Tercer Domingo de Pascua

EN MI NOMBRE, NO

¡Pobres Pedro, Tomás, Natanael, Juan, Santiago y los otros dos discípulos del Señor! Toda la noche trabajando, peleando con el frío y con las olas, remando impacientes en todas las direcciones, y, al final, cuando llegó el alba, ¡nada!, las manos y las redes vacías. Ellos eran pescadores expertos y conocían metro a metro los caladeros y profundidades donde se escondían los peces del lago de Tiberíades. ¿Qué podía haber pasado? No lo entendían. Y ahora, cuando ya estaban dispuestos a abandonar, llega un desconocido y les dice que echen las redes a la derecha y que encontrarán peces grandes y en cantidad. ¡Valiente consejo! A la derecha y a la izquierda han echado ya ellos la red durante toda la noche cientos de veces. ¿En nombre y a santo de quién van a echar la red precisamente ahora, cuando ya ha amanecido, en ese lugar donde ya lo han intentado, fatigosamente y sin éxito, tantas veces? En fin, dirá Pedro, si ustedes quieren que hagamos caso a este desconocido y que sigamos remando y peleando con las olas, podemos volver a intentarlo, pero por mí y en mi nombre desde luego no lo haríamos. En su nombre, tal vez…

Pero, en fin, después de todo, ellos son buena gente y no tienen motivos para desconfiar de este extraño que parece tan bien intencionado. En nombre de ellos no lo harían, pero en nombre de esta persona que parece tan bien intencionada lo intentarán de nuevo. ¡Y la red se llenó de grandes peces! ¡Es el Señor! dijo el discípulo que más amaba. Lo que a nosotros nos parecía imposible, lo que nunca hubiéramos conseguido con nuestras solas fuerzas, lo hemos conseguido con la ayuda del Señor. ¡Es el Señor quien lo ha hecho, ha sido un milagro patente! La confianza en el Señor nos ha salvado. Qué peligroso es, debió pensar Pedro, fiarse sólo de uno mismo y querer hacer todas las cosas en nombre propio. El orgullo, la vanidad, el egoísmo se meten fácilmente entre las rendijas del alma y nos empujan a caminar en dirección equivocada.

Y Jesús tomó el pan y se lo dio, y lo mismo el pescado. Seguro que estos expertos pescadores y humildes discípulos se acordaron entonces de la última cena que habían celebrado con el Maestro y del relato que les habían contado los dos discípulos que se dirigían a Emaús. También ellos, ahora, habían reconocido al Maestro y estaban seguros que era el Señor. También ellos le habían reconocido al partir el pan. En adelante se fiarían siempre del Señor y, en nombre del Señor, repartirían siempre el pan de la palabra y el pan de vida. Querían convertirse en pescadores de hombres, en apóstoles, enviados, del único Maestro al que habían escuchado palabras de vida eterna. En nombre propio podían conseguir muy poco, pero en nombre del Señor iban a conseguirlo todo.

No iba a ser fácil para ellos recorrer todo el camino por el que ahora habían comenzado a caminar. La incomprensión y la hostilidad del mundo en el que se movían tratarían de aplastar sus mejores propósitos. Pero ellos lo tenían muy claro: debían obedecer a Dios antes que a los hombres. No a cualquier dios, sino únicamente al Dios al que ellos habían descubierto en el rostro y en la vida del Maestro; sí, a un Dios de vida, de verdad y de amor. Y si tenían que padecer, o incluso morir, por el nombre de Jesús, ellos estarían siempre contentos de haber merecido aquel ultraje.

Pidamos al Señor resucitado para que nuestras vidas sean modelos a seguir como cristianos auténticos y que sea guiada no en nuestro nombre pero si en el nombre del Dios de la Vida, Verdad y Amor.

