“The only real sin is to remain insensible to the resurrection” said Isaac the Syrian, a father of the ancient Church. Exactly for this reason it is possible to value the Christian’s faith and to distinguish his ability to hope for everybody and to transmit this hope to everybody. On Easter day each Christian proclaims the victory of life over death, because Jesus the Messiah rose from death to be He who lives forever. He who, being a man like us, flesh as we are flesh, he who was born and lived among us, who died a violent death, who was crucified and buried, has been resurrected!

Oh death, where is your victory? Oh death, you are no longer the last word for the men, you became a passage, the moment of the exodus from earthly life to eternal life, from this world to God’s kingdom…
This should be the Christian’s song on this Easter day, the most important feast among all festivities, because God has been resurrected as the first fruit of us all, because life reigns finally and a secret but real process of redemption, of transfiguration has begun inside each creature.

Death is a dominant element for each man, a really effective power, not just because it arouses fear and anguish, contradicting men’s life, but also because as a consequence of death men get wicked and sinful. Sin is always egoism, it is always a contradiction to the communion with men and with God, and it’s exactly the presence of death to rouse the desire to rescue oneself, to live without the other men or against them. Death is not only “the wages of the sin” (Romans 6:23), but also instigation to sin… If men are inclined to sin this is because of the anguish in the face of death, in the face of that fear which makes man subject to lifelong slavery (see Hebrews 2:14-15). Because of anguish and fear men’s longing for life becomes hate, denial of the others, competition, rivalry, outrage. Everything can be distorted by anguish, love as well. Therefore death seems to be present not only in the moment of the physical death of the human body, but also before it. Death is a power which makes incursions in the wholeness of our existence, which pays attention to the fullness of our relationships and of our life.

This is exactly the death against which Jesus fought till he won. The agonía (agony) which Jesus began in the Garden of Gethsemane (Luke 22:44) is a fight (agón) ended with the descent to the nether world, when he defeated Satan — and therefore death and sin— in a definitive way. And Jesus did not defeat only his death, but Death. “Through death he defeated death,” as the liturgy sings today. Now, this fight dimension is essential for the Christian: all life is a fight, it is a struggle against death which dwells inside us and against the instincts and death pulsions by which we are attracted.

Jesus’ resurrection is then the seal set by the Father on the Son’s fight, on his agón: and the Son, showing that he had a reason to die (giving one’s life for the other men), showed that there is a reason to live (i.e. to live, to dwell in the communion). Therefore the Father called him back from the reign of the dead, making him Lord forever.

All men, even if they know neither Him nor His plan, carry a feeling of eternity inside their heart and they all wonder: “What can we hope for?”. They know that, if they remain insensible to the resurrection, they prevent them from knowing “the sense of the sense” of their life. With difficulty and sometimes along wrong paths, men wait for and look for the good news of life being stronger than death, of love being stronger than hate and violence. Christ, risen and living forever, is the true answer which requires an authentic narration from Christians, a narration which can be made just by those who experienced the Living God. Where are these Christians? Yes, today there are still Christians who are able of all this: there are still Christian martyrs, Christian prophets, and Christian witnesses who never blush because of the Gospel. One more time, today just like the morning of the resurrection, the same announcement comes from the empty grave: “Don’t be afraid! Have no fear! Don’t be anguished! The Crucified has risen and gone before you!”. Yes, a spring is near for the Church by now, a season during which the Spirit of the Risen Lord will make himself present as never before, a season during which God’s Word will be less rare.

And it will be a season with neither flights, nor escapes, nor spiritualisms, but marked by the feeling of the resurrection in one’s own existence, in history, in the present time, so that the Easter faith may get already effective here and in the present time. What does this mean according to the Gospels? It means that believers have to show the resurrection in the community of men, they have to narrate to men that life is stronger than death. They have to do this by building a community no longer based on the “I” but on the “We,” by forgiving without asking for reciprocity. They have to do this through the deep joy which persists in pressure situations, through the sympathy for each creature, above all the poorest ones, the sufferers, through justice which leads to bring freedom from those situations of death in which many people lay. They gave to do this by accepting to spend one’s life for the other men, by giving up self-assertion without the consideration of the others or against them, by giving one’s own life freely and because of love, to the point of praying even for murderers.

