A CRUCIFIX
THAT QUESTIONS US
AND SAVES US
-
by Enzo Bianchi
I would like to contemplate Jesus crucified together with
you, according to the three splendid interpretations provided five centuries
ago by Donatello (…) These works of exceptional beauty, which have accompanied
the faith of countless Christians over the last five hundred years, still
accompany our faith, here and today, because the Crucifix remains for the
Christian the place par excellence in which he can know God. The cross is truly
the chair of God's wisdom (cf. 1 Cor 1:18-25), it is the place where God was
most fully narrated by his Son Jesus Christ (cf. Jn 1:18: exeghésato ).
All the written testimonies about the end of Jesus' earthly
life agree in declaring that he died on the cross. According to the Holy
Scriptures, this is the death of the one cursed by God ("Cursed is he who
hangs on a tree": Dt 21:23; Gal 3:13), hanging between heaven and earth
because he was rejected by God and men. Jesus, a Galilean who had gathered
around him a community of a few men and some women involved in his itinerant
life, considered a teacher and prophet by these disciples and by a larger
number of supporters, was condemned and put to death by crucifixion in
Jerusalem on Friday 7 April of the year 30. This failed end immediately
appeared to be a scandal, "the scandal of the cross" (cf. 1 Cor
1:23), a grave obstacle to faith in Jesus, especially when people began to
confess him as the Messiah of Israel and the Son of God. This is why, still at
the beginning of the 2nd century AD, the Jewish rabbi Tryphon states in his
dialogue with the Christian Justin: "We know that the Messiah must suffer
and be led like a sheep (cf. Is 53:7); but that he should be crucified and die
in such a shameful and ignominious way, through the death cursed by the Law, we
cannot even conceive" (Justin, Dialogue with Trypho 90,1).
Yet for the authentic Christian faith it is precisely the
Crucifix that has told the story of God; even on the cross, indeed especially
on the cross, Jesus "bore witness to the truth" (cf. Jn 18:37),
transforming an instrument of capital punishment into the place of maximum
glory. But how was it possible for a man hanging on a cross to become the one
on whom Christians keep their gaze fixed as Lord and Savior? To answer this
question we must first guard against the temptation to read Jesus starting from
the cross. On the contrary - as we will see better shortly - we must also read
the cross starting from the life of the one who ascended it, the man Jesus:
this death is the act that recapitulates his entire existence spent in freedom
and for the love of God and men.
To contemplate the Crucifix, it is necessary to meditate on
the paradoxical "word of the cross" (1 Cor 1:18), the central mystery
of our faith. In truth, in the face of the "word of the cross",
weakness of God, weakness of the Christian, weakness of the Church, but
fullness of life because "life in abundance" (cf. Jn 10:10),
"eternal life" (cf. Jn 3:15-16.36; 4:14; etc.), none of us is worthy
of calling ourselves a disciple of Christ. If anything, we will be able to make
our own the words of Ignatius of Antioch: "Now I begin to be a
disciple" ( To the Romans 5:3). On the other hand, if this weakness
of ours is consciously assumed, in it can be manifested "Christ crucified,
... the power of God" (1 Cor 1:23-24), according to the word addressed by
the Lord to Paul: "My grace is sufficient for you; my power is made
perfect in weakness" (2 Cor 12:9). And it will be precisely some of Paul's
reflections in his two letters to the church of Corinth that will constitute
the framework of my meditation.
1. "Jesus Christ, and Christ crucified"
In the First Letter to the Corinthians, addressing a church
that a few years after its foundation appears to be troubled by disputes, and
tempted by the cult of apostolic personalities (cf. 1 Cor 1:12), but above all
to have reasons to boast before God (cf. 1 Cor 1:27-29) and to make the
Christian faith a religion capable of convincing those who seek miracles, and
an ideology for those who seek wisdom, Paul renews the proclamation of the
Gospel. In Corinth, in fact, the very heart of the Gospel is compromised: the
cross of Christ risks being emptied (cf. 1 Cor 1:17)! Faced with such
impoverishment, the Apostle pronounces decisive words, the fruit of experiences
suffered first-hand: "I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus
Christ and Christ crucified" (1 Cor 2:2).
