, but in hearts. Or, to use another expression of Ezekiel, human hearts will no longer be of stone, but of flesh.

Here there is no room for doubt: the repetition of the phrase “my people” clearly shows that these two promises herald a rebirth, a restoration of the people. This is not a matter of individual resurrection. Individual death did not compromise the future of the people; and for a long time it was the future of the people, and that alone, that mattered. When someone died, it was said that they had fallen asleep with their fathers, without imagining any personal survival; on the contrary, the survival of the people has always been a certainty, because the people are the bearers of God’s promises. To believe in individual resurrection, two elements are required: firstly, an interest in the individual’s fate — something that did not exist at the beginning of biblical history; an interest in one’s personal fate is a later development. Secondly, it is essential to believe in a God who does not abandon you to death. The certainty that God never abandons humanity did not arise suddenly; it developed in step with the concrete events of the history of the chosen people. The historical experience of the Covenant is what nourishes the faith of Israel; it is the experience of a God who frees humanity from all forms of bondage and intervenes ceaselessly to liberate them; a faithful God who never goes back on his word. It is this faith that guides all of Israel’s discoveries; indeed, it is their driving force. Four centuries after Ezekiel, around 165 BC, these two combined elements—faith in a God who continually liberates humanity and the discovery of the value of every human person—led to faith in individual resurrection. It became evident that God would liberate the individual from the most terrible and definitive form of slavery, that of death. This discovery came so late to the Jewish people that, in Christ’s time, it was not yet shared by all: the Sadducees, in fact, were known as those who did not believe in the resurrection. Perhaps, however, Ezekiel’s prophecy might have surpassed his own understanding, without him realising it. The Spirit of God spoke through his mouth, and we might think: Ezekiel did not know how great was what he was proclaiming

*Responsorial Psalm (129/130) 

In the Psalter there is a group of fifteen psalms bearing a particular name: Song of Ascents. Each of them begins with the words ‘Song of Ascents’, which in Hebrew signifies going to Jerusalem on pilgrimage. In the Gospels, moreover, the expression ‘going up to Jerusalem’ occurs several times with the same meaning: it evokes the pilgrimage for the three annual feasts and, in particular, the most important of these, the Feast of Tabernacles. These fifteen psalms therefore accompanied the entire pilgrimage. Even before arriving in Jerusalem, they already foreshadowed the unfolding of the festival. For some, one can even guess at which point in the pilgrimage they were sung; for example, Psalm 121/122 – ‘How joyful I was when they said to me: “We shall go to the house of the Lord”… now our feet stand within your gates, Jerusalem…’ – was probably the psalm of arrival. Psalm 129/130 is one of these Songs of Ascent; it was probably sung during the Feast of Tabernacles as part of a penitential celebration, which is why guilt and forgiveness feature so prominently in the psalm: ‘If you keep track of sins, O Lord, O Lord, who can stand before you?’.  The sinner who pleads here is certain of being forgiven; it is the people who together acknowledge God’s infinite goodness, his tireless faithfulness (his Hesed) and man’s radical inability to respond to the Covenant. These repeated acts of unfaithfulness are experienced as a true spiritual death: “From the depths I cry out to you”, a cry addressed to Him whose very being is Forgiveness: this is the meaning of the expression “with you is forgiveness”. God is Love and is Gift, and the two are one and the same. Now “forgiveness” is nothing other than a gift that goes beyond everything. To forgive means to continue to offer a Covenant, a possible future, beyond the other’s infidelities. Let us recall the story of David: after the killing of Bathsheba’s husband, the prophet Nathan announced God’s forgiveness to him even before David had uttered a single word of repentance or confession. The idea that God always forgives, however, does not please everyone; yet it is undoubtedly one of the central teachings of the Bible, right from the Old Testament. And Jesus forcefully takes up this same teaching: for example, in the parable of the Prodigal Son in the Gospel according to Luke (chapter 15), the father is already out on the road waiting for his son (a sign that he has already forgiven him) and opens his arms to him even before the son has opened his mouth. And the example of God’s totally gratuitous forgiveness was given to us by Jesus himself on the cross: those who were killing him did not utter a single word of repentance, yet he says: ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do’. It is precisely in his forgiveness, says the Bible, that God manifests his power. This too is a great discovery of Israel; consider what the Book of Wisdom states: “Your strength, Lord, is the source of justice… you who possess strength, judge with gentleness and rule us with great indulgence” (Wis 12:16, 18). The certainty of God’s mercy does not breed presumption or indifference towards sin, but humble and amazed gratitude: “With you is forgiveness, so that we may fear you.” This concise formula indicates the believer’s attitude before God, who is nothing but gift and forgiveness. This certainty of forgiveness, always offered beyond all fault, inspires in Israel an attitude of extraordinary hope. Repentant Israel awaits forgiveness “more than the watchmen await the dawn”. “He will redeem Israel from all its sins”: similar expressions recur frequently in biblical texts. They announce to Israel the definitive liberation, the liberation from all the sins of all time. Israel awaits even more: precisely because the people of the Covenant experience their own weakness and ever-recurring sin, but also God’s faithfulness, they await from God himself the definitive fulfilment of his promises. Beyond immediate forgiveness, what they await from age to age is the definitive dawn, which they hope for against all hope, like Abraham: the dawn of the Day of God. All the psalms are permeated by this messianic expectation. Christians know with even greater certainty that our world is moving towards its fulfilment: a fulfilment that has a name, Jesus Christ: “Our soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen wait for the dawn”.

