By: Mons. Alberto José González Chaves
When in the Passion everything seems finished, that’s when the most disconcerting thing begins. Jesus is already dead. There is no longer word, nor gesture, nor gaze: everything has been consummated. And then, when nothing is expected anymore, something happens that has no human sense: a soldier opens the side of a corpse with a spear. Useless gesture. However, God has wanted that useless gesture to be the most fruitful in history.
«Aperuit… et continuo exivit sanguis et aqua.» Not a few drops; a fountain of blood and water flows out, as if that body still held a secret that not even death could exhaust; as if Christ had reserved the last for afterward; as if, having loved to the extreme… there was still more.
The wound overflows: God allows himself to be “opened” because he wants to give everything. His pierced side is not a defeat, but a door; it is not the end of his body, but access to Him.
«Et qui vidit, testimonium perhibuit.» The one who saw bears witness. Why this insistence from John? Because he knows that this is not evident; that one can look at the Cross and see no further than a corpse, a spear, a wound. That’s why one must look differently; let the gaze become slower, softer, more interior, to perceive that there is not simply an opened body… but a mystery where I can enter.
It is not only Christ who has been pierced: it is reality that has been left open. There no longer exists a “outside” of God that is completely closed: there will always be a crack, an access, a place through which grace can enter. Even in what seems most dead because «it has no solution anymore.» Even in myself.
And then: «Videbunt in quem transfixerunt.» They will look, but not as one looks at a spectacle, but with the gaze of one who recognizes himself as involved and begins to understand that that wound is not only Christ’s, but has to do with his own story, with his resistances and his escapes. They will look and something will break within the soul upon contemplating that open side. That’s why the Church never stops returning to that wound that does not close. That’s why, in the end, the only question is not why he was pierced, but whether I dare to enter that open Heart.