Reynaldo Rodrigo Román Díaz. SVD

Segundo Domingo de Pascua

APRENDIENDO DE TOMAS

Hace tiempo tuve la oportunidad de asistir a una exposición de la obra pictórica de Caravaggio. Y de entre todos los cuadros, verdaderamente geniales, recuerdo uno que me llamó mucho la atención: la profesión de fe del apóstol Tomás ante Cristo resucitado. Nuestro Señor, vuelto a la vida después del Viernes Santo, se aparece en el Cenáculo a sus discípulos, con los signos evidentes de la crucifixión en sus manos y en sus pies. Y en esta pintura, Jesús resucitado muestra a Tomás su costado abierto por la lanza del soldado, invitándolo a meter su mano en el pecho traspasado. El apóstol, totalmente fuera de sí, acerca su dedo y su mirada confundida para contemplar de cerca las señales de la pasión de su Maestro y comprobar, de esta manera, la veracidad de su resurrección.

Personalmente, cuando yo leo el Evangelio de este domingo, me parece excesiva y empedernida la incredulidad de Tomás: “Si no veo en sus manos la señal de los clavos –dice—, ni no meto el dedo en el agujero de los clavos y no meto la mano en su costado, no creeré”. ¡Demasiadas condiciones y exigencias para dar el paso de la fe!

Y, sin embargo, nuestro Señor, con su infinita bondad y comprensión, como siempre, condesciende con su apóstol incrédulo. Él no estaba obligado a complacer las exigencias y el capricho de su apóstol, pero lo hace para darle más elementos para creer. Le presenta las manos, los pies, el costado, y permite incluso que meta su dedo en la herida de su corazón. ¡A ver si así termina de convencerse! Ante la evidencia de los signos y la gran misericordia de su Maestro, Tomás queda rendido y conquistado, y concluye con una hermosísima profesión de fe, proclamando la divinidad de Jesús: “¡Señor mío y Dios mío!”.

Esta fe, aunque grandiosa en su profesión, está muy lejos de ser perfecta, al haber sido precedida de tantas evidencias. Pero el Señor acepta, igualmente, su acto de fe y aprovecha para felicitar y bendecir a todos aquellos que creerían en Él sin haberlo visto.

Nosotros, como Tomás, somos duros, pragmáticos, rebeldes. Tomás es un perfecto representante del hombre de nuestro tiempo. De todos los tiempos. De cada uno de nosotros. ¡Cuántas pruebas exigimos para creer! ¡Cuántas resistencias interiores y cuánto empedernimiento antes de doblegar nuestra cabeza y nuestro corazón ante nuestro Señor! Exigimos tener todas las pruebas y evidencias en la mano para dar un paso hacia adelante. Si no, como Tomás, ¡no creemos! Como se dice vulgarmente, “no damos un paso sin huarache”.

Creemos a nuestros padres porque son nuestros padres y porque sabemos que ellos no nos pueden engañar; creemos al médico en el diagnóstico de una enfermedad, aun cuando no estamos seguros de que acertará; creemos a los científicos o a los investigadores porque saben más que nosotros y respetamos su competencia respectiva, aunque muchas veces se equivocan. Y, sin embargo, nos sentimos con el derecho y la desfachatez de oponernos a Dios cuando no entendemos por qué Él hace las cosas de un determinado modo… ¿Verdad que somos ridículos y tontos?

Nosotros nos comportamos muchas veces como el bueno de Tomás. Tal vez su incredulidad y escepticismo eran fruto de la crisis tan profunda en la que había caído. ¡En sólo tres días habían ocurrido cosas tan trágicas, tan duras y contradictorias que le habían destrozado totalmente el alma! Su Maestro había sido arrestado, condenado a muerte, maltratado de una manera bestial, colgado de una cruz y asesinado. Y ahora le vienen con que ha resucitado… ¡Demasiado bello para ser verdad! Seguramente habría pensado que con esas cosas no se juega y les pide que lo dejen en paz. Había sido tan amarga su desilusión como para dar crédito a esas noticias que le contaban ahora sus amigos…

A nosotros también nos pasa muchas veces lo mismo. Nos sentimos tan decepcionados, tan golpeados por la vida y tan desilusionados de las cosas como para creer que Cristo ha resucitado y realmente vive en nosotros. Nos parece una utopía, una ilusión fantástica o un sueño demasiado bonito para que sea verdad. Y, como Tomás, exigimos también nosotros demasiadas pruebas para creer.