As a matter of fact this is exactly the heart of the Christian faith: to believe the unbelievable, to love those who are unlovable, to hope when there is no more hope left. Yes, faith, hope and love are possible only if we believe in the resurrection. Then, indeed our last word will be neither death nor hell, but the victory over death and hell. Easter opens up the horizon of eternal life for everybody. May this Easter be a Easter of hope for everybody, really for everybody!

Translated from:

ENZO BIANCHI
{link_prodotto:id=320}, Le feste cristiane
Edizioni Qiqajon, 2003, pp. 93-96.

Good Friday is a severe day for Christians, a day which is still felt as an “anti-festivity”, which is still able to isolate tragically Jesus’ passion and death from his resurrection. When Christians go to their Lord, they are always brought back to the one event of the passion-death-resurrection. But today what is meditated, thought of, and celebrated, is the passion, culminated in the death. It is the cross which dominates the liturgy with its shadow and which, by imposing itself, makes us think of the resurrection just as hope, just as a wait. Peculiarity of the Christian faith is to have the crucified Jesus as its core message and to feel Jesus’ crucifixion as God’s most revealing tale. What do Christians commemorate every year on Good Friday?

They commemorate what happened in Jerusalem, the holy city and the heart of the Jewish faith, in the 30th year of our era on Friday, April 7th. Jesus from Nazareth — a rabbi and a prophet who had aroused a movement around him and who used to be followed by a little itinerant community composed of a dozen men and some women — was arrested, sentenced and put to death through the torment of the crucifixion. From a historical point of view we can say that Jesus was arrested on the initiative of some high priests, the hierocracy of Jerusalem, because of some of his deeds and some of his words, such as some messianic traits in his deeds, the passionate expulsion of the sellers from the Temple, the prophetical polemic against the religious men, especially the Sadducees.

Caught by night in the Cedron Valley by a handful of guards of the Temple, he was dragged to the High Priest, in the presence of whom there was a confrontation which permitted to set forth precise indictments which could be presented to the Roman Governor, the only one who had the power to pass death sentence and to order to execute it. We must say clearly that there was not a due process of law and that the members of the Sanhedrin which met at night were almost certainly not able to deliberate in a legal situation. Jesus was all the same given in charge of Pilate who, after some sessions and procedures which seemed to be a real trial, decided to condemn him with two other criminals after making him flagellated. Was this a precautionary measure, an attempt to please the priests who had given Jesus in charge of him, or was it hate towards anyone among the Judeans who seemed to transmit a message not in line with the imperial ideology? It’s likely that all these reasons together led Pilate to the decision of condemning that Galilean. What is certain is that Jesus dies on the cross, going through what according to the Romans was “an extremely cruel and horrible torture” (Cicero) and according to the Jews was, like the hanging, an excommunication sign for the sinner, a God’s curse for the blasphemer, as the Torah says: “Damned is anyone who is hung on the wood” (Deuteronomy 21:23; see the Epistle to the Galatians 3:13). Jesus dies in the infamy of his nakedness, hung half-way up, because neither the earth nor the sky want him. He dies in the shame of those who are condemned by the official law of their own religion, or by the civil authority because of their being harmful to the common good of the polis! Unlike John the Baptist, Jesus doesn’t die as a martyr, but as an excommunicated and cursed man, using an expression loved by Paul, who is proud of preaching the crucified Jesus, a scandal for the religious men and a folly for the wise men of the Greek world.

The cross, yes, the cross is the sign of Jesus’ infamous death — “Jesus who is counted among the criminals”, as the evangelists like noticing —, it is the tale of his sympathy with the victims, of his stooping to the condition of a humiliated slave, “to the death and the death on the cross”, as Paul witnesses. Nevertheless, the cross must not prevail over the Crucified! As a matter of fact, the cross doesn’t make great the one who is hung on it, but Jesus is he who redeems the cross and gives a meaning to it, so that everyone who knows this situation of suffering and shame, of curse and annihilation, could find Jesus next to him. Each cross is an enigma turned into a mystery by Jesus: in an unjust world, the just can only be refused, opposed, condemned. This is a necessitas humana (human need) and Jesus — exactly because he wanted to “remain just”, in solidarity with the victims, the lambs — had to know the clash between him and the injustice of this world. But those who are able to read Jesus’ passion and death in this way have to understand it as a glorious event for Him: the glory of he who has spent his life for the mankind, the glory of he who has loved to the end, the glory of he who dies condemned for having tried to tell that God is mercy, is love. If there is a place where Jesus turned God into “Gospel”, where he “evangelized” Him, that place is exactly the cross, good news for all the sinners!

