Today many of us crucify Jesus with the nails of indifference on the cross of oblivion. The very name of this character – Jesus Christ – sounds like an indiscretion when we write it on the pages of this newspaper. Let it be known that there is no particular cruelty in this oblivion and in these keys of ours. It is the same indifference we show to those dying of starvation or curable diseases on distant continents. The same one that allows us to close our eyes to serious social problems that affect many people who cross paths with us on the streets of our cities.
The funny thing, though, is that our maps of time are still based on Jesus: we celebrate his birth, profusely lighting up the winter streets, we just celebrated his death and resurrection, and we count the years and centuries from its appearance on Earth. Our creatures receive gifts brought by magicians who went to see him and it is difficult for our children to forget the hypermarket of happiness whose showcase is the nativity scene. It must be confessed: whenever we have tried to change this temporary structure it has not gone well for us. And what happens with time, happens with space. If we were to create an atheist association in Barcelona, ??perhaps the headquarters would be located in Plaça Sant Felip Neri or Ronda Sant Pere.
And, since we are in Barcelona, ??how do you explain that in this free-thinking city, in the best sense of the word, the immensity of the Sagrada Família basilica continues to emanate? We Westerners forget our faith, felt like an old-fashioned thing, but many of the people who only see Holy Week as an epiphany of tourism and, consequently, have come to Catalonia on these dates have queued up to visit this religious building . It seems that we are like the Visigoths: we have defeated the Roman empire of the Christian faith, but then we live in the society that the Christians created, with their calendars and their geographies.
In fact, materialist philosophies are usually narrow and do not manage, do not want, to include the whole dimension of the human being. They look at us and comment: “Those legs with which you walk in your dreams do not exist” or “those hands with which you draw your fantasies are not real”. It is as if they cut out the photograph of our reality and reduced it to the rectangle of our image on the ID card or passport. Crucifixion, at least, gives us our whole body or even all our bodies, real and imagined, and to me it is preferable to the brutal amputations of the fiercest materialism, which sit us forever in a biographical wheelchair.
It is undeniable that many have taken advantage of this cross, which is a bird about to fly everywhere, to dominate and oppress others. May God forgive those who have given the cross, diagram of freedom, the shape of the bars of a prison. And let it be known that I admire those who have put their existential vigor before this religion in the form of a miserable presidency. Blessed be, then, this contemporary Christianity of ours, so fragile, so unofficial, that it can no longer impose anything on anyone.
Even if Christ had not existed, life would continue to crucify us. Old age, for example, functions as a progressive Golgotha. And the last bed of a sick person represents, in reality, a strange soft cross. But, before that, we are crucified, sent to economic hardship and, in many continents, to pure misery. Slave labor or poorly paid work, carried out as an endless sentence, are also crosses. We are crucified in the deserts of solitude to which many are condemned. In fact, the cross is not an archaism, but something deeply current.
By going up to the cross and being resurrected, Jesus saves us, telling us that the darkness of our lives will never have the last word. By submitting to barbaric injustice and then reviving, he showed us that human oppression will not triumph. That is why I told you that, in effect, the cross is a bird about to fly. We understand nothing if we look at it as a macabre business, in which someone must die brutally to pay, with his blood, the sins of humanity. This is turning the beauty of Jesus’ gesture into a horror movie.
And, knowing that the evil of the world cannot chain us, everyone who later finds his way to be reborn, his personal resurrection: whether through the struggle for political changes, rebellion against what is wrong or soft delivery to others. Be, likewise, valuing art and science as great spiritual adventures of humanity. Faith should not close the doors to thought and creativity, but quite the opposite: it should open new horizons to our ideas and our imagination. Never let faith lock you into a cowed, cowed existence, into a narrow and intolerant mindset.
We do not believe, but we live in the times and places of belief. Our cities are secular to the max, and huge religious temples are born there. We deny the cross of Christ, now that we are crucified on it. We immerse ourselves in the sadness of materialism, and our initial youthful smiles turn, over time, into tears that nothing consoles. While this is happening, Jesus always rises, inviting us to the beyond of our pain. He does not want to chain us to anything, but to free us from everything. It is here, right next to us, perhaps precisely where we do not see it. Sometimes it is enough to light a candle of illusion to feel its presence.
