At the heart of the Gospel there is this long suffering, a God who dies for love. Something that I do not manage to understand and yet which calls me, disarms me and wounds me. And I, each time, am powerless and fascinated. The cross was not given to us to be understood but to be grasped by us and to raise us up high. Why did Jesus come? So that the earth could sound out with a cry – a cry of pain and nostalgia for paradise lost, for God lost, for love and peace lost. The earth with its thorns and its brambles, its primroses and its evergreens and, every so often, its tenderness; but only every so often and in a hidden way. And its cruelty, often, too often; and its tears and its sobs. The earth is immense weeping.

And one day God could no longer bear it, He could no longer keep Himself back. And so He came, He reached His children, He became flesh and He set Himself to crying out together with them the same cry rooted in anxiety and hope.

Why did Christ go up on the cross? To engage in the abandonment of God, the place of the abandonment of God: the place of faith…

To be with me and like me. So that I can be with him and like him. To be on the cross is what God, in His love, owes to man who is on the cross. Love knows many duties, but the first of these duties is to be together with the beloved: near, united, like a mother who wants to take upon herself the malady of her child, to fall ill herself in order to cure her child.

The cross is the abyss where God becomes He who loves. He enters death because that is where all His children go. In the body of the Crucified Christ love writes its tale with the alphabet of wounds.

‘You who have saved others, save yourself’. Everybody says that: chiefs, soldiers, the thief: ‘If you are God, work a miracle, conquer us, impose yourself, come down from the cross, and then we will believe’. Anyone, a man or a king, being able to do so, would come down from the cross. He does not, Only a God does not come down from the cross, only our God. Because His children can not come down from it. Only the cross removes all doubts; there is no deception on the cross.

‘Remember me’, the thief beseeches, ‘Today you will be with me in heaven’, replies Jesus. This is why I am here, to be able to have you always with me. There is nothing that can separate us, not evil, not betrayals, not death. I will come to fetch you even in the depths of hell, if you want me. Only if you want me.

But I will continue to die for love of you, even if you do not want this, and as soon as you move your gaze you will find one who is eternally nailed in an embrace who cries out: I love you!

These are the days of our destiny: man who came from the hands of God is reborn now from the pierced heart of his Creator.

Esteemed friends,
best wishes of holiness and mercy for this Easter of 2015,
a ‘strong’ season of our faith,
to walk, to build
and to confess
the Crucified Love of the Lord.
Happy Easter in the Risen Christ!