Eyes Cleansed of Tears

Simone Riva - When we are little, we don't make too much fuss, and if something is wrong, we burst into tears in front of everyone, looking for our parents' faces. Often, all it takes is for them to pick us up, and everything passes, including discomfort or tantrums. Dad and Mom do everything and learn the secrets so that the crying lasts a short time. Then we grow up, life gets complicated, and even the presence of parents cannot spare us challenges and tears. We become a mystery even to them, who also see us every day and are spectators to the enlargement of our hearts to the dimensions of infinity. Languages don't come together as easily as before, and who knows how many times they would have preferred to see us still crying for confirmation that something is wrong and can be fixed.

Instead, no one understands what is going on. A mysterious being is roaming around the house. Sometimes, however, it happens that parents decide to observe their children in astonishment. They sharpen their gaze so as not to miss the details, they guard the silences so as not to force their way, and they always revive their freedom, they live their lives with more intensity, knowing that they are always curiously observed. Thus, the day comes when children sense that Dad and Mom have not become two strangers and that, for them, children are not a problem to be solved or a presence to be managed. It even happens that they begin to cry again without shame, ask for help without fear, and look at them with the secret desire to grow old like them.

Christ, with us, walked the same path, as the Pope also said, “Only when Christ wept and was able to weep did he understand our dramas,” because “certain realities can be seen only with eyes cleansed of tears” (Apostolic Journey to the Philippines, Jan. 18, 2015). The more we enter into the heart of our human the more we realize the chasm of longing that inhabits us. Jesus himself wanted to go through all our drama so that we would discover that it is not an inconvenience to be fixed but an adventure to be undertaken. This Sunday's Gospel reveals that the relationship between Christ and his own was not without tears either, right up to that peremptory provocation, “Do you also want to leave?” Who could have answered but the one who would “burst into tears” just after publicly denying him three times? "Simon Peter answered him, 'Lord, to whom shall we go? You have words of eternal life, and we have believed and known that you are the Holy One of God.'"

Jesus entrusts his Church to the apostle of tears as if to demonstrate the indispensability of the ability to be moved by one's own and others' shortcomings in order to show the way to all.

We know, in fact, how dangerous are those men who lead others in the name of power or their own authority(which lasts as long as it lasts), so Christ introduces another method, even if it is often misunderstood.

In the novel The Tunic, first published in 1942, there is a passage in which this misunderstanding is well described. Military tribune Marcellus Gallio is sent to preside over border troops in Jerusalem, the city ruled by Pontius Pilate. While in the Holy City, Marcellus is assigned to carry out the crucifixion sentence for three dangerous rebels, one of whom is a certain Jesus of Nazareth. After the Nazarene's death, Marcellus plays dice and wins his robe, but Demetrius, his slave, warns him that that robe belonged to a righteous man. Demetrius himself, one day, finally gets to see Jesus.

"The memory of those pleading eyes that had met his gaze for a few moments on the road to Jerusalem nagged at him. For hours, he had pondered, trying to define them, and had concluded that they were distinguished from all others by a strange sense of loneliness about them” (Lloyd Cassel Douglas, The Tunic, Castelvecchi, 2012, p. 90). This “strange sense of loneliness” the Creator carefully placed it in every human heart so that it would vibrate at every hint of His presence that only “eyes cleansed of tears” recognize.
Unrevised translation by the author. Download. Italian. Spanish. German.