“God defines Devil from every side through the suffering love of the Innocent”. The Passion Sunday’s homily

“Each one of us, even the absent-minded, here summoned by the Eucharistic Sacrament of love, are involved in the heart of the action, becoming aware that we have an active part in this story which did not happen only long ago but it continues to happen in every instant. We are not spectators. Let us then identify ourselves, as much as possible, in an alert consciousness with Christ who undergoes the titanic clash between good and bad: ” I offered my back to those who struck me, my cheeks to those who tore at my beard. I did not cover my face against insult and spittle” (First Reading). The Servant of Yahweh is the figure of Jesus…

Reading during the Procession Lk 19: 28-40
The Mass. Scripture Readings: Is 50:4-7; Psalm 22(21): 8-9.17-18.19-20. 23-24;
Phil 2: 6-11; Lk 22: 14-23,56

1. The Greatest Tragedy of history
“Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord” (Gospel according to St. Luke, before the procession). Jesus enters triumphantly in Jerusalem, acclaimed as the Messiah by the crowd. However, Jesus refuses to silence his disciples as some of the furious Pharisees ask him to do: “If these keep silence the stones will cry out”. He only required a donkey stating that he needed it, as a King, and as a King he has ridden over the clocks on the road.
Yet, he knows exactly what is expecting him. Having just gone through the door of the city, a short distance away from the clocks placed on his way, from the merry waving of the palm branches, from the approved acclamations, the power of evil lies in ambush. The flight and the betrayal of his friends, solitude and anguish, the cry Crucify Him!, the mockery of the leaders of the people, his dreadful dead were expecting him…
The violent and furious opposition of evil seems to have the best over the power of good. The Gospel passage which during this celebration has been given in recitative, instead of being proclaimed, is the greatest tragedy of history; every tragedy is only the echo repeated and repeated infinitively.
Each one of us, even the absent-minded, here summoned by the Eucharistic Sacrament of love, are involved in the heart of the action, becoming aware that we have an active part in this story which did not happen only long ago but it continues to happen in every instant. We are not spectators.

2. “Christ was humbler yet, even to accepting death, death on a cross”
Let us then identify ourselves, as much as possible, in an alert consciousness with Christ who undergoes the titanic clash between good and bad: ” I offered my back to those who struck me, my cheeks to those who tore at my beard. I did not cover my face against insult and spittle” (First Reading). The Servant of Yahweh is the figure of Jesus. In the third Canticle of the Servant according to Isaiah the lament is subdued, not as in Jeremiah and in other figures of the Old Testament; therefore a positive consent to suffering is put in evidence. Not the search of suffering, which would be inhuman, but the surrendering oneself when faced with suffering. This is a revolution not only in Israel, but in all the ancient world. On which bases can this surrendering happen? Because the Servant is sure that God is on his side: “The Lord comes to my help, so that I am not untouched by the insults. So, too, I set my face like flint; I know I shall not be shamed”(Second Reading).
And the Second Reading induces us into the heart of the appalling struggle between good and bad. Though being the Son of God, “Christ did not cling to his equality with God but emptied himself to assume the condition of a slave, and become as men are; and being as all men are, he was humbler yet, even to accepting death, death on a cross”(Second Reading). “I am among you as one who serves” (Gospel).
Today’s liturgy lead us to understand the authentic focus of the whole history. In this radical lowering of himself, in this becoming obedient and accepting death on a cross the greatest and total love is accomplish, as the Pope has reminded us in his encyclical letter: “His death on the Cross is the culmination of that turning of God against himself in which he gives himself in order to raise man up and save him. This is love in its most radical form” (Benedict XVI, Deus caritas est, 12).

God does not answer to evil by opposing himself to evil front to front through the use of power, but defining it from every side through the suffering love of the Innocent par excellence. This is why in the course of history evil often seems to be winning, but at the end God destroys it. Jesus dissolves evil through his victorious redemption (John Paul II, Memory and Identity).

