Pope Francis presides over Palm Sunday Mass in St Peter’s Square. He used Jesus’ words on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” “The Abandoned ‘Christ'”.
(Vatican News Network)At 10 o’clock in the morning on Sunday, April 2, St. Peter’s Square was crowded with about 60,000 believers participating in the grand procession of palm branches and the Eucharist Mass presided over by Pope Francis. Previously, the Pope left Gemelli General Hospital on the morning of April 1 after staying in the hospital for three days due to bronchitis, returned to the Vatican, and presided over the liturgical activities as scheduled on Sunday.
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
In the liturgy of Palm Sunday, the Church commemorates the last journey of Christ’s mortal life until his death. What Jesus said on the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.” This makes us feel the unspeakable pain he suffered on the cross. The pope began his homily with these words of Jesus. He pointed out that Jesus endured great physical and spiritual suffering, from scourging to crucifixion; being betrayed, ridiculed and his disciples fleeing.
“Look, this is heart-wrenching pain, spiritual pain: in the most tragic moment, Jesus experienced God’s abandonment. … It is what it is. This is extreme derogation, it is He who The abandonment of the father, the abandonment of God. The Lord came to suffer for our love, so that we cannot understand. It is really not easy to understand this moment… He sees the closed sky, experiences the most painful edge of life, the end of life. Destruction, the collapse of all certainties: he cries out the ultimate ‘why’.”
Jesus experienced the abyss of pain that God was far from, but it did not end
The pope went on to explain that the biblical verb to abandon “appears in moments of extreme pain”, “in the most extreme tearing of relationships”. Jesus carried all the sins of the world on his cross and finally “experienced what he never had before, that is God’s far away. He did it for us, to be always by our side, not to let us feel alone …all of this today is “not a show”.
“He did it for me and for you, because when I, you or anyone else is cornered, it’s sad to see yourself stuck in a dead end, to see yourself lost in a dead end, trapped in a dead end,” the Pope said. The abyss of abandonment, suffocating in the vortex of ‘why’s, and no answer, there is a glimmer of hope. He is for you and for me. This suffering is not over, because Jesus was there, and now This moment is with you: He endured the sense of alienation, in order to receive in His love all our alienation. Thus, each of us can say: In how many times I have fallen, in my sorrow , when I feel betrayed or betrayed by others; abandoned or abandoned by others; abandoned or abandoned by others, we should think: He was abandoned, betrayed, abandoned. Here we find Him.”
The love of Christ prompts us to care for the discarded today
Hope is born out of suffering. On the cross, Jesus did not succumb to despair, he cried out for abandonment, but immediately entrusted himself to the Father. He “continued to love those whom he loved,” and he forgave those who crucified him. God’s love, manifested in the rejected Jesus, is able to “turn our hearts of stone” and move us to seek him and love him in those who have been rejected. The Pope also mentioned a homeless man who died a few months ago under the colonnade in St. Peter’s Square.
“Brothers and sisters,” said the Pope, “today there are many ‘Christs who were rejected’. There are places where people are exploited entirely and left to fend for themselves; there are poor people who live at our crossroads and we do not have the courage to confront them.” eye contact; some immigrants no longer have faces, but become figures; rejected prisoners, seen as ‘troublesome’ figures. But there are also many invisible, hidden ‘abandoned Christs’: the unborn Children, lonely old people who may be your father, maybe your mother, grandpa, grandma…, the unvisited sick, neglected disabled, and young people who feel so empty inside, no one really Listen to their cries of pain. They have no choice but to commit suicide. This is the abandoned, the abandoned ‘Christ’ of today.”
Pray for the grace to recognize Jesus in the forsaken
So the rejected Jesus makes a request to us not to leave anyone alone, not to exclude anyone, because the rejected and lonely are his “portrait of life”. Finally, the Pope invited all those who attended the ceremony to reflect together, saying: “Today let us ask for this grace: to know how to love the rejected Jesus, to know how to love Jesus in every rejected person. Let us Pray for the grace to see and recognize the Lord who still cries out to the forsaken. Let us not let his voice be silenced in the din of indifference. God does not leave us alone; let us take care of those who are alone. people.”
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