Letter of Pope John Paul
As we begin the new millennium, Pope John Paul has written a letter to
all members of the Church. During the weeks of Lent, selections from the letter will be in
our bulletin to help us prepare for the Feast of Easter.
A FACE OF SORROW
In contemplating Christ’s face we confront the most paradoxical
aspect of his mystery as it emerges in his last hour, on the cross. The mystery within the
mystery, before which we cannot but prostrate ourselves in adoration.
The intensity of the episode of the agony in the Garden of Olives
passes before our eyes. Oppressed by foreknowledge of the trials that await him, and alone
before the Father, Jesus cries out to him in his habitual and affectionate expression of
trust: Abba, Father." He asks him to take away, if possible, the cup of suffering
(cf. Mk. 14:36). But the Father seems not to want to heed the Son’s cry. In
order to bring man back to the Father’s face, Jesus not only had to take on the face
of man, but he had to burden himself with the "face" of sin. "For our sake
he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of
God" (2 Cor. 5:21).
We shall never exhaust the depths of this mystery. All the harshness of
the paradox can be heard in Jesus’ seemingly desperate cry of pain on the cross:
"Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?", which means, ‘My God, my God, why have you
forsaken me?" (Mk. 15:34). Is it possible to imagine a greater agony, a more
impenetrable darkness? In reality, the anguished "why" addressed to the Father
in the opening words of the 22nd Psalm expresses all the realism of unspeakable pain; but
it is also illumined by the meaning of that entire prayer, in which the psalmist brings
together suffering and trust in a moving blend of emotions. In fact the psalm continues:
"In you our fathers put their trust; they trusted and you set them free...Do not
leave me alone in my distress, come close, there is none else to help: (Ps. 22:5,12)
Jesus' cry on the cross, dear brothers and sisters, is not the cry of
anguish of a man without hope, but the prayer of the Son who offers his life to the Father
in love, for the salvation of all. At the very moment when he identifies with our sin,
"abandoned" by the Father, he "abandons" himself into the hands of the
Father. His eyes remain fixed on the Father. Precisely because of the knowledge and
experience of the Father which he alone has, even at this moment of darkness he sees
clearly the gravity of sin and suffers because of it. He alone, who sees the Father and
rejoices fully in him, can understand completely what it means to resist the Father’s
love by sin. More than an experience of physical pain, his passion is an agonizing
suffering of the soul.
Theological tradition has not failed to ask how Jesus could possibly
experience at one and the same time his profound unity with the Father, by its very nature
a source of joy and happiness, and an agony that goes all the way to his final cry of
abandonment. The simultaneous presence of these two seemingly irreconcilable aspects is
rooted in the fathomless depths of the hypostatic union.
Faced with this mystery, we are greatly helped not only by theological
investigation but also by that great heritage which is the "lived theology" of
the saints. The saints offer us precious insights which enable us to understand more
easily the intuition of faith, thanks to the special enlightenment which some of them have
received from the Holy Spirit or even through their personal experience of those terrible
states of trial which the mystical tradition describes as the "dark night." Not
infrequently the saints have undergone something akin to Jesus’ experience on the
cross in the paradoxical blending of bliss and pain. In the "Dialogue of Divine
Providence," God the Father shows Catherine of Siena how joy and suffering can be
present together in holy souls: "Thus the soul is blissful and afflicted: afflicted
on account of the sins of its neighbor, blissful on account of the union and the affection
of charity which it has inwardly received. These souls imitate the spotless lamb, the
only-begotten Son, who on the cross was both blissful and afflicted." In the same
way, Thérèse of Lisieux lived her agony in communion with the agony of Jesus,
"experiencing" in herself the very paradox of Jesus’ own bliss and anguish:
"In the Garden of Olives our Lord was blessed with all the joys of the Trinity, yet
his dying was no less harsh. It is a mystery, but I assure you that, on the basis of what
I myself am feeling, I can understand something of it." What an illuminating
testimony! Moreover, the accounts given by the evangelists themselves provide a basis for
this intuition on the part of the Church of Christ’s consciousness when they record
that, even in the depths of his pain, he died imploring forgiveness for his executioners
(cf. Lk. 2:24) and expressing to the Father his ultimate filial abandonment; "Father,
into your hands I commend my spirit" (Lk. 23:46).