Today, Good Friday, Christians gather all the victims of history, all the lambs killed by the wolves, in the image of the Crucified, the innocent lamb. During this day Christians are asked to learn to sustain the scandal of the cross without blaming the other, in the certainty that behind the cross of each just man it is possible to see a reason for giving one’s life for the other. Only he who has a reason for which giving his own life is worthwhile, has also a reason for which living is worthwhile.

Translated from:

ENZO BIANCHI
{link_prodotto:id=320}. Le feste cristiane
Edizioni Qiqajon, 2003, pp. 79-82.

Baptism of the Lord
The Christian holidays by ENZO BIANCHI
Jesus’ baptism reveals that the Holy Spirit descended on him and dwelt in him with his energies

Speaking of the Holy Saturday may seem paradoxical because for Christians this is a day characterized by silence, a day which may seem a “dead time,” emptied of all meaning. Also the Gospels are silent on this “Great Saturday.” The narration of the Passion ends with the night of Friday, when Saturday dawn is breaking, and it restarts at dawn of the first day of the week, i.e. the third day. Is this then an empty day? In the Western Christian tradition, the Holy Saturday is the only day without a Eucharistic celebration, the only day which has remained without a liturgy, without a particular celebration: the bells are silent, there are no little flames in the bare churches, no chants. Christians’ prayer gets silent as well and it is chiefly a prayer of wait, a wait for what will deeply change each thing, each life story. We certainly know well that Easter is an event which happened eph’hapax, once and forever, in the 30th year of our era, on April, the 9th; we know that Christ, who is resurrected by now, will not die again, we are aware of our not being celebrating a cyclic mystery as the heathens did. Nevertheless we are asked to live this day catching its very meaning. We live it in the faith that the crucified Lord is living among us. But, by choosing the second day of the Easter Triduum as the day of silence, of the wait, of the “not said,” we assume a dimension which always dwells inside us and which is sometimes — in our life, in other men’s life, or in an entire people’s life — the lasting, not momentary, not transitory dimension.

On Holy Saturday, the day after death, when there was the end of hope before the disciples, an aporia, an emptiness over which the absence of meaning, the unbearable suffering, the laceration of a final separation, of a mortal wound impended: where is God? This is the mute question on Holy Saturday. Where is that God who had intervened at the moment of Jesus’ baptism, opening the skies to tell him: “You are my son, in You I am well pleased” (Mark 1:11)? Where is that God who had intervened on the high mountain at the moment of the transfiguration with Moses and Elijah, who had said: “This is my son, the Beloved!” (Mark 9:7)? At the moment of the cross God did not intervene, to such a point that Jesus felt himself abandoned by God and cried to Him: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34). A whole day passes by and there is no God’s intervention… And yet God has not forsaken Jesus. The abandonment seems to be the bitter truth before the disciples’ eyes, but actually God has already called Jesus to Him, indeed, he has already resurrected him in his Holy Spirit and Jesus is alive in the nether world announcing salvation there as well. “He descended to the nether world,” we profess in the Credo. This is what happens in the hiding on the Holy Saturday: an empty, silent day for the disciples and for the men, but a day during which the Father — who “is always working” (see John 5:17), as Jesus said — brings salvation to the nether world by means of Jesus. Just as Jonah was in the belly of a fish for three days and three nights (see Matthew 12:40), Jesus was taken down from the cross and laid in the grave, and from there he descended again to the nether world, to the Sheol where the dead dwell.

This a great mystery, on which today the Church seems to prefer to remain silent, almost as if it were aphonic. And yet the Fathers of the Church, mainly in the ancient liturgy, wanted to sing this action done after his death. In a homily attributed to Epiphanes we read: “Today there is a great silence on earth. The Lord died in the flesh and has descended to the nether world to shake it. He goes to look for Adam, the first father, as if he were looking for the lost sheep. The Lord descends to see those who lay in the darkness and in the shadow of death.” And this is what we read in a hymn by Ephrem the Syrian: “He who had said to Adam ‘Where are you?’ descended to the nether world after him, he found him, he called him and said to him ‘You, created in my image and likeness, come! I descended to the place where you are, to bring you back to your promised land!’.” Jesus who, by means of his death, descended to the nether world — a death which became an “act,” a death which was assumed and completely felt — destroyed the very death in an admirable fight, as the Syriac liturgy recalls: “You, Lord, you had been fighting against the death for the three days of your dwelling in the grave, you sowed joy and hope among those who dwelt in the nether world.”

