In John's Gospel, Jesus dies asking for something to drink: “I thirst” (Jn 19:28), whereas the Synoptic Gospels recount his death with this cry: “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?”, in which the whole drama of his earthly life is condensed.
Today, as throughout history, this cry is passing through the lives of so many people who find themselves living through this very station: alone, desperate, without an answer to their pain… and God is silent, just as he was silent during the great events that shook the earth and our continent in the last century. Why does God remain silent in the face of the suffering of his Son and his children? God remains silent, we might say, so as not to prevent his Word from becoming the full and definitive incarnation of his loving will for humanity; the Father suffers with the Son, but at the same time he knows and sees that the Son is carrying out his mission. If we understand the Father's silence in this way, a prayer rises from the heart that many people may be sustained in their suffering by this gaze of the Father, so austere and yet so gentle, who sometimes does not caress his children simply because he knows they are managing to endure.
Then there is a second cry that Jesus utters after the Father's silence; it is so powerful that it tears the veil of the Temple in Jerusalem. The message conveyed by the tearing of this symbol is very powerful: God's presence, his Word, is no longer in the Ark; it is in Christ's body. It is there that all the glory of God is visibly revealed; all of the God whom we “fear” and do not know is now fully visible in the flesh of the Son who is allowing himself to die out of love. We could say that the Father was a perfect director, because he knew how to open the curtain at the right moment, when both suspicion and fear of him necessarily had to collapse before such a great sign of love.
To cry out means to confess, even dramatically, the hope that life can once again prevail over death. It is curious that we enter life with a cry and leave it with a cry, sometimes silent, sometimes real, and these are the two necessary acts of protest when the scene suddenly changes. The second cry is like this: God violently “casts us out” of the scene of this world, and we cry because we do not know exactly how or when we might come to know a new life; so we find ourselves facing two absolutely necessary cries. Jesus, dying in this silence of the Father, who respects his Son’s freedom to the very end, shows us that suffering can be faced with love.
In this sense, seeing Jesus die on the cross educates us; it is like dew that envelops us in moments of suffering, because it is that silent cry that tells us: «Do not be afraid, I have done it, and you will do it too; and after this passage we will be children together before the Father».
The death of Jesus forces us to abandon the idea of an almighty God, as we would like to imagine him. God is almighty, but in love, and love never prevents the other from exercising their freedom, even when that freedom turns against them.
The death of Jesus reminds us that there is great hope for every suffering, both our own and that of all the people we carry in our hearts. Moreover, it teaches us that even moments of suffering, when we feel we are simply fading away and losing everything, are actually the moments that reveal our great dignity as men and women created in the image of the Son of God, and therefore capable not only of making choices in life, but of carrying them through to completion, even when this leads us to have to die to what we had imagined, to what we had thought or hoped for, to what we had chosen, knowing that our freedom is the greatest gift God has given us and that through this freedom we can continue to love, even in the most difficult moments (from the meditation by Fr. Roberto Pasolini at the twelfth station, in “The Way of the Cross. The Most Precious Gift”).
