“Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb? Even if she were to forget, I will never forget you!” (Is 49:15). With these words, the prophet Isaiah seeks to explain to the people of Israel what God is like “within,” what His love for us is like. Isaiah also foretells that the Virgin will conceive and bear a son, Emmanuel—God with us. He likewise describes in detail the passion and death of Jesus, 750 years before they took place, and the final triumph of His Resurrection (50:4–9).
View of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem
Within less than 700 meters, the Via Dolorosa, Calvary, and the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem condense a unique intensity: here Jesus embodied the love described by Isaiah (Is 53:3); here He freely took upon Himself all the suffering of humanity—of every man and woman of all times—its causes and its consequences; here He died on the cross; and a few meters away, He rose from the dead, as He had foretold. His Resurrection was a historical event that shattered all categories of human experience: He had to convince His disciples, who were in shock and unable to react.
Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem
Our reason, accustomed to solving practical matters, becomes blocked before what it does not understand; it needs to enter another logic—the logic of the heart—not of mere feeling, but the logic of God, which Pascal expressed in a famous phrase: “The heart has reasons that reason does not know.” If at times we are not even able to read our own hearts, how can we understand the madness of love contained in the heart of God? Before such immense love, all that remains is grateful wonder, and the desire to respond—to go deeper and deeper into that “sea of the divine essence, eternally tranquil and at the same time of prodigious and unceasing activity”; a suffering love that pours itself out constantly upon each person and upon the whole world.
The Empty Tomb teaches us to lift our gaze above the evil that surrounds and overwhelms us. Evil is there and will not disappear, but we can overcome it with good. As A. Brooks affirms: “If you want to be truly rebellious, love your enemies.” Not to justify what they do, but so that hatred does not define who you are. He recounts how, after receiving a message full of insults, instead of responding with anger, he replied with gratitude. This changed the dynamic, he explains. “The other person didn’t know how to react. Loving where there is no love disarms, breaks the script: it frees.” “Love is the secret,” he insists. “It is not weakness; it is power in its purest form.”
By Carmen Rodríguez Êyre