Therefore, the descent to the nether world becomes the extension of the salvation of all the universe, of the human being in his wholeness: Christ descends to the heart of the earth, to the heart of creation, to the nether regions dwelling inside each man. What will become then of the nether world, after “its being visited” by the glorious Christ? Cyril of Alexandria states that Christ’s preaching in the nether world — about which Peter the Apostle says: “put to death in his flesh, but made alive in his Spirit, he went to announce salvation to the spirits who were waiting in prison” (1 Peter 3:18-19) — meant that Jesus emptied it: “Immediately Christ, emptying the whole hell and opening its impenetrable doors wide for the spirits of the dead, left the devil alone there.” Hell, where is your victory?

Today Christians should not forget the mystery of the Great and Holy Saturday, a real prelude to Easter and to the reading of Christ’s descent to the nether regions which dwell inside each Christian as well, in spite of his wish to follow Jesus. Who doesn’t recognize inside himself the presence of these nether regions? Regions which are not evangelized, zones of incredulity, places where God is absent, and where we can do nothing but invoke Christ’s descent so that he may evangelize them, enlighten them, change them from regions of death under the rule of the devil into fertile ground able to germinate life, thanks to God’s grace. Thus, the Holy Saturday is like the time of pregnancy, it is a time growth towards the childbirth, towards the triumph of a new life: its silence is not muteness, but it is a time full of energy and life.

What then could hold us back from thinking of the last century as the century during which the Holy Saturday was the experience of many people who believed in Jesus and of many other men whose faith is known and led only by God? In the concentration camps under the Nazi rule, in the gulag and in the Soviet prisons, in many countries where the atheistic communist ideology gave new martyrs to the Church, as on a deep Holy Saturday… A few years ago, I met a bishop in China who belonged to that Church which, officially, is not in communion with Rome and he said to me in Latin: “We live the Holy Saturday, but we are waiting for Easter: it will come! Tell the Holy Father that we love him.” On Holy Saturday God seems to be absent, evil seems to prevail, suffering seems to have no meaning, and where is God? Sometimes it’s Holy Saturday also for those who meet the darkness along the path of their faith, those who see it wavering, those who can feel no more hope. A day of callousness, during which each confidence seems to be inaccessible and too great to be conceived. Then there is the Holy Saturday of many sick people, above all the ones who suffer from Aids, who are bound to Jesus in his shame… But Holy Saturday can also be seen as the time when the blood of the martyrs and of the victims falls as a seed on the earth in order to fecundate it in view of a plentiful fruit, a time during which the decay of our outward being leaves room for the growth of our inner man… Everyone who will speak of his Holy Saturday will be able to say then: “Surely the Lord was in this place and I did not know it!” (Genesis 28:16). There is no Easter dawn without a Holy Saturday.

Translated from: 

ENZO BIANCHI
{link_prodotto:id=320}, Le feste cristiane
Edizioni Qiqajon, 2003, pp. 85-89.

On Holy Thursday, at sunset, the Easter Triduum begins. In these “holy days” separated from the other ones we, the Christian people, meditate, celebrate and live again the central mystery of our faith: Jesus goes into his Passion, knows his death and burial and the third day he is resurrected by the Father in that strength of life that is the Holy Spirit. But was this event of Jesus’ Passion due to chance or to a fate that impended over Him? Why did Jesus know a sentence, the torture and the violent death? These are questions to be answered if we want to catch and deeply understand the meaning of the Passion. And it is exactly the Gospels that want to give us this answer witnessing the events of those Easter days in the thirtieth year of our era. As a matter of fact in order to show to his disciples that he was going into his Passion assuming it as an act, not obliged by fate nor as a consequence of a series of fortuitous and unfavourable circumstances, Jesus anticipates with a mime, a symbolic gesture, what is about to happen to him, thus revealing the meaning of it. Therefore, Jesus accepts freely the end looming before him. He could have fled away or avoided to face that trial and, yes, he asked the Father if this was possible. But if Jesus wanted to dwell in justice, if he wanted to stay on the side of the just (always opposed and persecuted in an unjust world), if he wanted to stay in solidarity with the victims, the lambs of history, he had to accept that sentence and that death. He did accept it freely so that the Father’s will was done. Obviously the Father did not want the death of His son, but the Father’s will required that Jesus remained in the reign of justice, love, solidarity with the victims.