Nuestra incredulidad es también fruto de la mentalidad materialista, mecanicista y fatuamente cientificista de la educación técnica y pragmática del mundo moderno, que se resiste a todo lo que no es empíricamente verificable. Exactamente igual que Tomás.

Pero la fe es, por definición, creer lo que no vemos y dar el libre asentimiento de nuestra mente, de nuestro corazón y de nuestra voluntad, a la palabra de Dios y a las promesas de Cristo, aun sin ver nada, confiados sólo en la autoridad de Dios, que nos revela su misterio de salvación. Esto nos enseña el Catecismo de la Iglesia Católica. Es lo que aprendimos desde niños. Es lo que nos dice también el capítulo 11 de la carta a los Hebreos. Y, sin embargo, ¡cuánto nos cuesta a veces confiar en Cristo sin condiciones!

Pero sólo Cristo resucitado tiene palabras de vida eterna y el poder de darnos esa vida eterna que nos promete. ¡Porque es Dios verdadero y para Él no hay nada imposible!

Acordémonos, pues, del apóstol Tomás y de la promesa de Cristo: “Dichosos los que crean sin haber visto”. La fe es un don de Dios que transforma totalmente la existencia y la visión de las cosas. Pidámosle, pues, a nuestro Señor que nos conceda la gracia de ser dignos de esa bienaventuranza. Con la fe, nuestra vida será inmensamente dichosa, serena, sencilla y feliz. ¡Con Cristo resucitado!

Reynaldo Rodrigo Roman-Diaz.SVD

EASTER SUNDAY

MAKING THE LEAP OF FAITH

We sometimes envy the apostles and the first disciples. We are convinced that they had an advantage over all later Christians because they were actually present at the events related in the gospels. They saw the risen Jesus with their own eyes, and touched him with their hands. Therefore, faith was easy for them. And we are convinced that it would be easy for us too if only we could see Jesus personally, as the apostles did, or if only we could see for the ourselves the miracles he performed, as the first disciples did.

Yes, the first disciples had the advantage of seeing Jesus with their own eyes. But did that make faith any easier for them? When they looked at Jesus what did they see? They did not and could not have seen God, for God is not immediately visible and knowable. In Jesus they saw a human being ostensibly like themselves. But to go from there to believe that he was the Son of God required a huge act of faith.

This account for the fact that there were many who heard Jesus speak and saw him act, who did not believe in him. Even the apostles themselves, who had been with him from the beginning, are shown to be slow to believe. Seeing is not necessarily believing. The shock caused by his passion and death on the cross was so great that the disciples were slow to believe in the news of the resurrection. When Jesus appeared to them on Easter evening, he rebuked them for their unbelief and hardness of heart, because they had not believed those who saw him after he had risen.

Where does all this leave us? We can´t see Jesus the way the apostles saw him. We can´t be present in the upper room going over the evening of Holy Week when Jesus drops in. we can´t put our finger in the wounds of Jesus. We can´t look into his face and say, my “Lord, and my God. We must live by faith, not by sight. Yet if we would believe in Jesus we must see him somehow. But just how many people like us see Jesus? What must we do in order to believe?

We are disciples at the second hand. For the disciple at the second hand, things are harder in some ways, but easier in others. Things are harder because twenty centuries have gone since Jesus walked the earth. A lot of dust has gathered. The light has dimmed. But on the positive sight, the notion that the Son of God walked the earth has become “naturalized” over time and so in some ways has become easier to believe. But at the end of this day, all disciples are essentially equal- all have to make the leap of faith. We become disciples through faith.

The friends of Jesus saw him and heard him only a few times after that Easter day, but their lives were completely changed. And by sharing their faith our lives will change too. We are able to travel in hope because we know that good will triumph over evil and life will triumph over death, because Jesus is risen.

Reynaldo Rodrigo Roman-Diaz.

GOOD FRIDAY

Through the 1980s there was a famous Catholic Japanese novelist, Shusaku Endo. One of his most famous books was simply called, Silence. It chronicled the life of Father Sebastian Rodrigues, a Jesuit missionary from Portugal who embarked for Japan in 1637 with two other companions. Throughout his time in Japan Rodrigues struggles not only to come to terms with the evil and the suffering that he encounters but also his experience of God as apparently as inactive and disinterested. God is silent.

