The buffer that keeps the carriages of a train together and apart, the beach during the undertow of high tide, the womb of a mother that hosts and gives shape to her child: images that speak of a retreat to make room for the other ( to the wagon that hooks up, to the sea that pulsates, to the body of the growing child). Today’s issue is: how can we limit the bestial impetuosity of violence?
The logic of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” sought to oppose it by placing a firm and well-defined limit on the disorderly spread of violence: violence is responded to with more violence proportionate to the first, a kind of balanced play of forces. Works? No!
It is clear to everyone, and in all fields of human life, that violence does not respect the laws of dynamics (after all, why should it?) and does not allow balance, violence rather bounces, shoots away in an unpredictable way and instead of losing energy buys it; you find it on your body or on your psyche and – sometimes – you don’t even know why, you don’t understand why, you didn’t deserve it, you hadn’t done anything wrong…
Today Jesus goes completely outside the logic of what is directly intuitive and offers us a counter-intuitive gesture, possible to understand and experience only if the head is well connected to the heart and if the gaze (at least for us Christians) is fixed on the Cross of Jesus: the unstoppable force of violence is reduced if each person chooses to take charge (and is not forced to… ) of a part of it, that part which they can realistically take charge of here and today, no more, no less. Complicated? Difficult? Illogical? Maybe: possible!
Andrea Piccolo SJ
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Source: Get up and Walk – the daily gospel with commentary