To the worldly wisdom ( sophía toû kósmou : 1Cor 1,20)
that has insinuated itself into the Christian community, an anthropocentric and
self-sufficient culture ( sophía anthrópon : 1Cor 2,5), Paul opposes
«the word of the cross» (1Cor 1,18), not an announcement based on persuasive
speeches or reasoning that have their strength in the sublimity of the word and
culture. In the church of Corinth there are already attempts underway to
transform the message of the Gospel into cultural speculation: this translates
into the rejection of the face of God manifested in the crucified Son Jesus
Christ, in an interpretation of the resurrection in triumphal terms, in the
failure to recognize weakness as the cornerstone of Christian life. In reaction
to all this, the Apostle, who through his personal experience and with the
grace of the Lord has deepened the scientia crucis , reads the cross as
folly because it is an unheard-of event, a failure in the eyes of the world,
but at the same time preaches it as "the power of God and the wisdom of
God" (1 Cor 1:24), that is, the fullness of life, the possibility of
reaching that full life that God had intended for man at the time of creating
him through and in view of the Son (cf. Col 1:16).
The death of Christ was not just any death, nor was it
clothed in the glory of martyrdom, like that of his master John the Baptist,
but it was a shameful death: " mortem autem crucis " (Phil
2:8). Well, the ignominious nature of this death cannot be silenced or removed:
this event - personalized and almost hypostatized in the term "cross"
- was and remains a scandal and madness! Let us not forget: in the time of
Jesus the cross was a terrible instrument of death, a most shameful gallows in
the eyes of the Romans, a torture that, in the eyes of the Jews, made whoever
hung on it accursed by God and men. Yet Jesus transformed the cross into a
truly glorious place, a place where he loved men to the end, a place where he
died for us, to give us salvation (cf. 1 Thess 5:9-10)!
But it is necessary to delve deeper into this last statement,
too often repeated in vain, that is, without understanding its real meaning. I
do so by borrowing an acute reflection by the theologian Giuseppe Colombo:
In the "Christian" imagination the cross seems to
prevail over the Crucifix, giving free rein to the ambiguous tendencies
inherent in man's subconscious... It is not the cross that makes Jesus Christ
great; it is Jesus Christ who redeems even the cross, which is properly to be
understood, not rhetorically exalted ( On Evangelization , Milan 1997,
p. 64).
In other words, Jesus' death on the cross is nothing other
than the outcome of an existence lived in freedom and for the love of men. In
order not to forget this, it would be enough to pay attention to what the
Church, remembering the life of Jesus, feels the need to proclaim at the heart
of the Eucharistic prayer:
- He, at the hour
when he was going freely to his passion, took bread… (Eucharistic
Prayer II).
- To carry out
your plan of love, [Holy Father], he freely gave himself up to
death… When the hour came for him to be glorified by you, Holy Father, having
loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end,
and while he was eating with them, he took bread… (Eucharistic Prayer IV)
In freedom and for love: this is how the folly of the cross
became the power of God and the wisdom of God!
The power of God was revealed in Jesus crucified, man and Son
of God, who was made sin for us (cf. 2 Cor 5:21), who showed himself to be the
lost Messiah, numbered among sinners, a voiceless lamb, a victim among the
victims of history. The cross is the impure gallows, whoever climbs on it is an
anathema , rejected by the community to which God has bound himself in a
covenant; whoever dies on it, dies outside the camp and the gate of the city
(cf. Heb 13:11-13), in the desecrated place where God is considered absent.
Truly, the cross is the anti-sacrifice par excellence, according to the cultic
norms of Israel: it is madness, foolishness and scandal! But only those who
know this truth and fully accept this madness, seeing Jesus die on the cross,
can confess with the centurion: "Truly this man was the Son of God!"
