Dear brothers and sisters, Fiat!
With the procession of the Palms and shortly afterwards, during Mass with the reading of the Gospel of the Passion (this year, that of Matthew, chapters 26 and 27), today's liturgy celebrates two moments in the life of Jesus, very close yet contrasting: first His triumphant entry into Jerusalem among the glorious crowd; a few days later, His unspeakable Passion. This is enough to recall the precariousness of human destiny, the unreliability of success, the need to place one's life in safer hands than those of men.
After recalling the first moment, the focus is on the second, with the shocking narration of what Jesus suffered. And remembering that He knew what He would face, a dramatic question arises: why? Why did He not escape such torment, such an ignominious end? As we know, the answer lies in the word love. The Crucifix, which has become the emblem of Christian civilization, is the attestation of how great is God's love for mankind.
The "yes" to an authentic love is always also a source of suffering, because this entails the expropriation of one's own self; true love cannot exist without even painful renunciations, otherwise it becomes selfishness and is therefore annulled. But we should consider the beloved person very important in order to be willing to suffer for her: the Crucified One shows how important men and women are to God. By His nature God cannot suffer; but for Him man is so important that He Himself became man in order to be able to pity, that is, "suffer with", and for man. And not in words, but in flesh and blood, with a dizzying concreteness.
Here are two signs of this concreteness, among the many that are attested by the account of the Passion. During His spiritual agony on the night of Gethsemane, Jesus addresses a brief prayer to the Father, with which He manifests His awareness, and at the same time the most human fear about what is about to happen: " My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me!"; but immediately afterwards He adds His availability to the trial and His trust in the divine plans: " nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will". If we put ourselves in His place for a moment, we can sense how terrible it was for Jesus to know what He was going through, if He could escape it, and yet remain!
A second sign belongs to the next day, when the tortures of unfair trials and unprecedented physical violence end with the body of Jesus pierced by nails to fix it to the wood. Each Gospel reports some words pronounced by Jesus during Hs physical agony; Matthew reports a cry: "Elì, Elì, lemà sabactàni?", which translated from Hebrew means: " My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?". This expression has often been misunderstood: even then some of those present thought that Jesus invoked the prophet Elijah; others, even recently, have interpreted it as a sign of His despair, which would cancel out the value of His sacrifice. Instead, the correct meaning lies in the Bible itself;
Jesus quotes and applies to Himself Psalm 21, which begins with those very words and goes on to anticipate, in an impressive way, what really happened. It says, " All who see me mock me… A pack of villains encircles me; they pierce my hands and my feet. All my bones are on display… They divide my clothes among them and cast lots for my garment..." The Psalm goes on to express full trust in God, who "has not despised or scorned the suffering of the afflicted one; he has not hidden his face from him but has listened to his cry for help. Posterity will serve him; future generations will be told about the Lord. They will proclaim his righteousness, declaring to a people yet unborn: He has done it!".
"Posterity will serve him": in the darkness of that death the light of the resurrection is already announced.
The passage of October 30, 1924 helps us to introduce us into the Holy Week. With her thought Luisa placed herself near Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemani, and she prayed Him to let her penetrate into that love with which He so much loved us. So Jesus allowed her to enter into His love, never to go out of it. Moreover He invited Luisa to run after it, or to stop in His love that she may comprehend well how much He loved the creature. Everything in Jesus is love toward her.
In creating this creature, the Divinity intended to love her always; so, in everything, inside and outside of her, It was to run toward her with a continuous and incessant new act of love. Therefore, in each thought, gaze, word, breath, heartbeat, and in all the rest of the creature, runs an act of eternal love. But if the Divinity intended to love this creature always and in everything, it was because It wanted to receive, in everything, the requital of the new and incessant love of the creature; It wanted to give love in order to receive love - It wanted to love to be loved in return. But it was not so! Not only did the creature not want to keep the rhythm of love and respond to the echo of the love of her Creator, but she rejected this love, she denied it, and offended it. At this affront, the Divinity did not stop, but continued Its new and incessant love toward the creature; and since the creature would not receive it, Heaven and earth remained filled with it, waiting for one who would take this love, so as to receive the requital of it.
In fact, when God decides, when He proposes, all adverse events do not change Him, but He remains immutable in His immutability. And this is why, moving on to another excess of love, Jesus, Word of the Father, came upon earth; and taking on a Humanity, He gathered within Himself all this love which filled Heaven and earth, in order to requite the Divinity with as much love for as much as It had given and was to give to creatures; and He constituted Himself love of each thought, of each gaze, of each word, heartbeat, movement and step of each creature.
Therefore, Jesus’ Humanity, even in Its littlest fiber, was worked by the hands of the eternal love of our Celestial Father, in order to give Him the capacity to be able enclose all the love that the Divinity wanted to give to creatures, so as to give to It the love of all, and constitute Himself love of each act of creature. So, each one of our thoughts is encircled by Jesus’ incessant acts of love; there is nothing, inside and outside of us, which is not surrounded by His repeated acts of love.
This is why, in that Garden, Jesus’ Humanity moans, pants, agonizes, feels crushed under the weight of so much love – because He loves and He is not loved in return. The pains of love are the most bitter, the most cruel; they are pains without pity, more painful than His very Passion! If creatures loved Jesus, the weight of so much love would become light, because when love is loved in return, it remains quenched and satisfied in the very love of the beloved. But when it is not loved in return, it goes mad, it raves, and it feels the love which it had issued being repaid with an act of death.
How much more bitter and painful was the Passion of Jesus’ love; because if in His Passion they gave Him only one death, in the Passion of love they made Him suffer as many deaths for as many acts of love as came out of Him, for which He was not requited.
Therefore, in this holy week let us go to requite Jesus for so much love. In the Divine Will we will find all this love as though in act; let’s make it our own and, together with Jesus, let’s constitute ourselves love of each act of creature, to give Him the requital of the love of all.