"To preach the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ today entails the following:
"1) To commit oneself and all one's energies for a world where love, peace, and a community of sisters and brothers, a world where openness and self-surrender to God, will be less difficult. This means denouncing situations that generate hatred, division, and practical atheism — atheism in terms of structures, values, practices, and ideologies. It means proclaiming, and practicing — in commitment, love, and solidarity — justice in the family, in the school, in the economic system, and in political relations. The consequence of this engagement will be crisis, suffering, confrontation, and the cross. Acceptance of the cross of this clash, this confrontation, is what it means to carry the cross as our Lord carried it: it means suffering, enduring, for the sake of the cause we support and the life we lead.
"2) The suffering that comes with this commitment, the cross to be carried down this road, is suffering and martyrdom for God and God's cause in the world. These martyrs are martyrs for God. They are not martyrs for the system. They are martyrs of the system, but for God. Those who suffer and are crucified for the sake of the justice of this world, then, are God's witnesses. They break open the closed system that holds itself out as just, fraternal, and good. Those who suffer and are martyred for justice, after the fashion of Jesus and of all who follow him, dis-cover the future — leave history open, so that it can grow and produce more justice than at present, more love than prevails in society as yet. The system seeks to close the future. It tries to 'put a lid' on it. The system is fatalistic: it judges that there is no need of freedom and modification. One who bears the cross and suffering of the struggle with this intrasystemic fatalism carries the cross and suffers with Jesus and as Jesus. To suffer thus is honorable. To die thus is a death worth dying.
"3) To carry the cross as Jesus carried it, then, means taking up a solidarity with the crucified of this world — with those who suffer violence, who are impoverished, who are dehumanized, who are offended in their rights. To carry the cross as Jesus carried it means to defend these persons, and to attack the practices in whose name they are made nonpersons. It means taking up the cause of their liberation, and suffering for the sake of this cause. This is what it means to carry the cross. Jesus' cross and death, too, were the consequence of such a commitment to the deserted of this world.
"4) To suffer thus, to die for the sake of other crucified persons, involves bearing the heavy burden of the system's inversion of values, the cross of the warped hierarchy of values against which one has committed oneself. The system calls those who take up the cause of the lowly and the defenseless 'subversives, traitors, enemies of the human race, damned by religion and abandoned by God.' ('Cursed be he who hangs on the tree!') Horrors! These persons want to revolutionize the established order! But the reason why the sufferer, the martyr, opposes the system and denounces its values and practices is because it constitutes an ordering precisely of disorder. What the system labels 'just, fraternal, and good' is in reality unjust, arbitrary, and evil. The martyr rips the mask from the face of the system. Martyrs suffer for the sake of a greater justice, for the sake of another order ('If your justice abound not more than that of the Pharisees . . .'). These are those who suffer without hating, who bear the cross without fleeing: for they bear it out of love for the truth and love for the crucified persons for whom they have risked their personal security and their very life. This is what Jesus does, and this is what every follower of his must do, all down through history. They suffer as the damned; actually they are the blessed. They die as if abandoned; in reality it is they who are the accepted of God. Thus does God confound the wisdom and justice of this world.
"5) The cross, then, is the symbol of the rejection and violation of the sacred rights of God and the human being. It is the product of hatred. There are those who, committing themselves to the struggle to abolish the cross of the world, themselves have to suffer and bear the cross. The cross is imposed upon them, inflicted on them, by the creators of crosses. But this cross is accepted. Not because a value is seen in it, but because there are those who burst asunder the logic of its violence by their love. To accept the cross is to be greater than the cross. To live thus is to be stronger than death.
"6) To preach the cross can mean to be invited to perform the extreme act of love and trust, in a total de-centering of self. Life has its traumatic side. There are those who are vanquished in their battle for a just cause, who are deprived of all hope, who are in prison for life, or who have been sentenced to a sure death. Indeed, all of those who struggle for the cause of justice must either carry the cross onerously, or hang upon it helplessly. How often we must assist at this human drama silent and impotent! Anything we might say by way of an attempt to console will seem empty chatter. Any deed of solidarity will seem ineffective resignation. Thought strangles word. Perplexity stifles tears at their source. There is a pain and a death at the hands of injustice that shreds the heart: the conclusion of the drama is foregone, and there is no escape.
