Full text of Fr. Cantalamessa's Good Friday homily
“TRULY, THIS MAN WAS SON OF GOD!” Homily for Good Friday 2011 in St Peter’s Basilica
In
His passion – writes Saint Paul to Timothy – Jesus Christ “has given his noble witness”
(1 Tim 6,13). We ask ourselves: witness to what? Not to the truth of his life or the
rightness of his cause. Many have died, and still die today, for a wrong cause, while
believing it to be right. Now, the resurrection certainly does testify to the truth
of Christ. “God has given public proof about Jesus, by raising him from the dead”,
as the Apostle was to say in the Areopagus at Athens. (Acts 17, 31). Death testifies
not to the truth of Christ, but to his love. Of that love, in fact, it is the supreme
proof. “No-one can have greater love than to lay down his life for his friends” (Jn
15, 13). One could object that there is a greater love than giving your life for your
friends, and that is to give your life for your enemies. But that is precisely what
Jesus has done: “Christ died for the godless”, writes the Apostle in the Letter to
the Romans. “You could hardly find anyone ready to die, even for the upright; though
it is just possible that, for a really good person, someone might undertake to die.
So, it is proof of God’s own love for us that Christ died for us while we were still
sinners. (Rm 5, 6-8). “He loved us while we were enemies, so that he could turn us
into friends”, exclaims St Augustine. A certain one-sided “theology of the cross”
can make us forget the essential point. The cross is not only God’s judgment on the
world and its wisdom; it is more than the revelation and condemnation of sin. It is
not God’s NO to the world, it is the YES God speaks to the world from the depths of
his love: “That which is wrong”, writes the Holy Father in his latest book about Jesus,
“the reality of evil, cannot simply be ignored; it cannot just be left to stand. It
must be dealt with; it must be overcome. Only this counts as true mercy. And the fact
that God now confronts evil himself, because men are incapable of doing so - therein
lies the “unconditional” goodness of God”.
* * * * But how can we have the
courage to speak about God’s love, with so many human tragedies before our eyes, like
the disaster that has struck Japan, or the shipwrecks and drownings of these last
few weeks? Should we not mention them at all? But to stay completely silent would
be to betray the faith and to be ignorant of the meaning of the mystery we are celebrating
today. There is a truth that must be proclaimed loud and clear on Good Friday.
The One whom we contemplate on the cross is God “in person”. Yes, he is also the man
Jesus of Nazareth, but that man is one person with the Son of the Eternal Father.
As long as the fundamental dogma of the Christian faith is not recognised and taken
seriously – the first dogma defined at Nicea, that Jesus Christ is the Son of God,
and is himself God, of one substance with the Father - human suffering will remain
unanswered. One cannot say that “Job’s question has remained unanswered”, or that
not even the Christian faith has an answer to give to human pain, if one starts by
rejecting the answer it claims to have. What do you do to reassure someone that a
particular drink contains no poison? You drink it yourself first, in front of him.
This is what God has done for humanity: he has drunk the bitter cup of the passion.
So, human suffering cannot be a poisoned chalice, it must be more than negativity,
loss, absurdity, if God himself has chosen to savour it. At the bottom of the chalice,
there must be a pearl.
We know the name of that pearl: resurrection! “In my
estimation, all that we suffer in the present time is nothing in comparison with the
glory which is destined to be disclosed for us”. (Rom 8, 18), and again: “He will
wipe away all tears from their eyes; there will be no more death, and no more mourning
or sadness or pain. The world of the past has gone.” (Ap 21, 4).
If life’s
race ended here below, we would have every reason to despair at the thought of the
millions, if not billions, of human beings who start off at a great disadvantage,
nailed to the starting line by poverty and underdevelopment, without even a chance
to run in the race. But that is not how it is. Death not only cancels out differences,
but overturns them. “The poor man died and was carried away by the angels into Abraham’s
embrace. The rich man also died and was buried …in Hades” (cf. Lk 16, 22-23). We
cannot apply this scheme of things to the social sphere in a simplistic way, but it
is there to warn us that faith in the resurrection lets no-one go on living their
own quiet life. It reminds us that the saying “live and let live” must never turn
into “live and let die”. The response of the cross is not for us Christians alone,
but for everyone, because the Son of God died for all. There is in the mystery of
redemption an objective and a subjective aspect. There is the fact in itself, and
then awareness of the fact and our faith-response to it. The first extends beyond
the second. “The Holy Spirit – says a text of Vatican II – offers to all the possibility
of being made partners, in a way known to God, in the paschal mystery”. One of
the ways of being associated with the paschal mystery is precisely through suffering:
“To suffer”, wrote John Paul II in the days following the attempt on his life and
the long convalescence that ensued, “means to become particularly susceptible, particularly
open to the working of the salvific powers of God, offered to humanity in Christ”.