3. Drawn in his sacrificial act

Let us go further onto another step with Jesus. “I have longed to eat this Passover with you before I suffer” (Gospel). With the Last Supper Jesus initiates consciously and freely (every act of love is not human if it is not conscious and free) towards his Passion. At the ecclesial meeting of Verona last October the Holy Father has reminded us: “in the Last Supper he has anticipated and accepted death on the cross for our sake and therefore transforming death in his self-giving, the gift which gives us life, frees and saves….Giving himself to his disciples in the bread and the wine, his body and his blood, Jesus anticipates his death and resurrection”. During this celebration as well as in every Eucharist, we are drawn in the sacrificial act of Jesus. The victory of the Risen over evil becomes a commitment to each one of us. Our personal and communitarian struggle against evil becomes possible day after day through the active participation of the Self Total Gift accomplished by Jesus. Thinking over the Passion of Jesus with this conviction we will manage to deal with the evil experience as a trial, never as a defeat.

4. The itinerary of trial

“My God, my God why have you forsaken me?” (Responsorial Psalm); in the rending cry of the Psalmist every human suffering is acknowledged. The impotence of freeing ourselves from evil – starting with the dreadful experience of physical illness over which not even science can do anything, to the moral and spiritual which threat to destroy us – produces the experience of solitude and isolation. And when a man feels abandoned he is tempted by despair, “to plug off” that is to put an end to life. The Son of God who made himself obedient until death on the cross, drunk to the end the chalice of this fearful anguish to teach us the positive side: the hopeful abandonment in the arms of the Father.
Jesus, the Crucified Innocent has experienced personally the human itinerary of trial: from the feeling of being abandoned – first of all the terrible experience of the “Silence of God” – to the confident abandoning himself into the arms of the Father: “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit” (Gospel). This is the itinerary of Christian death – the most con-venient to man – that the Church continually proposes to every man. The Church does not propose it only through words, but through an effective witness of love which supports and encourages. This is why the Holy Father and the Pastors are tireless in recalling to everyone, but especially to the governments, the need to respect life, every life from its conception to its natural end.

5. The Dawn of Resurrection
Today, our meditation of the “Passio” would not be complete if we do not foresee the hope that pervades the whole account. The words of Jesus on the Cross: “Father, forgive them; they do not know what they are doing….” “Indeed, I promise you, today you will be with me in paradise…”"Father into your hands I commit my spirit” (Gospel) illuminate something about the grace he procured by his suffering. Neither death nor evil are the last words; solely resurrection and mercy are the last words. The dawn of resurrection which can already be seen in the new humanity of those who recognize Him and follow Him. “Me, but no longer me”: this is the formula of Christian existence based on Baptism, the formula of resurrection within time, the formula of the Christian “novelty” called to transform the world” (Benedict XVI, during the ecclesial meeting of Verona).

“The Lord has given me a disciple’s tongue (a better translation than ‘beginners). So that I may know how to reply to the wearied” (First Reading). The Church Mother and Teacher proclaims unceasingly and openly this fascinating vocation. Therefore, together with the affirming of the value of life, the Church upholds vigorously the sound and fecund union between a man and a woman in a family based on the sacred bond of matrimony. Every direct or indirect attempt to weaken this precious ecclesial and social cell is a wound inflicted to the whole community.

6. At the foot of the Cross, with Mary

The journey done by Saint Luke proposes again at the end, with another image, the same tragedy of the beginning: the struggle between good and bad. The two criminals hanging on the right and on the left side of Jesus represent the two alternatives given to the fallen humanity: refusing Christ (evil) or abandoning ourselves to Christ (good). This tragedy is still acted today. Let us ask Mary, the mother who has followed Him courageously until the Calvary, under the cross, to sustain us in our abandoning ourselves to Him. Let us beseech her with the incomparable words of the “Stabat Mater” with which the Church invites us to pray in these days: “I yearn to be with you under the Cross, to enjoy your companionship” Amen!