No
one can ever put you in writing my Lord. You inscribed the universe with your
blood. Your blood alone was the Word, the utterance, through which we came to
discover that the uniqueness of God is that He loves. We yearn to you because of
that freedom, through which you abolished slavery from the nature of religion,
proclaiming us as your beloved, and that we may dare to call upon your Father
since you made us your house's own.
You utter your
Father's hidden depths—you translate these depths from which spring all His
kindness and flows into the deepness of suffering—to the valleys of despair of
all the multitudes of sinners; enabling the mercifulness of your Father, to take
hold of our eyes that we may perceive the final Truth: that God has sent you to
proclaim Him nailed to the Cross; to announce Him in what is seemingly His
weakness.
You refused to
descend from the Cross, because if you did it, people will have continued to
believe that God shall give them another sign from heaven—but you did not want
for them another sign other than this: Yourself hang up on the tree. In this
manner of death, you entered the game the devil perceived for you, as he thought
he would annihilate you by death—his domain. He did not envision that one person
could lay himself voluntarily to die for love, and that love alone can conquer
death.
No poet in the
entire world is able to compose a comparable love poem to the one you wrote with
your sufferings and blood. Before your birth, it was said to the humanity that
lived to the south of our country that they were God's beloved. But people did
not believe, or they could not believe, because they were crushed under the yoke
of misery—the misery of their sins. They did not imagine that God is able to
lift up the weights that burden their souls.
All humans
knew that God is capable of quaking the world, and subduing wild creatures to
them; however, none of them did know, really and precisely, that he is God's
beloved one and that he is qualified, through this compassion, to become
superior to the universe and to all its natural elements.
***
O Jesus of
Nazareth, if a moment of intellectual exercise permitted me to think about you
regardless of my faith in you, I would then tell the people who study the
civilizations, that no one before you, nor after you, nor by your sides has
spoken of love the way you spoke of it. Their words were mere ethical
recommendations or, in its best, closer to poetry. You said: "a new commandment
I give to you, that you love one another as I loved you." We may collect from
the Dialogues of Plato and the affableness of Pluto something resembling love.
And one can find something relating to love in the myths of the Ancient East.
You may not be, my Lord, a renovator in the complete sense of the word, despite
the fact that I don't know anyone who spoke with such impulse and universality,
in old religious or poetical literature, as you spoke. However this is not the
greatest. The greatest is that you said: "as I loved you"—that is I loved you to
the end, to death. Above and superior to all of that is that you revealed your
love to mankind in the reality of your flesh and blood. I don't know of any
person who did not have a little or great chasm between his words and deeds. Let
us take for instance the "Way" you founded which your enemies spitefully called
its followers "Christians" in Antioch. I have studied the biography of your
great followers and have read their works very well—they are all small if
compared to you. All the saints are small. The only group that draws the closest
to you, near enough until the persistence of my tears, is the group of martyrs.
You alone in the whole history of humanity, none of your enemies who wrote books
against you since the Roman age until the age of Enlightenment and beyond, none
of them could see any separation between what you have taught your disciples and
what you lived.
In the texts
of your gospels, the Sermon on the Mount according to Mathew and Luke and the
Farewell Address according to John are two culminating peaks, no one can remain
the same person after reading it thoughtfully. However, the study of other
texts, here and there, reveals that the whole of your Gospel may not be
spiritually greater than other books. There are pages of religious thought,
before and after you, more eloquent and more intelligent than that what you
said. In this world there shines some breathtaking sentimental pieces not found
in the same strength in your Gospel. People are drunken fuddled with the magical
eloquence of language and of verses falling upon them like meteorites. However,
it is not in this manner that your Gospel is read. All of it, from its Alpha to
its Omega, is related to the blood you shed on the cross. You did not seek after
the eloquence of speech for you were a carpenter and from a circle of fishermen.
The beauty of sparkling words was not your concern. There is nothing that shows
that you have mastered the eloquence of speech, for if people came to you
because of its action on them, then they have failed to attain God hidden
between your flesh and bones.
***
Love, my
Master, is God's power alone. You brought love down to people's level enabling
them to participate in it through your compassion. There are many aspects of
love; but what mostly strikes me, the writer of this article, is that love is
the thrust of forgiveness. You forgave the Jews for they did not know what they
were doing. You ask from your followers much more, for you want them to forgive
those who actively harm them and continuously plan to hurt and to falsely accuse
them. You teach me: "this person who deliberately works on destroying you and
your plans for no other reason than that his soul is evil—this same one you must
forgive him for no other reason, or request from him or you, than that you want
him to become one of the children of the Kingdom—to become greater than you are
today and in the future, because the Kingdom is for all the children of God and
is open to all the thieves and murderers because they too must be your beloved,
and because I may be one of them knowingly or unknowingly." To endlessly
forgive, and to not take into account what is called dignity, which is vain
glory—is, I vow to my life, what mostly attracts me towards you—my Master, you
the Lord of the wounded hearts, wounded by the love of your kindness and
meekness.
O very sweet
Jesus, make your home in the hearts of the poor and beggars of the earth,
whether they know you or never have they heard of you. They are all yours
through your one love to them. Accompany, my Lord, the children who are
abandoned by their parents to all kind of iniquities. Calm down the weight of
terrible diseases. Heal the solitude of the afflicted. Be the harmony and unity
of the married and nurture their children. Take upon yourself these peoples, who
the civilized nations, call retarded—for they are the iris of your eye my Savior.
Assure the oppressed that you came to undo the oppression; that you are opposed
to the oppressor until he repents.
Wipe out O
Lord every tear from our eyes lest weeping comes to an end from the face of the
earth, lest the joy becomes resembling resurrection.