WITH THE CRUCIFIED ONES
The world is full of Christian churches presided over by the image of the Crucified One, and is also full of people who suffer, crucified by misfortune, injustice and abandonment: the sick deprived of care, women mistreated, elderly ignored, children violated, refugees without papers or future. And people, many people drowning in hunger and misery throughout the world.
It’s hard to imagine a symbol more charged with hope than that cross planted by Christians all over the place: a moving «memory» of a crucified God and a permanent reminder of God’s identification with all those innocent people who suffer unjustly in our world.
That cross, raised among our own crosses, reminds us that God suffers with us. God suffers the hunger of the children of Calcutta, suffers with the assassinated and tortured of Iraq, mourns with the women mistreated day after day in their homes. We don’t know how to explain the ultimate root of so much evil. And even if we would know how, it wouldn’t do us much good. We know only that God suffers with us. We aren’t alone.
But the most sublime symbols can end up perverted if we don’t recover again and again their true meaning. What does the image of the Crucified One, so present among us, signify if we don’t see marked in his face the suffering, solitude, torture and desolation of so many sons and daughters of God?
What meaning does the cross bear hanging on our chest if we don’t know how to bear with the much smaller cross of so many people who suffer at our side? What do our kisses to the Crucified One mean if they don’t awaken in us the kindness, the welcome and the closeness to those who are being crucified?
The Crucified One unmasks our lies and cowardice like no one else. From the silence of the cross, he is the firmest and humblest judge of the shallowness of our faith, of our accommodation to wellbeing and to our indifference in the face of those who suffer. To adore the mystery of a «crucified God», it’s not enough to celebrate Holy Week; it’s necessary to also draw nearer to the crucified ones, week after week.
José Antonio Pagola
Translator: Fr. Jay VonHandorf