For the novelist, Shusaku Endo, the silence of God is expressed in two ways. The characters experience a sense of despair at the thought of enduring their suffering without God, and, as such, without purpose. But for Endo the characters in the novel, precisely in their questions, at times desperate, are being slowly drawn into the very nature of God as silent. Of the nature of this silence,the writer,Karl Rahner has said,
Our existence is embraced by an ineffable mystery whom we call God. We can exclude him from our day-to-day awareness by the concerns and activity of our daily life; we can drown the all pervading silence of this mystery . . . This ultimate mystery at the root of reality and of our lives is nameless, impenetrable . . .

The journey of Rodrigues is the journey that all of us are drawn into at some level. Our questions rise up from the depth of our experiences and we search for the answers and none come. In the midst of our hurts, our failures, our griefs we wonder, often with great angst, at the meaning of suffering and none is given. Sometimes the silence to our questions becomes all too great, and the silence seems to condemn us and it turns us against even ourselves. It becomes a weight too great for us to bear and it appears that we are left accused by our questions, our struggle to understand, and our failed hopes.

All of us at some stage of our life must meet the silence of God, and we must determine in the silence of our own hearts whether this silence is one of condemnation or one of invitation. Perhaps this is the moment of greatest spiritual crisis that each of us will face in our life. It is the crisis that we bring to mind each Good Friday. It is the crisis that Jesus himself knew. As the theologian Johann Metz declares,
I will describe it tentatively here as a mysticism of suffering unto God. It is found particularly in Israel’s prayer traditions: in the Psalms, in Job, in Lamentations, and last but not least in many passages in the prophetic books. This language of prayer is itself a language of suffering, a language of crisis, a language of affliction and of radical danger, a language of complaint and grieving, a language of crying out and, literally, of the grumbling of the children of Israel. The language of this God-mysticism is not first and foremost one of consoling answers for the suffering one is experiencing, but rather much more a language of passionate questions from the midst of suffering, questions turned toward God, full of highly charged expectation. . . . What occurs in this language is not the repression but rather the acceptance of fear, mourning and pain; it is deeply rooted in the figure of the night, the experience of the soul’s demise. It is less a song of the soul, more a loud crying out from the depths – and not a vague, undirected wailing, but a focused crying-out-to. Jesus’ [own] God-mysticism is also a part of this tradition.

On this day we bring to mind the way in which the fundamental human crisis is played out in the story of Jesus himself.

We also bring to mind how this crisis is resolved in Jesus. For Jesus, as does Rodriguez in Endo’s novel, discovers deep within himself that the very silence of God that he encounters in the depths of his questions is a silence full of invitation and embrace. Rodriguez moves from experiencing an absent God to a God who speaks in the silence and who is that ‘Silence.’

How might we ourselves understand this same resolution in which absence is transformed into presence? Perhaps these words again of the writer Karl Rahner, help us when he says,
If, however, we find the sudden courage still to speak our You into this darkness in hope and trust, if we do this again and again, if we make no arrogant demand that our call into this silent darkness should receive an immediate, particular answer which simply overwhelms us instead of being the soft and silently saving presence of this mystery, we notice that can say You to God, trusting and so waiting for the moment when the mystery of our existence will show his face unveiled as everlasting love, which is an eternal You to You.

Then, we find that, “God is the silence in which we belong, the silence in which every voice is heard, all wounds are healed and all our times have a future.” In other words, the silence of God is full of invitation. It is the silence that speaks to us. And we discover that the silence is a home, full of life, and not a tomb for us. The silence had become a sign of intimacy rather than of isolation.

To realise this also helps us re-orient where we look for God. To look for God in the most powerful of places and in the most obvious of places is at times to miss God and to be deaf to the way in which he speaks to us. When we accept the silence of God, and no longer fight against it, but discover there the source of our invitation to trust and hope, the means of our intimacy with God, then God speaks to us in such diverse ways all around us.

