This Good Friday, Pope Francis presided over the Celebration of the Lord’s Passion in St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican on 7 April.
The homily, as every year, was given by the Preacher of the Papal Household, Cardinal Raniero Cantalamessa.
Below is the full homily for this Good Friday:
For two thousand years, the Church announces and celebrates, on this day, the death of the Son of God on the cross. At each Mass, after the consecration, we repeat: “We announce your death, we proclaim your resurrection. Come, Lord Jesus.”
Another death of God, however, has been proclaimed for over a century in our de-Christianized Western world. When, in the field of culture, one speaks of the “death of God”, it is this other death of God -ideological and not historical- that is understood. Some theologians, in order not to be left behind, hastened to build a theology on it: “The theology of the death of God.”
We cannot ignore the existence of this different narrative, without leaving many believers prey to suspicion. This death different from God has found its perfect expression in the well-known proclamation that Nietzsche puts into the mouth of the “mad man” who arrives out of breath in the town square:
Where has God gone? he -he shouted- I’ll tell you! It was us who killed him: you and me! There was never a bigger action. All those who come after us, by virtue of this action, will belong to a history higher than any history that has existed until now.
In the logic of these words – and, I believe, in the author’s expectations – was that, after him, history was no longer divided into Before Christ and After Christ, but rather in Before Nietzsche and After Nietzsche.
Apparently, it is not Nothing that puts itself in the place of God, but man, and more precisely the “superman”, or “the beyond-man”. We must now exclaim about this new man – with a feeling of satisfaction and pride, no longer compassion: “Ecce homo!”: Here is the true man! However, it will not take us long to realize that, left to himself, man is nothing.
What did we do untying this earth from the chain of its sun? Where is it moving to now? Where do we walk? Far from all sun? Is not ours an eternal fall? And backwards, to the sides, forward, on all sides? Is there still an up and a down? Are we not wandering as through an infinite nothingness?
The “mad man”‘s tacit and consoling response to these questions of his is: “No, we will not wander in infinite nothingness, because man will fulfill the task entrusted to God so far!” Instead, our response as believers is, “Yes, and that is exactly what has happened and is happening! We wander spiritually as through an infinite nothingness”. It is significant that, precisely in the wake of the author of that proclamation, some have come to define human existence as a “being-for-death”, and to consider all the supposed possibilities of man as “nullities from the beginning”.
“Beyond good and evil” was another battle cry from the author[3]; but beyond good and evil, there is only “will to power”, and we know where it leads us.
We are not allowed to judge the heart of a man that only God knows. Even the author of that ad has had his share of suffering in life, and suffering unites Christ, perhaps, more than invective separates him. The prayer of Jesus on the cross: “Father, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23,34), was not said only for those who were present on Calvary that day!
An image comes to mind that I have sometimes observed live (and which I hope has come true, in the meantime, for the author of that proclamation!): an angry child tries to hit with his hands and scratch his father’s face , until, exhausted, he falls crying into his arms, who calms him down and hugs him to his chest.
We do not judge, I repeat, the person that only God knows. The fruits, however, that his proclamation produced, we can and must judge. It has been declined in the most diverse ways and with the most diverse names, until it has become a fashion, in an air that is breathed in the intellectual circles of the “postmodern” West. The common denominator of all these different declensions is total relativism in all fields: ethics, language, philosophy, art and, of course, religion. Nothing else is solid; everything is liquid, or even vaporous. In the days of romanticism people delighted in melancholy, today in nihilism.
As believers, it is our duty to show what is behind or under that proclamation. There is the glow of an ancient flame, the sudden eruption of a volcano active since the beginning of the world. The human drama also had its “prologue in heaven”, in that “spirit of denial” that did not accept existing in the grace of another. Since then, he has been recruiting followers to his cause, starting with the naive Adam and Eve: “You will be like gods, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3,5).
For modern man, all this seems nothing more than an etiological myth to explain the existence of evil in the world. And – in the positive sense that myth is given today – that’s how it really is! But history, literature, and our own personal experience tell us that behind this “myth” there is a transcendent truth that no amount of historical narrative or philosophical reasoning could convey to us.
God knows our pride and has come to meet us. He has “annihilated” himself first before our eyes. In fact, Christ Jesus, being of a divine condition, did not avidly hold to being equal to God; on the contrary, he emptied himself taking the condition of a slave, made similar to men. And so, recognized as a man by his presence, he humbled himself, made obedient to death, and a death on a cross. (Phil 2, 6-8).
“God? It was us who killed him: you and me!” shouts “the mad man”. This terrible thing actually happened once in human history, but in a very different sense from what he understood.
Because it is true, brothers and sisters: it was us, you and I, who killed Jesus of Nazareth! He died for our sins and for those of the whole world (Jn 2,2). But his resurrection assures us that this path does not lead to defeat, but, thanks to our repentance, leads to that “apotheosis of life”, sought in vain by other paths.
Why talk about all this in a Good Friday liturgy? Not to convince atheists that God is not dead. The most famous among them discovered it on their own, the moment they closed their eyes to the light – indeed, the darkness – of this world.
As for those who are still among us, other means are needed than the words of a poor preacher. Means that the Lord will not fail to grant to those whose hearts are open to the truth, as we will ask God in the universal prayer that will follow in our liturgy.
No, the real reason is another; it is to prevent believers, who knows, maybe just a few college students, from being drawn into this vortex of nihilism that is the true “black hole” of the spiritual universe. The intent is to make Dante Alighieri’s ever-present exhortation resonate with us:
Be thirsty, oh Christians, to move more seriously. Do not be like a feather in every wind and do not think that every water washes you away.
Let us continue, then, Venerable Parents, brothers and sisters, repeating gratefully and more convinced than ever, the words that we proclaim at each Mass:
We announce your death, we proclaim your resurrection.
Come, Lord Jesus!