On his return from the hospital, Francis presided over the lengthy Palm Sunday liturgy in St. Peter’s Square. Among the “abandoned Christs” of our time are the people that exploitation and poverty throw at the crossroads of our streets, but also “the unborn children and the elderly who are left alone”. Prayer and an olive branch, a symbol of Christ’s peace for the martyred people of Ukraine.
Vatican City () – Jesus abandoned on the cross “asks us to have eyes and a heart” for today’s “abandoned Christians”. Those that exploitation and poverty throw at the crossroads of our streets, but also the most invisible such as “unborn children or the elderly alone”. It is to them that Pope Francis has invited us to look this morning from Saint Peter’s Square at the beginning of this Holy Week.
After returning to the Vatican yesterday morning from his hospitalization at the Gemelli Hospital, the pontiff regularly presided over the long Palm Sunday liturgy, assisted at the altar by Card. Leonardo Sandri, sub-dean of the Sacred College and emeritus prefect of the Department of Oriental Churches. And at the end of the celebration – after thanking the many people who had intensified their prayers for him in recent days – Francis walked the entire square greeting the approximately 60,000 Romans and pilgrims present. At the beginning, as usual, it was he himself who blessed the olive branches from the obelisk and then made the brief procession in the popemobile.
In his homily – commenting on the account of the passion according to Matthew that today’s liturgy proposes – the Pope stopped precisely on the question of Jesus on the cross “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” “In the most tragic hour – he commented -, Jesus experiences the abandonment of God. He had never before called the Father with the generic name of God. To convey to us the force of this fact, the Gospel also includes the phrase in Aramaic: it is the only , among the words that Jesus said on the cross, which come down to us in the original language. He sees the closed sky, experiences the bitter frontier of living, the shipwreck of existence, the collapse of all certainty: he screams the why of whys” .
“The verb ‘abandon’ is strong in the Bible – he added -; it appears in moments of extreme pain: in frustrated, denied and betrayed love; in rejected and aborted children; in situations of repudiation, widowhood and orphanhood; in exhausted marriages, in the exclusions that deprive of social ties, in the oppression of injustice and in the loneliness of illness: finally, in the most drastic lacerations of ties.Christ bore this on the cross, taking upon himself the sin of the world.”
But the important fact is the reason why he experiences all this: “Brother, sister,” Francis said, addressing the faithful directly, “he did it for me, for you, so that when I, you, or anyone finds himself between the sword and the wall, lost in a dead end, plunged into the abyss of abandonment, dragged by the vortex of ‘why’, there may be hope. This is not the end, because Jesus has been there and now he is with you. You are there , Jesus; in my failures, you are with me; when I feel bad and lost, when I can’t take it anymore, you are there, you are with me”.
In abandonment Jesus entrusts himself. “Not only that: in abandonment he continues to love his own who had left him alone and forgives his crucifiers. Brothers and sisters, such a love, all for us, until the end, can transform our hearts of stone into hearts of flesh , capable of feeling pity, tenderness, compassion. Christ abandoned moves us to seek him and love him in the abandoned. Because in them are not only the needy, but also He, Jesus abandoned, the One who saved us descending to the depths of our human condition”.
Hence the invitation to take care of the brothers who are most similar to him, the many “abandoned Christs” of today. “I think of that man considered ‘of the street’, a German, who died under the colonnade, alone, abandoned – he recalled -. There are entire towns exploited and abandoned to their fate; there are poor people who live at the crossroads of our streets and whose look we do not have the courage to find, migrants who are no longer faces but numbers, rejected prisoners, people classified as problems, but there are also so many abandoned Christians, invisible, hidden, who are discarded with a white glove: unborn children, elderly people who are left alone, the sick who are not visited, the disabled who are ignored, young people who feel a great emptiness inside without anyone really hearing their cry of pain. And they find no other way than suicide. Today’s abandoned The Christs of today”.
For the “disciples of the Abandoned” no one can be left alone: ”let us remember – warned the Pope – that the rejected and excluded are living icons of Christ, they remind us of his crazy love, his abandonment that saves us from all loneliness and desolation. Today let us ask for this grace: knowing how to love Jesus abandoned and knowing how to love Jesus in each abandoned person”.
In this sense – at the end of the celebration, before the Angelus prayer – Francis once again turned his gaze to the peoples affected by the war. He did so by directing his blessing to the Caravan of Peace that in these days has left Italy for Ukraine, at the initiative of various associations, to bring basic necessities, olive branches, symbols of Christ’s peace. “We join this gesture with prayer,” the Pope concluded, “which will be more intense during the days of Holy Week.”