But Jesus’ freedom was fed and accompanied also by love: love for the Father, surely, but also for truth and justice, love for us, for the man. Yes, exactly in order to show that he was renouncing his life freely and because of love — not obliged by fate or fortuitous circumstances — Jesus anticipates through some signs what is about to happen to him. At table with his disciples, Jesus makes some acts on bread and wine accompanied by his words: his body is broken and given for the man, his blood is poured and given for everybody. And the sign of his imminent death, the sacrament of giving thanks, is the Eucharist that the Christian will have to celebrate in memory of Jesus in order to be involved in the deed of giving life for the brothers, for the others. At the end of that act, Jesus exclaimed: “Do this in memory of me”. In the celebration of that gesture made by their Master and Lord, the Christians who live in the world in all the times from Jesus’ death- resurrection till his return, his coming back in glory, will be moulded as his disciples, they will be part of Christ’s life, they will know that he, the Lord, will be with them till the end of history.

Therefore the Holy Thursday has to celebrate this event which anticipates Jesus’ Passion, the narration of his exodus from this world to the Father. But in the evening liturgy of the Holy Thursday, besides remembering and living as in every Eucharist this gesture of its Lord, the Church significantly lives and repeats another gesture made by Him, i.e. the Maundy. As a matter of fact, also the fourth Gospel narrates “Jesus’ last supper with his disciples”, the supper during which the traitor’s identity was revealed, Peter’s denial and all the other disciples’ flight were announced; the supper made on the occasion of Jesus’ last Passover in Jerusalem before his death. But instead of narrating the sign of the bread and the wine, John tells the sign of the Maundy! Why a “different” gesture, a “different” sign? And yet the fourth evangelist knows the story of the Eucharist, because the Church had been celebrating this sacrament for decades by then. Why then the remembrance of this different sign? We can deem quite probable that this choice in the fourth Gospel is motivated by an urgency felt in the Church at the end of the first century: the Eucharistic celebration can’t be a rite disjoined from a consistent praxis of agape, of love, of service towards the brothers, as this is exactly its meaning: to give one’s life for the brothers!

Thus, the evangelist wants to bring up-to-date the Eucharistic message remembering that if it is not a mutual service, the gift of one’s life for the brothers, an extreme love, it becomes just a rite belonging to “the scene” of this world. We could say that John’s purpose is to make the altar’s sacrament always read and lived as the brother’s sacrament. Eucharistic celebration with the broken bread and the offered wine and the concrete daily service to the brother attract each other mutually as two faces of the participation to Christ’s Easter mystery. Here is then Jesus’ gesture narrated slowly, almost in slow- motion, so that it may be well impressed in the mind of the disciple of every time: Jesus takes off his clothes, takes a towel, puts it round his hips, pours the water in the basin, washes the disciples’ feet, dries them, takes his clothes again… These are action verbs which plastically convey the event of the Maundy. It is a gesture made by Jesus in complete awareness: Jesus, the Kyrios, the Lord, washes his disciples’ feet. That’s an anomalous, paradoxical, roles inverter gesture; a scandalous gesture, as Peter’s reaction shows! And yet, it’s exactly in this way that Jesus tells, “evangelize” God, in the sense of making Him “Gospel” for us.

Two different actions, two sacramental mimes, two signs narrating the same reality: Jesus offers his life and, freely and because of love, goes towards his death turning himself into a slave. Because of this, the same command follows the Eucharistic gesture and the Maundy: “I washed your feet, do as I did”. And that’s what the Church has to do if it wants to be the Lord’s Church and wants to obey its mandate: it has to break the bread, offer the wine, wash the feet in the assembly of the believers and in the history of the man.

Translated from:

ENZO BIANCHI
{link_prodotto:id=320}. Le feste cristiane
Edizioni Qiqajon, 2003, pp. 73-76.