As Rodrigues says at the end of Shusako Endo’s novel,
Even now I am the last priest in the land. But our Lord was not silent. Even if he had been silent, my life until this day would have spoken of him.

So, too, does not Jesus life –a self emptying become a self-giving - not speak of the nature of God’s own silence that characterises the experience of this day?

HOLY THURSDAY. THE LAST SUPPER

HOLY THURSDAY

Throughout the 20^th century worked the famous anthropologist Margaret Mead. She was born in Philadelphia in 1901 and lived through until 1978. It is hard to imagine another anthropologist who has taught us as much about the nature of human community. Of her it was written,

As an anthropologist, Mead had been trained to think in terms of the interconnection of all aspects of human life. The production of food cannot be separated from ritual and belief, and politics cannot be separated from childrearing or art. This holistic understanding of human adaptation allowed Mead to speak out on a very wide range of issues. She affirmed the possibility of learning from other groups, above all by applying the knowledge she brought back from the field to issues of modern life. Thus, she insisted that human diversity is a resource, not a handicap, that all human beings have the capacity to learn from and teach each other. Her delight in learning from others showed in the way she was able to address the public with affection and respect.

Mead was once asked what sign we had about when civilisation began. The expectation was that her reply would concern the discovery of some ancient artefact such as a tool, or a weapon, or a segment of art. Instead, she simply replied, “a healed femur.”

A healed femur bone is the sign we have of the beginnings of civilisation. Why did Mead claim this? She claimed this because for the first time we had an indication that a community had cared for someone. Previously, there would be no evidence of a healed femur, for the person who had experienced a broken femur would be left to die. There comes a point in human history, however, when someone with a broken femur is cared for. Since a broken femur takes many months to heal, the person whose healed bone was discovered would have been cared for consistently for a good length of time. Their every need would have required attention. For Margaret Mead the indication of this attention was the sure sign of the beginning of human civilisation. Human civilisation begins as the culture of care is evidenced, a culture in which human beings give themselves over to one another in care for each other.

If this be so for human civilisation, then the divine civilisation, itself, becomes apparent on this evening. It does not begin on this evening but it is given its greatest transparency. It is given its truest indication and we left the surest fossil of its realisation, so to speak. Divine civilisation becomes apparent in the simple gesture of Jesus own care of his friends. He washes their feet. In Jesus, God becomes absorbed in service of us and in his attention to the most humble part of ourselves.

God is attention without distraction, declared the great mystic of the 1940s, Simone Weil.[1] The divine civilisation, revealed and enacted in Jesus, attends to us. God attends to us in all that we consider all too-human for him to become involved in

· The ambiguous ways in which we search for love in our life;

· The uncertainties we have about our identity and our future

· The angst that consumes us about our children and that keeps us awake at night.

· Our fears about our partners and how we can maintain them in the bonds of relationship

· In the helplessness we feel in the face of the demise of someone we love but feel powerless to assist.

· In the memories that haunt us

· In the failures and mistakes of our life that continue to subvert our best aspirations

· In our struggle to believe, to hope and to trust.

If Jesus washes the feet of his friends, these are the experiences with which he involves himself. It is to these experiences of our life, and more, that he attends. As he says to Peter, he says to us, “if I do not find you there in those experiences in which you discover the weight of your humanity, you cannot understand me.”

As God washes our feet, we wash each others. For Simone Weil “compassion consists in paying attention the one who is afflicted and identifying oneself with [them] in thought.” For Weil, attention is the key that opens the door to compassion for those suffering, "Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention” Human attention means “giving to those who have been stripped of their humanity an existence apart from their affliction. It is an action requiring considerable sensitivity, courage and sacrifice--a detachment from self and complete focus on the other person. It is what was required millennia ago to heal a broken femur.

As it is with us so too it is with God himself in Jesus. In other words human civilisation begins when it starts to mirror the divine civilisation as disclosed in the story of this evening. May the divine civilization of attention, care and involvement that we celebrate this evening as God in Jesus washes us and feeds us in the starkness of our humanity, become the model of what constructs our human civilisation.

For in the story of this night divine civilisation and human civilisation have become united.

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