Pope: God still weeps over today's calamities and wars
waged for money
(Vatican
Radio) Pope Francis said God weeps over today's calamities, the wars waged to
worship ‘the idol of money’ and over the many innocent victims killed by the
bombs. He stressed that God weeps because humanity does not understand “the
peace that He offers us.” His words came during the Mass celebrated on Thursday
morning in the chapel of the Santa Marta residence.
Taking
his inspiration from a reading from the gospel of Luke where Jesus weeps over
Jerusalem, the “closed” city that “kills the prophets and stones those sent” to
it, Pope Francis’ homily reflected on some of the moments of weeping during
Christ’s ministry. He explained that Jesus had the tenderness of His Father
looking at his children when he wept over the city of Jerusalem in the gospel account
saying: “How many times I yearned to gather your children together as a hen
gathers her brood under her wings, but you were unwilling.”
“Somebody
said that God became man in order to be able to weep, to weep over what His
children had done. The weeping in front of the tomb of Lazarus is the weeping
of a friend. This is the weeping of the Father.”
In
the same way, the Pope continued, we can look at the behaviour of the father of
the prodigal son and what happens when this son asks for his inheritance and
leaves home. He said the father did not go to his neighbours to say “Look what
has happened to me! This horrible thing he did to me! But I will curse this
son…” Pope Francis said he is certain that the father did not do this although
maybe he went “to weep alone in his bedroom.”
“And
why do I tell you this? Because the Gospel does not talk about this, it says
that when his son returned home, he saw him from afar: this means that the
Father was continually going up onto the terrace to look at the road to see if
his son was coming back. And a father who does this is a father who lives in
tears, waiting for his son to return home. This is the weeping of God the
Father. And with his weeping, the Father recreates through his Son all of
creation.”
Turning
next to the moment when Jesus is carrying the cross to Calvary, Pope Francis
reflected on the pious women who were weeping, saying they were not weeping
over Him but over their own children. He stressed that this weeping like that
of a father and of a mother is one that God still continues to do in our times.
“Even
nowadays in front of the calamities, the wars waged in order to worship the god
of money, the many innocent people killed by the bombs launched by those who
worship the idol of money, God still weeps and He also says: ‘Jerusalem,
Jerusalem, my children, what are you doing?’ And he also says this to the poor
victims, to the arms traffickers and to all those who sell the life of people.
We’d do well to think both about how God our Father became man in order to be
able to weep and how God our Father weeps nowadays: he weeps over humanity that
ends up not understanding the peace that He offers us, the peace of love.”
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