"Even so, the drama has a meaning. All cynicism, resignation, and despair notwithstanding, it remains meaningful to speak of the cross. The drama is not necessarily a tragedy. Jesus Christ passed through all this. He transfigured suffering, pain, and condemnation to death by transforming them into acts of freedom and a love of self-surrender — by transforming them into a way to God and a new approach to those who rejected him. He forgave the rejecters, and abandoned himself in trust and confidence to One who is greater.
Forgiveness is love in pain. A trusting self-abandon is the total de-centration of ourselves and our total recentering on Someone who infinitely transcends us. Forgiveness and self-surrender mean risking Mystery, throwing in our lot with that ultimate vessel of Meaning in which we participate more than we dream. This is the opportunity offered to human freedom. Men and women can take advantage of the offer, and rest secure. Or they can let it slip by, and founder in despair. Forgiveness and trust are our tools for not letting hopelessness have the last word. They constitute the supreme deed of human grandeur.
"How do we know that this trust, this de-centering, achieves ultimate Meaning? By the resurrection. Resurrection is the fullness and manifestation of the Life that resonates within life and within death. The only way for the Christian to make this assertion is to look at the crucified Jesus — who now lives.
"7) To die thus is to live. Within this death on a cross is a life that cannot be stamped out, a life that lies hidden in death itself. This life does not come after death. This life is found in the life of love, solidarity, and courage that has so suffered and so died. This is the life that, in death, is revealed in its power and its glory.
"This is what Saint John means when he tells us that Jesus' being lifted up on the cross is glorification, and that this 'hour' is at once the time of passion and of transfiguration. A unity, then, a oneness prevails between passion and resurrection, life and death. To live and be crucified for the sake of justice and for God's sake is to live. This is why the message of the passion is always accompanied by the message of the resurrection. Those who have died in rebellion against the system of this world, those who have refused to enter into and connive with this world, who have refused to fit into the schemata of this world (Rom. 12:2), are the risen ones. Insurrection for the cause of God and neighbor is resurrection. Death may look meaningless. Yet it is death that has a future, for it is death that guards and protects the meaning of history.
"8) To preach the cross, today, is to preach the following of Jesus. This is not 'dolorism,' this is not the exaltation of the negative. This is the proclamation of positivity, of a commitment to make it gradually impossible for human beings to crucify other human beings. But this struggle involves the cross. It means carrying that cross with courage, and hanging upon it with constancy. Thus to live is resurrection achieved. Thus to live is to live a life founded in the Life that no cross can crucify, but can only reveal as still more victorious. To preach the cross, then, means this, and this alone: to follow Jesus. And to follow Jesus is to take (per-seguir) his path, pursue (pro-seguir) his cause, and achieve (con-seguir) his victory.
"9) God is not indifferent to the pain of the victims of history. Out of love and solidarity (cf. John 3:16), God becomes poor, is condemned, crucified, and murdered. God has taken on a reality that objectively contradicts God. Why does God do so? Because God does not wish some human beings to impoverish and crucify other human beings. Thus are we shown that God's preferred mediation is neither the glory of history nor the transparency of historical meaning. God's preferred mediation is the concrete, real-life suffering of the oppressed. 'If God has loved us so, we must have the same love for one another' (1 John 4:11). To draw near to God is to draw near the oppressed (Matt. 25), and vice versa. To say that God took up the cross must not be a glorification or eternalization of the cross. That God has taken up the cross shows only how much God loves. God loves sufferers so much that he suffers and dies along with them.
"But neither, on the other hand, is God indifferent to crime — to the negative weight in the balance of history. God does not allow the wound to fester until the manifestation of justice at the end of the world. God intervenes and justifies, in the risen Jesus, all the impoverished and crucified of history. The meaning of the resurrection is that justice and love, and the struggles waged for both, have meaning. Their future is guaranteed. Justice, love, and our struggles to attain them only appear to have failed in the process of history. They shall triumph. Good, and good alone, shall reign."
