evangeli.net

Dear friend:

We are getting close to the Holy Week, "endearing week", true "heart" of the liturgical year. St. Therese of the infant Jesus imagined the face of Christ, particularly in those moments of His Passion, when Jesus was more lonesome: there -she used to say- she could be admitted more easily. We can also join the Lord in His «extreme hour»

The Mount of the Olives was one of St. Therese’s favorite "mystical" places. "Jesus’ prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane" is like the "epicenter" of the Passion: there - in intimate and intense prayer with the Father - Jesus shouldered with the guilt of sin that fouls the history of mankind. Jesus sweat blood: the infinite pain He experienced with His divine Love for the countless offenses to His Father - to put it in some way – did not fit in his human will. Any other man would have died on the spot...

There, in Gethsemane, Jesus renews before God His offering for our salvation. «The atonement of Christ for the sins of humanity» means much more than "paying" for our sins. St. Paul, graphically describes it by resorting to the most mysterious expression of the New Testament: God made him who had no sin “to be sin” for us (2Cor 5:21). In the words of St. John Paul II, this "to be sin" in Jesus is a mystery within the mystery, the depth of which we will never get to know.

In the «Death of Christ» in the Cross and in His grave is where that love that reaches the end comes out, and then, the «ever new coveted cult» emerges: our mankind that could not be redeemed with the sacrifice of animals, has been saved with the Blood of God incarnate, our Lord Jesus Christ.

I wish you a very holy Easter,

Antoni Carol i Hostench, pbro.

(Coordinator general of evangeli.net)

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