(Mk 15:39; cf. Mt 27:54).
Allow me to summarize the paradoxical power of the cross in
this way: woe to those who deify Jesus and call him God without knowing the
very human life of Jesus, without knowing how he lived, making life a gift and
loving others to the extreme; at the same time, woe to those who do not know
how to make the ignominious seal of the cross, telos of this life, the
chair of the Christian magisterium! But when the folly of the cross is
measured, then it appears to be the power of God, then the wisdom of the wise and
the intelligence of the intellectuals are destroyed (cf. 1 Cor 1:19), then the
mystery of God is truly known and one sees in Jesus "the image of the
invisible God" (Col 1:15).
Paradoxical mystery: the cross of Christ is really the
foolishness and weakness of God that offends those who demand manifestations of
his presumed omnipotence, or who trust in a refined religious wisdom. But it is
precisely in the cross that God shows his wisdom and his power, "because
the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger
than men" (1 Cor 1:25). It is precisely in the cross that he asks that his
foolish action of love for humanity be recognized! Yes, it is in the emptying
of his divine form (cf. Phil 2:7) and in the act of con-descending where men
are, that the Son of God revealed the grammar of God's power. Gregory of Nyssa
was able to write about this:
The cross is theological for those who have a penetrating
gaze, and proclaims with its form the authentic power of the one who appears on
it and is "all in all" (1 Cor 15:28) ( First discourse on the
resurrection of Christ ).
And Luther echoes: It is not enough to know God in his glory
and majesty, but it is also necessary to know him in the humiliation and infamy
of the cross… In Christ, in the Crucified, are true theology and true knowledge
of God ( The Heidelberg Disputation , Thesis 20).
Once this unspeakable reality has been understood, or at
least intuited, it is up to the Christian and the Church as a whole to live in
such a way that this folly and weakness of "Jesus Christ, and Christ
crucified" (1 Cor 2:2) is reflected in the lives of his disciples: here
and here alone lies the truth of the sequela Christi .
2. "I have been crucified with Christ"
In the Second Letter to the Corinthians, Paul devotes himself
extensively to describing the foolishness of the cross and the weakness that
are revealed in his life and ministry, with statements that cannot fail to
concern the life of every Christian. In this text, the Apostle certainly
intends to defend his ministry in the face of adversaries from both Judaism and
from within the community of Corinth itself; more than anything else, however,
what is close to his heart is the safeguarding of the integrity of the Gospel,
to whose service he has totally dedicated himself. For this reason, he affirms
first of all the power of his own apostolic ministry (cf. 2 Cor 2:14-4:6), but
at the same time he underlines its weakness (cf. 2 Cor 4:7-5:10). In this way,
as in the case of the powerful foolishness of the cross, we are faced with the
paradoxical character of the apostolic ministry and, more profoundly, of the
entire Christian life.
After having affirmed the normative centrality of the Word of
God, of the Gospel and of the preaching of Jesus Christ, Paul outlines the
non-worldly criteria that inspire his service within the Church (cf. 2 Cor
4:2-6): rejecting duplicity, deception, the falsification of the truth, acting
hypocritically, acting differently from what is preached, bending the Gospel to
one's own ends, even religious and ecclesial ones. The Apostle does not preach
himself, does not manipulate the Word of God by turning it into human ideology,
does not seek success by taking advantage of his position in the Church, nor
does he aspire to obtain easy consensus. On the contrary, his ministry is
effectively summarized in two very precise tasks: preaching Jesus as Messiah
and Lord and, consequently, serving his brothers (cf. Mt 20:25-28 and par.; Jn
13:12-15). Only God can make a believer suitable for this ministry (cf. 2 Cor
3:5) because it is the service of the New Covenant, a service conducted in the
Spirit who gives life (cf. 2 Cor 3:6), a diakonía far more glorious than
that carried out by Moses (cf. 2 Cor 3:7-8).