Suffering – all suffering, but especially that of the innocent and of the martyrs
- brings us into contact with the cross of Christ, in a mysterious way “known only
to God”. * * * * After Jesus, those who have “given their noble witness”
and “have drunk from the chalice” are the martyrs! The account of a martyr’s death
was called “Passio”, a passion, like that of the sufferings of Jesus to which we
have just listened. Once more the Christian world has been visited by the ordeal of
martyrdom, which was thought to have ended with the fall of totalitarian atheistic
regimes. We cannot pass over their testimony in silence. The first Christians honoured
their martyrs. The records of their martyrdom were circulated among the churches with
immense respect. In this very day, in a great Asian country, Christians have been
praying and marching in the streets to avert the threat hanging over them. One
thing distinguishes genuine accounts of martyrdom from legendary ones composed later,
after the end of the persecutions. In the former, there is almost no trace of polemics
against the persecutors; all attention is concentrated on the heroism of the martyrs,
not on the perversity of the judges and executioners. Saint Cyprian even ordered his
followers to give twenty-five gold coins to the executioner who beheaded him. These
are the disciples of the one who died saying: “Father, forgive them; they do not know
what they are doing”. Truly, “Jesus’ blood speaks a different language from the blood
of Abel (Heb 12:24): it does not cry out for vengeance and punishment; it brings reconciliation”.
Even the world bows before modern witnesses of faith. This explains the unexpected
success in France of the film “Of Gods and Men”, which tells the story of the seven
Cistercian monks slain in Tibhirine on the night of the 26th and 27th
March 1996. And who can fail to admire and be edified by the words of Shahbaz Bhatti,
a Catholic politician in Pakistan who was recently killed for his faith? His testament
is a legacy to us, his brothers and sisters in the faith, and it would be an act of
ingratitude to allow it to be quickly forgotten. He wrote: “I was offered high
government positions and asked to quit my struggle but I always refused to give up,
even at the cost of my life. I do not want popularity; I do not want any position.
I just want a place at Jesus’ feet. I want my life, my character, my actions to speak
for me and indicate that I am following Jesus Christ. Because of this desire, I will
consider myself most fortunate if - in this effort and struggle to help the needy
and the poor, to help the persecuted and victimized Christians of Pakistan - Jesus
Christ will accept the sacrifice of my life. I want to live for Christ and I want
to die for Him”. We seem to hear again the martyr Ignatius Antioch, when he came
to Rome to suffer martyrdom. The powerlessness of the victims doesn’t however justify
the indifference of the world toward their fate. “The upright person perishes –lamented
the prophet Isaiah - and no one cares. The faithful is taken off and no one takes
it to heart” (Is 57: 1).
* * * * Christian martyrs are not the only ones,
as we have seen, to suffer and die around us. What can we believers offer to those
who have no faith, apart from the certainty our own faith gives us that there is a
ransom for suffering? We can suffer with those who suffer, weep with those who weep
(Rom 12, 15). Before proclaiming the resurrection and the life, with the weeping sisters
of Lazarus before Him, “Jesus wept” (Jn 11, 35). At this time we can suffer and weep,
most of all with the Japanese people, now recovering from one of the most devastating
natural disasters in history. We can also tell those brothers and sisters in humanity
that we admire the example of dignity and composure which they have given to the world.
Globalisation has at least this positive effect: the suffering of one people becomes
the suffering of all, arouses the solidarity of all. It gives us the chance to discover
that we are one single human family, joined together for good or ill. It helps us
overcome all barriers of race, colour or creed. As one of our poets put it: “Peace,
you peoples! Too deep the mystery of the prostrate earth”. But we must take in
the teaching contained in such events. Earthquakes, hurricanes and other disasters
that strike the innocent and the guilty alike are never punishments from God. To say
otherwise would be to offend both God and humanity. But they do contain a warning:
in this case, against the danger of deluding ourselves that science and technology
will be enough to save us. Unless we practise some restraint in this field, we see
that they can become more devastating than nature itself. There was an earthquake
also at the moment when Christ died: “The centurion, together with the others guarding
Jesus, had seen the earthquake and all that was taking place, and they were terrified
and said: ‘In truth, this man was son of God’” (Mt 27,54). But there was an even bigger
one at the moment of his resurrection: “And suddenly there was a violent earthquake,
for an angel of the Lord, descending from heaven, came and rolled away the stone,
and sat on it” (Mt 28, 2). This is how it will always be. Every earthquake that brings
death will always be followed by an earthquake of resurrection and life. Someone once
said: “Only a god can save us now”. (“Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten”). We have
the sure and certain guarantee that he will do exactly that, because “God loved the
world so much that he gave His only-begotten Son” (Jn 3,16).
Let us, then,
prepare to sing the ancient words of the liturgy with new conviction and heartfelt
gratitude: “Ecce lignum crucis, in quo salus mundi pependit: See the wood of the cross,
on which hung the saviour of the world. Venite, adoremus: Come, let us worship.