*Second Reading from the Letter of Saint Paul the Apostle to the Romans (8:8–11)

“I will put my Spirit within you, and you shall live,” announces Ezekiel in the first reading, but from baptism, Saint Paul reminds us here, this is a reality, and he uses a figurative expression: the Spirit of God dwells within you. Taking this literally, one commentator speaks of a change of ownership. We have become the dwelling place of the Spirit: it is he who is now in charge. It would be interesting to ask ourselves, in all areas of our lives, both personal and communal, who is in charge, who is the master of the house within us; or, if we prefer, what is our purpose in life. According to Paul, there are not many alternatives: either we are under the influence of the Spirit, that is, we allow ourselves to be guided by him, or we do not allow ourselves to be inspired by the Spirit, and this he calls being under the influence of the flesh. Being under the influence of the Spirit is easy to understand: simply replace the word ‘Spirit’ with the word ‘Love’, as the Letter to the Galatians demonstrates when explaining the fruits of the Spirit: ‘love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control’ (Gal 5:22–23); in a word, love expressed in all the concrete circumstances of our lives. Paul is the heir to the entire tradition of the prophets: and they all affirm that our relationship with God is realised in the quality of our relationship with others; in the ‘Songs of the Servant’, the Book of Isaiah (chapters 42; 49; 50; 52–53) forcefully asserts that living according to the Spirit of God means loving and serving one’s brothers and sisters. Once life according to the Spirit—that is, life according to love—has been defined, it is easy to understand what Paul means by life according to the flesh: it is the opposite, namely indifference or hatred; in other words, love is turning away from oneself, whilst life under the influence of the flesh is centring on oneself. The question: ‘Who is in charge?’ here becomes ‘Who is the centre of our world?’ And those who are under the influence of the flesh cannot please God, says Paul. On the contrary, Christ is the beloved Son in whom God is well pleased, that is, he is in perfect harmony with God precisely because he too is all love. In this sense, the account of the Temptations, read on the first Sunday of Lent (Matthew chapter 4), is very eloquent because Jesus appears totally centred on God and on his Word and resolutely refuses to focus on his own hunger or even on the demands of his messianic mission. If the text of the temptations is presented to us every year at the start of Lent, it is because Lent is precisely a journey of shifting our focus away from ourselves in order to refocus on God and on others. Later on, in the same Letter to the Romans, Paul says that the Spirit of God makes us children: it is he who prompts us to call God ‘Father’. That which is love within us comes from God; it is our inheritance as children. The Spirit is your life, Paul says again: to put it another way, love is your life. After all, we know from experience that only love is creative. What is not love does not come from God and, precisely because it does not come from God, is destined for death. The great good news of this text is that everything within us that is love comes from God and therefore cannot die. As Paul says: ‘If God raised Jesus from the dead… he will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you’.

