With this passage from Luigino Bruni, taken from his forthcoming book "L'anima e la cetra" (Quiqajon ed.), the EoC staff wishes everyone a Happy Easter.
The Bible calls man "son of God" (Psalm 2). When a son is crucified, out of malice or by the events of life, his father will do anything to remove him from the cross, and if he cannot, he will stand beside him and die with him. A father will never be on the side of the soldiers preparing the gallows, because fatherhood is the wonderful art of liberating your children from their crosses. The Holy Trinity is not only an abstract theorem, and the first stabat of Holy Saturday is in fact that of the Father. The passion, death and resurrection of Christ are neither praise nor justification for human suffering - any reader who approaches those pages of the Gospels without the back-up of a proper ideology, will only find a story of the unjust suffering of an innocent man who continued to love despite all that cruelty. God our Father continues to read and relive that same story with us over and over again. He continues to suffer every time while re-hearing his son cry out, the echo of which has not yet died out, because it will only die out on the very last day. He cries just like us, while he sees his son, a new Sisyphus, continue to retrace the same Via Crucis every day.
It is right there, on top of the infinite Golgotha of history, that another wonderful surprise enclosed in the psalm awaits us: «Arise, Lord! Deliver me, my God!» (Psalm 3,7). After sleep there is awakening, after death there is resurrection: «Perhaps because of the fatal quiet you are the imago, come so dear to me, o evening» (Ugo Foscolo). The resurrection of God is the first fruit of our resurrection. God must rise so that we can rise as well. That is why the first prayer is to ask God, in a loud voice, to rise again after the night, to rise again after death. Hence, in the first psalm of prayer, in fact, we find the greatest of prayers: God arise, rise again, arise, because you must rise again, you cannot leave us in this infinite Holy Saturday. There is no more human prayer than this: God, I beg of you, please rise again. The prayer of those who believe, but also the prayer of those who have lost their faith, of those who want to start believing again after the death of God.
For centuries, the singers and cantors of the psalms had loudly asked God to rise again. Hence, we too can imagine Abel, Dina, and Agar, Job, Rizpah, Naboth, the daughter of Jephthah, and all the victims of the Bible, waiting and praying, on that Saturday night in front of the sepulcher. Their prayers were also there in that Resurrection. Today we have ours, and while we see the crucifix inexorably retrace his painful path, we cannot stop praying and ask him to rise again, to implore that his resurrections are more than his deaths - at least one more time.
Happy Easter.