Yes, the ministry is the power of God, a power that is shown
first and foremost in the mercy shown towards the weakness of those entrusted
with such a service. But here, punctually, is the reflection of the foolishness
of the cross: "We have this treasure in clay vessels, to show that the
surpassing power belongs to God and not to us" (2 Cor 4:7). The contrast
between the clay and the treasure should not be understood in the sense of a
dualistic anthropology, but serves only to define the paradoxical greatness of
Christian life. The treasure of the Gospel, the treasure of the New Covenant
or, better still, the paschal mystery of the death and resurrection of Jesus
(cf. 2 Cor 4:10) is in fact entrusted to man, a weak and fragile creature: in
our mortal flesh we are called to manifest the life of Jesus, full and
authentic life, divine life! Paul seems to testify to this unspeakable truth
when he confesses: "I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I
who live, but Christ who lives in me... I bear the marks of Jesus on my
body" (Gal 2:19-20; 6:17).
But in various other passages the New Testament loves to
evoke the "Gospel of Jesus Christ" (Mk 1:1; cf. Rom 16:25; 2 Thess
1:8), the "mystery of the kingdom of God" delivered by Jesus to
believers (Mk 4:11), with the expressions "precious pearl" (Mt
13:46), "treasure in the field" (Mt 13:44), and it is pleased to
define faith as "much more precious than gold" (1 Pt 1:7), since
"in Christ are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge" (Col
2:3). This is the treasure that the Christian carries in his clay vessel! And
the mature Christian is precisely the one who is aware, on the one hand, of the
treasure entrusted to him and, on the other, of his own weakness (Pauline
language); he is the one who is aware of being a stranger and pilgrim on earth,
but at the same time is inhabited by the hope of eternal life (Petrine
language: cf. 1Pt 2:11 and 1Pt 3:15).
It is necessary, however, to understand well the meaning of
this weakness. Of course, if man is even minimally attentive to the plot of his
daily life, experience is merciless in showing him his weak and fragile nature,
the constant temptation to fall into the slavery of sin, that is, of what is
opposed to full life and fraternal communion. This is what is expressed
lapidarily by Paul: "I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not
want" (Rom 7:19). However, we must be careful not to understand this weakness
as a synonym for low human quality, often masked under the guise of religious
virtue. Dietrich Bonhoeffer warns against all this:
Religious people speak of God when human knowledge … has
reached its end or when human strength fails – and in fact what they call into
play is always the deus ex machina , as a fictitious solution to
insoluble problems, or as strength in the face of human failure; therefore
always exploiting human weakness or in the face of human limits … I would like
to speak of God not at the limits, but at the centre, not in weaknesses, but in
strength, therefore not in relation to death and guilt, but in the life and good
of man … Jesus never questioned the health, strength, happiness of a man as
such, nor did he consider them as rotten fruits: why else would he have healed
the sick, given strength back to the weak? Jesus claims for himself and for the
kingdom of God human life in its entirety and in all its manifestations (D.
Bonhoeffer, Resistenza e resa , Cinisello Balsamo 1988, pp.
350-351.417).
In other words, the Christian is called to live a full life,
a beautiful, good and blessed life like that of Jesus Christ, and to do this
without trusting in himself with a foolish and arrogant self-sufficiency – only
to then return to God in moments of anguish and need! –, but only in the grace
and ever-preventing love of God. Ultimately, it is a question of obeying a
precise word of Jesus: "If anyone would come after me, let him deny
himself and take up his cross daily and follow me" (Lk 9:23; cf. Mt 16:24;
Mk 8:34). There is no need to try in vain to choose a "cross" for
oneself: it is life itself that provides, from time to time, the one peculiar
to each of us. They are the limits inherent in one's family history, in one's
body, in one's psyche, they are the inevitable contradictions in human
relationships, up to the exhausting and decisive struggle that awaits us: to
make the enigma of death a mystery that, illuminated by the Crucifix, reveals
the meaning of meaning, the call of man to resurrection and eternal life.
