But before being a human action, charity is a divine action. In fact, it is possible for humans only as a totally gratuitous fruit of imitation and identification with divine Charity, that is, with the person of Jesus, our Lord…

Holy Mass closing the International seminar of the Sovereign order of  Malta.

Liturgy of the feast of the Hezaltation of the Holy Cross
Nm 21,4b-9; from Psalm 77; Phil 2,6-11; Jn 3,13-17

1. «We will take glory in nothing other than the Cross of Jesus Christ, our Lord: he is our salvation, life and resurrection: through him we were saved and freed» (Entrance Àntiphon). That is what we prayed at the beginning of this Eucharistic celebration.
The cross, which in the pre-Christian world represented the most fearsome way of torture, is the tree of life for the Christian, the marriage bed, the throne, the altar of the new alliance. The Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, which is comparable to that of Easter in the Eastern Church, is linked to the dedication of the Holy Sepulchre Basilica in Jerusalem, the mother Church of your Order, where your glorious and almost millenary history started.
At the beginning of this Eucharistic celebration, which concludes your important international Seminar, I am glad to remember His Eminence Cardinal Patronus Pio Laghi, recently departed, whose merits as a man of the Church I had the pleasure to appreciate in my years as Rector of the Lateran Pontifical University. I associate him in my memory with Fra’ Andrew Bertie, who served for many years as Grand Master. I am also pleased to send my Christian respects to the Grand Master Fra’ Matthew Festing, to the Prelate of the Order, H. E. Angelo Acerbi, to the Sovereign Council, to the High Offices of the Order. I especially greet the Great Prior of Lombardy and Venice and his close collaborators, as well as all of you here present.

2. The cross is the symbol of charity par excellence, the symbol of objective and effective love whose source lies in God. This is the reminder that the Order’s ensign with the eight-pointed cross- reminiscent of the eight Beatitudes – continues to bring into the world.
But before being a human action, charity is a divine action. In fact, it is possible for humans only as a totally gratuitous fruit of imitation and identification with divine Charity, that is, with the person of Jesus, our Lord. «God so loved the world as to send his only begotten son, shat whoever believes in him may not be lost, but may have eternal life» (John 3: 16)
The passage we have heard proclaimed from the gospel of John allows us, while we tremble in front of the great mystery, to turn our eyes to the measure of divine love. Man could never have supposed that the eternal Father, giving all his love entirely in the Son he generated, could love the created world to the point of delivering his beloved Son to the darkness of God’s abandonment and to the extreme torments of the cross. Thus the folly of the Cross acquires meaning solely in the love of the One and Triune God. Going right to the depths of his love («having loved his own, he loved them til the end») the Son shows all the Father’s love. And the love between the Two is demonstrated by means of the power of the Holy Spirit. In the crucified dedication of the Son lies his supreme glorification [«For this God exalted him» (Phil 2:9)].

3. As Paul writes to the Christians of Philippi (Second Reading) we too can have the same sentiments as Christ the Lord. Only on the strength of this identification with Him is communion not an unachievable utopia, an abstraction merely on our lips; only thus can it really be practised in objective terms because it is welcomed and received through the Eucharistic power of Jesus, who gave his life as an innocent on the Cross in order to generate this communion. For this reason, as the late lamented Cardinal Pio Laghi wrote in a recent publication of your Order, «Applying to our Order John Paul II’s words to the Church (and it is by no means an exaggeration!), to be able to be faithful to God’s plan and answer the needs of the society we are part of and that we serve, we must make our Order “the home and school of communion”» (Per una spiritualità di comunione, Roma, 2002, p 26). Identifying with the Divine Master is what characterizes all the members of the Order of Malta, according to the three-fold forms of belonging to the charism in which the Lord calls them: the Professed knights, the Knights of Obedience and the members of the Third Class (Knights and Dames, Conventual and Magistral Chaplains, and Donats).

4. «While being in the form of God, Jesus Christ did not hold it a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant» (Phil 2:6) Only by conforming yourselves to Christ the Lord will you continue to live out the logic of service which has characterized your Order from the beginning, according to the chivalric spirit well summed up by your programme: Tuitio fidei et obsequium pauperum (defence of the faith and veneration of the poor). And thus you will continue to be servants of the “poor and the sick” even today, just as your founders put themselves at the service of pilgrims in Jerusalem. I think of your vast and intelligent initiatives in health care, of which the St John the Baptist Hospital in Rome is a crowning achievement. But I also think of your operations in war situations, natural calamities, pilgrimages with the sick, and the multifarious activities in which your mission is lived out, which has recently gained you the prestigious recognition of the UN and the participation of an Ambassador and Permanent Observer of the Order to the United Nations General Assembly.

5. From faith to action: faithfulness to its origin is where lies the secret of the life of your charism, now over a thousand years old and yet still fresh with youth. Let us entrust your work and yourselves to the Madonna of Nicopeia, whose icon has come down to us from the times and places where your history flowered most gloriously. May she sustain and bless your precious commitment on behalf of all men and women – our brothers and sisters. The Church is deeply grateful to you for it. Amen.

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!

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