From the Gospel according to John (11:1–45)

We have got into the habit of calling this passage the resurrection of Lazarus, but, to tell the truth, it is not the most appropriate term; when we proclaim ‘I believe in the resurrection of the dead and in eternal life’, we mean something quite different. Lazarus’s death was, in a sense, merely a parenthesis in his earthly life; after Jesus’ miracle, his life resumed its ordinary course and was, more or less, the same as before. Lazarus simply had his earthly life extended. His body was not transformed and he had to die a second time; his first death was not what it will be for us, that is, the passage to true life. So one might ask: to what end? In performing this miracle, Jesus took great risks, for he had already drawn far too much attention to himself… and for Lazarus, it was merely a matter of postponing the final appointment. It is St John who answers our question: ‘what was the purpose of this miracle?’ He tells us that it is a very important sign: Jesus reveals himself as the one in whom we have eternal life and in whom we can believe, that is, upon whom we can stake our lives. After all, the chief priests and the Pharisees were not mistaken: they fully understood the gravity of the sign performed by Jesus, for the Gospel of John tells us that many, many began to believe in him precisely because of Lazarus’s resurrection, and it was then that they decided to put him to death. This miracle thus sealed Jesus’ death sentence; thinking about it two thousand years later, it seems paradoxical: being able to restore life deserved death. A sad example of the aberrations to which our certainties can lead… Let us return to the account of what we might call the ‘raising of Lazarus’, because it is not a true resurrection but rather an extension of earthly life. Let us make just two observations. 

First observation: for Jesus, only one thing matters, the glory of God; but to see the glory of God, one must believe (If you believe, you will see the glory of God, he tells Martha). Right from the start of the story, when they tell him: ‘Lord, the one you love is ill’, Jesus replies to the disciples: ‘This illness will not lead to death, but is for the glory of God’, that is, for the revelation of the mystery of God. Faith opens our eyes, removing the blindfold of mistrust that we had placed over our gaze. Second observation: here, faith in the resurrection takes its final step. In Israel, faith in the resurrection appeared late; it was clearly affirmed only in the second century BC, at the time of the persecution by Antiochus Epiphanes, and in Christ’s time it was not yet shared by everyone. Martha and Mary, evidently, are among those who believe in it. But in their minds it is still a resurrection at the end of time; when Jesus says to Martha: “Your brother will rise again”, she replies: “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day”. Jesus, however, corrects her: he is not speaking in the future, but in the present: “I am the resurrection and the life… Whoever believes in me, even if they die, will live; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die.” To put it plainly, we sense that the Resurrection is already here.” “I am the resurrection and the life” means that death as separation from God no longer exists: it is overcome in Christ’s resurrection, so that believers, with Paul, can say: “O death, where is your victory?”. Now nothing can separate us from the love of Christ, not even death. The true novelty of this Gospel is not that a dead person returns to life, but that life itself has a face: Jesus. When he says: ‘I am the resurrection and the life’, he is not merely promising a future event; he is affirming that those who live in communion with him are already entering a life that death cannot destroy. Lazarus will emerge from the tomb once more, only to die again; but those united with Christ will never return to the tomb as to a final prison. Biological death becomes a passage, not an end; a threshold, not an abyss. If we live in communion with God — that is, in love — we are already within eternity. For God is not merely the One who gives life: He is Life itself. And that which is united to Life cannot be annihilated.

As Saint Augustine writes: “Do you fear death? Love. Love kills death.”

And again, St Paul, in his Letter to the Romans: “Nothing can separate us from the love of God” (Rom 8:39). Herein lies the heart of the sign of Lazarus: whoever remains in love remains in God, and God remains in him, and this communion knows no end. The true resurrection begins now.

+Giovanni D’Ercole