Dear brothers and sisters,

I hope this message finds you in good health and with peace in your hearts. With deep joy, gratitude and hope, we inaugurated the Camillian Jubilee Year, celebrating the 450th anniversary of the conversion of St. Camillus. The solemn initial celebrations in San Giovanni Rotondo and Manfredonia were valuable occasions of fraternity and inner renewal for our entire Camillian family, enriching our journey of faith and service.

In this month of March, we are about to experience the time of Lent, a time of grace and deep reflection that leads us to the celebration of the Lord’s Easter. We are called to convert, renew our spirit and rediscover the beauty of our faith, allowing ourselves to be transformed by the message of Christ’s cross and the saving power of God’s love.

With the rite of the imposition of ashes we begin the annual journey of Lent, a time of grace that the Lord grants us again this year, so that we may return to Him through the path of sincere and profound conversion: a strong call for radical change in our existence.

Every year the liturgy of the Word, at the beginning of Lent, offers for our meditation the Gospel account of the episode of Jesus’ temptations during his forty days in the desert.

The evocative forty days of Lent are a long retreat: a time of true spiritual agonism to be lived together with Jesus, using the weapons of faith, namely prayer, listening to the Word of God and penance to find the truth of our being disciples of Jesus.

“And when the devil had ended every temptation, he departed from him until an opportune time” (Luke 4:13). It is with this sibylline phrase that the evangelist Luke concludes the devil’s three temptations to Jesus in the desert. Now the favorable opportunity has come and it is the opportunity of suffering on the cross and the devil tries again with three more temptations, echoes of those in the desert.

Had he accepted his advice, Jesus would not now have ended up there, nailed to the gallows reserved for those cursed by God (Deut. 27:26). In fact, the devil had presented himself to Jesus as a valuable helper: he had invited him to use his abilities for his own needs, turning stones into bread to satiate his hunger (Lk 4:3), to use the power and glory of all the kingdoms of the earth, devilish properties that the devil would be willing to put in his hands to inaugurate his kingdom (Lk 4:6), and, above all, to be the spectacular Messiah that the people were waiting for, thus gaining the enthusiastic support of the crowds (Lk 4:9).

Jesus’ three temptations in the wilderness are seductive expressions of the false images of man, which at all times undermine the conscience, disguising themselves as convenient and effective, even good proposals. The core of the temptations always consists in instrumentalizing God for one’s own interests and comfortable laziness. The tempter is devious: he does not push directly toward evil, but toward a false good, making us believe that the true realities are power, success, money, careerism, the claim to replace God, convinced that we can very well do without, in the illusory belief of a radical and intoxicating self-salvation.

But Jesus, adamant, had flatly refused every time. His own abilities would not be used to save his own life, but to communicate it to others: Jesus would not go out to meet man, caressing and pandering to the expectations of the people, but would change them, convert them.

Total failure! Now that the people, the leaders and the soldiers are all against Jesus, the devil seizes his last chance, it is his favorable moment, and, as in the desert, he proposes again to Christ one extreme temptation: to save himself! Everyone agrees that it is a sign of weakness to have to depend on others. No one stands in solidarity with Jesus. The hatred of him is such that even one of the evildoers, hanging like him on the cross, insults him, “Are you not the Christ? Save yourself and us” (Luke 23:39).

“Save yourself and us too!” We all want a messiah who saves himself, just because we want to save ourselves. He should be a mirror and confirmation of our selfish desires.

This evildoer represents the expectation of man who ignores God and makes him in his own image and likeness. The diabolical deception makes us believe that salvation consists in what we lose. “God does not grant our wishes; God grants all his promises” (cf. D. Bonhoeffer, Resistenza e resa).

“Save yourself!” It represents the supreme aspiration of man who, moved by the fear of death, seeks to save himself from it at all costs, establishing the strategy of having (bread), of power (“prostrate yourself and the kingdoms will be yours, ‘power to bend the other and the other’s will), of appearing (’throw yourself down,” an expression of a sensationalistic pursuit of faith and its manifestations). The proposed temptation, the solution for a comfortable existence seems to consist in resting in the eye of the other to exist: but at what price?

The three temptations merge into one: the futility of the cross and salvation. But this very anxiety for a wrong and useless life breeds death and cynicism: Christ does not deliver us from death, rather he delivers us in death, his own death!

The powerful, as we imagine him, is the one who saves himself, who can afford to think only of himself and who has the means to be satisfied, without needing others.

In order to prove that he is truly God, Jesus would have to show himself as selfish because, in our mediocre and petty world, God is the supreme self-sufficient self, blissful in his perfect solitude. God becomes the projection of our most hidden and unconfessed desires, and so we try to seduce him, to flatter him, to corrupt him. No! Our God does not save himself, he saves us, he saves me. God is self-actualizing by giving himself, relating himself, opening himself to me, to us.

In this sense, the two thieves on either side of the crucified Christ are the epitome of becoming disciples. The first challenges God, tests him: he conceives of God as a king to be subject to. But under certain conditions, getting in return what he desires: a redemption in extremis. He does not admit his responsibility, is not adult in re-reading his life: he simply attempts the blow. His request is not loving: it exudes narrowness and selfishness. Like – often – our faith: what’s in it for me if I believe?

The other thief, on the other hand, is just amazed. He cannot comprehend what is happening: God is there sharing suffering with him. A suffering that is a consequence of his choices, his own. Innocent and pure choice of God. Here is the icon of the disciple: the one who realizes that the true face of God is compassion and that the true face of man is tenderness and forgiveness. In suffering we can fall into despair or fall at the foot of the cross and confess: “truly this man is the Son of God.”

This was enough to open his heart: the thief glimpses in that man not only good, but exclusively good, a possible different future, the beginning of a new humanity. He intuits that clean heart is the first step in a different history, the announcement of a kingdom of goodness and forgiveness, of justice and peace. And it is into this kingdom he asks to enter.

The shadow of a disturbing sovereignty has shrouded Jesus since infancy; a shadow under which he does not succumb, for he did not come to save himself; he came to introduce into the world a gift, self-offering, as the way to save others and oneself.

This is well understood by the second evildoer, whose tone is totally different: “Jesus, remember me when you are in your kingdom.” This man pleads for a familiar, simple, direct, friendly relationship. And Jesus’ response picks up the tone: “today with me you will be in paradise”; where it is the relationship (“with me”) that defines time (“today”) and space (“in paradise”).

Being “with” Jesus is the time and place of salvation. And not only after death, but already now: this evildoer is “with” Jesus on the cross, and not “against” Jesus, like the others; and because of this a word of salvation descends on him, an offer of relationship, which already from that moment changes his existence: it does not save him from the cross, but saves him in the cross.

The lowly evildoer is the last brother saved by the Lord, but he is also the first brother to enter his kingdom: “today.”

Jesus’ rankings follow criteria decidedly different from ours, criteria that displace us, that require conversion, humility, immersion in the mystery of the cross that saves: it is there, in the slain thief, the supreme consecration of man’s dignity: in his lowest limit man is always and still lovable to God, all that is needed is sincerity of heart. There is nothing and no one definitively lost, no one who cannot hope, for today and tomorrow.

Jesus points us to another way of living, one that contradicts our “saving ourselves” in order to save others or – better – to let Him save us.

The journey toward Easter is an invitation to renew our hearts, to give up false securities and to accept with confidence the way Christ shows us: that of self-giving, humility and authentic relationship with Him. Let us live this time intensely, so that it may be for us an experience of true conversion and growth in faith.

With fraternal affection and prayer,

Fr. Pedro Tramontin

Superior General