A person struck by the wound of death or by the affliction for the loss of a treasure cannot be comforted without that pain, together with the person herself, being looked at in their very depths. Trying to console without beginning from the pain that is being experienced is like putting a bandaid on someone who had been run through with a sword. The reason for which it seems to us impossible to comfort someone lies precisely in the depth of that wound, an abyss in which we are not able to penetrate.
There is a passage in the book of the Prophet Jeremiah that recently caught my attention. The context is that of the deportation of the people of Judah by the Babylonian Empire. Before being brought to Babylon, the inhabitants of Jerusalem were led near Bethlehem, in a town called Ephrata. It is where you find the tomb of Rachel, the beloved wife of Jacob. She had lost her life there, after having given birth to Benjamin, the last of the twelve sons of Jacob. In the same place, therefore, near the tomb of Rachel, the Babylonians led the Hebrews into exile, chained them, made them slaves and sent them far from their land. On that occasion, it is not God Himself who speaks: A voice is heard in Rama, a lament and a bitter cry; Rachel cries for her children and does not want to be consoled for them, because they are no longer. It is the same verse cited later by the evangelist Matthew commenting on the “slaughter of the Innocents.” Jeremiah, a direct witness of this tragedy, sees in it the end of every promise, the end of Jerusalem, the end of the story of the presence of God among us. Or at least, this is what it seemed…
Is not desperation but pain lived in the company of the Lord
At Rama, instead, it is God Himself who makes His voice heard. It is He who enters into the drama of what is happening. He does not say that He would resolve everything since He is the Lord of history. It is certainly this way, but He does not say it without first entering into the drama of Rachel who does not want to be consoled, in the cry of His people, in the loss of children who are no longer. The Lord Himself, to comfort His people, wants first to go to the depths of the pain that they were experiencing.
But the participation of God in our suffering does not exhaust the words reported by Jeremiah. What is, in fact, the Incarnation of the Son of God, Jesus Christ? He does not come to console us, inviting us not to cry, to be well because He is there as the dominator of everything. He first wants to enter with us into the drama of the loss to accompany us to depths and even beyond, where our story with Jesus is directed: to the tomb and the Resurrection. Nothing is left out of this, nothing!
St. Athanasius, one of the great Fathers of the Church of the IV century, wrote: “Nothing can be saved that is not assumed.” That which God does not assume into Himself cannot be saved, that which He assumes becomes instead part of His story of glory, including the cross, including loss, including even death itself. And this comforts me greatly.
He does not spare us anything; therefore, beware to those who seek to spare us pain because eliminating pain to the one who has lost a treasure means taking away also the attachment to that treasure. Hope is not born from the elimination of pain but from the possibility of giving it meaning.
One can weep with Rachel because the children are no longer without falling into nothingness because even this fact has been assumed by Jesus through His incarnation, death and resurrection.
The position of the Church is not desperation but pain lived in the company of the Lord; the pain that demands meaning from Him and, in this way, serves our salvation and that of the whole world.
