by Father Raniero Cantalamessa
Homily for Papal Household
Good Friday 2004
The following is an excerpt from the homily delivered on Good Friday at the Celebration of the Lord’s Passion by the Papal Household preacher, Capuchin Father Raniero Cantalamessa. The complete homily is available at http://www.zenit.org/article-9864?l=english.
The passion of Christ, described prophetically in the Deutero-Isaiah text [Isaiah 52:13-53:12] and historically in the Gospels in our present liturgy, has a special message for the times in which we are living. The message is: No to violence! The Servant committed no violent act and nevertheless all the violence of the world turned upon him. He was struck, pierced, ill-treated, crushed, condemned, torn from the land of the living and finally thrown into a common pit (“they gave him a grave with the wicked”).
Through all of this he did not open his mouth, he behaved like a gentle lamb led to the slaughter, he threatened no revenge, offering himself in expiation and interceding for those who were killing him: “Father, forgive them. They do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34).
That is how he overcame violence; he overcame it, not by confronting it with a greater violence, but by undergoing it, revealing the naked reality of all its injustice and futility. He brought about a new kind of victory — one that St. Augustine summed up in three words: “Victor quia victima”: victor because victim.[1]
The problem of violence is one that assails and scandalizes us today as it comes in new and fearsome forms, senseless and cruel, and invades even those areas that ought to be a remedy for violence: sport, art, family life. We Christians recoil with horror from the idea that one might resort to violence and kill in the name of God.
Some may object: But isn’t the Bible itself full of stories of violence? Isn’t God called “the Lord of hosts”? Doesn’t it say that he gave the order to impose the ban, to exterminate entire cities? Isn’t he the one who, in the Mosaic law, prescribes the death penalty in many cases?
If someone had put the same objection to Jesus during his life on earth, he would surely have answered in the same way as he answered the question about divorce: “It was because you were so hardhearted that Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but it was not like this from the beginning” (Matthew 19:8).
On the question of violence too, “it was not like this from the beginning.” The first chapter of Genesis shows us a world where the very idea of violence was unthinkable, not only in regard to relationships of human beings one with another, but even in regard to animals. It was not permissible to kill, not even to avenge the death of Abel (see Genesis 4:15).
What God really thinks is shown in the commandment, “You shall not kill,” rather than in the exceptions that the law makes, allowing them as concessions to the people’s hardness of heart. Violence was a facet of the life of those times, and in reflecting that life the Bible, in its lawmaking and even in dealing with punishment by death, tries at least to set limits to violence, to prevent it degenerating to a matter of mere personal decision.[2]
Paul speaks of a time when “sins went unpunished” because God “held his hand” (Romans 3:25). God put up with violence, as he put up with polygamy, divorce and other things, but all the while he was teaching the people, leading them toward the time when his original plan would again be put in place, restored to honor as by a new creation.
This time came when Jesus, on the mountain, proclaimed: “You have learnt how it was said: Eye for eye and tooth for tooth. But I say this to you: offer the wicked man no resistance. … If anyone hits you on the right cheek, offer him the other one as well. You have learnt how it was said: You must love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say this to you: love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:38-39;43-44).
God in Christ pronounces a definitive, commanding “No” to violence, and substitutes in its place not non-violence merely, but more: forgiveness, meekness, gentleness: “Learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart” (Matthew 11:29). Yet the true sermon on the mountain was not the one Jesus preached one day on a hillside in Galilee; it is the one he preaches now not with words but with deeds, from the cross, on Calvary hill.
If there is still violence, it cannot any longer, even in the remotest sense, claim to be of God or try to cloak itself with his authority. To do that is to drive the idea of God back to its primitive stages, which modern religious and civil conscience rejects. Better atheism than that. Better not to believe that there is a god at all than to believe in a god who would order us to kill innocents.
Nor is it possible to justify violence in the name of progress. “Violence,” someone has said, “is the midwife of history” (Marx and Engels). To some extent that is true. It is true that new and more just social orders are sometimes the outcome of revolutions and wars, but the contrary is also true: What results from them is injustice and evils worse than before. Yet it is precisely in this that we see how disordered is the state of the world: that it is necessary to have recourse to violence to redress evil; that we cannot achieve what is good without doing what is bad. Violence is only midwife of further violence.
Reflecting on the events that in 1989 led without bloodshed to the fall of totalitarian regimes of Eastern Europe, John Paul II in the encyclical “Centesimus Annus” saw the change as the result of men and women who knew how and when to give testimony of the truth without recourse to violence. He ended by expressing a wish that, at the distance of 15 years, resounds today more urgently than ever: “May humankind learn to fight for justice without recourse to violence.”[3] It is this wish that we want to transform now into prayer:
“Lord Jesus Christ, we don’t ask you to blot out the violent and those who boast of the terror they inflict, but to change their hearts and bring them to conversion. Help us too to say: ‘Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.’ Break this chain of violence and revenge that keeps the whole world waiting with bated breath. You created the earth in harmony and peace; may it cease to be ‘the threshing-floor that makes us so ferocious'” (Dante).
The world is so full of people who, like you in your Passion, are “without beauty, … despised and rejected, men and women of sorrow and very familiar with suffering”: Teach us not to “screen our faces” at their sight, not to run away from them, but to take up the burden of their pain and their loneliness.
Mary, “suffering with your Son dying on the cross, you cooperated in a unique way in the work of the Savior by your obedience, your faith, your hope and ardent love”[4]: inspire thoughts of peace and pardon in the men and women of our time. Amen.”
[Translation by Denis Barrett]
[1]. St. Augustine, “Confessions,” X, 43.
[2]. See R. Girard, “Des choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde, II, L’Ecriture judéo-chrétienne,” Paris 1981.
[3]. John Paul II, “Centesimus Annus,” III, 23.
[4]. “Lumen Gentium,” 61