Fr Marco Lazzaron
o I love God enough? Can his love fill the void and emptiness I sometimes feel, soothe the pain, and increase the joy? Why does it sometimes seem that His love doesn’t affect me and that I feel almost obliged to love him just because he is God, my Creator, and Savior? If I only look at myself, I risk never finding a solution to such decisive questions, because my heart is an abyss of feelings that are often conflicting with each other. I need to look outside myself. I do so and immediately the ‘form and measure’ of his love, the cross, unfolds before my eyes. John presents it to us suspended between heaven and earth. For the evangelist, Jesus raised up is Christ glorified by the Father because, with the gift of his life, he could transform a story of death into a story of love.
To explain the gift of life that comes to us from the sacrifice of the Son, the episode of the serpents that killed the Jews in the desert with their venom, is evoked (cfr. Nm 21:4-9). When Moses raised the bronze staff, whoever looked towards the serpent depicted there was saved from those deadly bites. Behind this image, there was the archaic idea that the serpent was dangerous if it crawled on the earth, as it absorbed all its impurity, while it lost his power of death when its contact with the ground was lost. Jesus is the One who absorbs all the hatred of the world and transforms it into love. The cross in fact responds to the need of the Father who wants men to be saved through it; at the same time, it questions on the human side the necessity of faith for man to access salvation. “Whoever believes” will receive “eternal life”, whether they have chosen Christ from the beginning or whether they have arrived there almost as a last final effort, after having searched elsewhere in vain, since the love of God holds nothing against and gives itself generously to those who turn to it even at the end of all other failed attempts.
Those who courageously decide to stay where love comes to life from death will not suffer any condemnation from God. We must dispel the spreading prejudice of a God who punishes or stays at a distance from man; He is only eager to radiate his light, which does not remain an abstract concept, but is felt as an attitude to the good that lives in a heart purified by love. John adopts the same symbolism as the Prologue to underline the richness of God’s gift but warns of the darkness that can descend on man’s life: the deliberate and mysterious choice of unbelief. Whoever, despite having known the work of Christ, chooses to persevere in “evil works”, thus demonstrates that he does not believe, that “he hates the light, and does not come to the light”. ‘Coming to the light’ is the continuous generation of the believer to the life of grace, which implies the constant struggle against darkness, but which knows the certainty of the final victory through the merits of the passion of Christ. A luminous life allows the believer to “clearly see that his works were done in God” so that the work of God and that of man merge in perfect communion of intent and implementation.