We and the Crucifix
There will surely come days when we will feel this weakness
as a contradiction, and we may even ask God to take it away from us, but he
will also respond to us, as he did to Paul: "My grace is sufficient for
you, for my power is made perfect in weakness" (2 Cor 12:9). Here, the
weakness chosen by God to reveal and bring about salvation (cf. 1 Cor 1:27) is
the instrument favored by God himself to manifest his action in the Christian.
It must be understood by the believer in the light of the prevenient gift ("If
you knew the gift of God...": Jn 4:10) and in the awareness of the
treasure that is contained in it. Only in this way can it be read and accepted
as a "blessed" and "welcome" weakness, as Bernard of
Clairvaux boldly affirms:
O blessed weakness ( optanda infirmitas ), filled by
the power of Christ… The ignominy of the cross is pleasing to those who are not
ungrateful towards the Crucified One ( Discourses on the Song of Songs 25,7.8).
Yes, the cross is a scandal and folly, but the Christian is asked only not to
contradict it, but to accept that, through it, the power of God, the power of
the Crucified and Risen One, works in his life!
Conclusion
The cross itself, the most terrible and humiliating symbol
known within Roman society, by welcoming Jesus Christ, has become the
culminating point of God's history of salvation with humanity, the event in
which the definitive revelation of the face of God occurs: truly the cross is
theological! The cross is the sign of God's unlimited responsibility towards
sinful humanity. In the Son Jesus Christ, just and innocent, it is God himself
who on the cross takes on the consequences of the sins committed by humanity
and submits to the punishment reserved for sinners. This gratuitousness to the
extreme, this "madness" (1 Cor 1:18, 23, 25) which can only be
explained by an excess of love, then becomes what allows us to glimpse in the
cross the radical meaning of the believer's human existence as a responsible
existence.
The Crucifix reminds us of love for others to the point of
giving one's life: the cross is the fulfillment of Christ's love for his
disciples and for all humanity (cf. Jn 13:1); the cross is the fulfillment of
the Son's obedience to the Father (cf. Mk 14:35-36); the cross is the
fulfillment of the freedom of Christ who lays down his own life (cf. Jn
10:17-18). Yes, the cross is fulfillment more than an end: it is the
fulfillment of an existence lived in love, in obedience and in freedom, of a
life of faith as a responsible life, before God and before men.
Well, on the cross Jesus was the man who took on the
sufferings of his brothers, the man who did not defend himself by responding
with violence to the violence inflicted on him, but spent his life for others,
offering himself "unto death, even death on a cross" (Phil 2:8).
in this death which in the eyes of the world is a defeat
consists the victory of the love of Jesus, the Servant of the crucified Lord,
"victorious because victim" (Augustine, Confessions 10,43).
We place before us a representation of Your passion so that
our eyes of flesh have something to cling to. But they do not worship an image
because the image refers to the reality of Your passion. For when we look more
attentively at the image of Your passion, in the silence we seem to hear Your
voice saying: This is how I have loved you, I have loved you to the end.
( Meditative prayers 10,7)
Donatello's Crucifixes certainly tell of a suffering Christ,
with his head bowed in very human pain... His mouth, however, is open and emits
the Spirit. "It is finished!" are the last words of the Crucifix in
the Gospel according to John. And the evangelist continues: "He bowed his
head and poured out the Spirit". Mark, Matthew and Luke say "he bowed
his head and died and expired"; John instead specifies "he handed
over and poured out the Spirit". That Spirit who inhabited him, the Holy
Spirit, who had presided over his conception in the womb of the Virgin Mary,
who had descended upon him at the moment of his Baptism... With his death,
Jesus pours it out over the entire universe, over the entire earth. Pentecost
for John is under the Cross!
Standing under Donatello's cross is to remember that we were
also under the Cross and that the Spirit that Jesus emitted from his mouth is
the Holy Spirit who forgives the sins of all men (" ipse remissio
omnium peccatorum ", a liturgical text says). That same Spirit in
whose power God resurrected Jesus, revives the entire Church and all humanity.
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