What if Christ returns today? Here is the question I asked myself when reading an article in the sheet. I stopped to think for a long time. The first reaction was to look at the office door. I tried for a moment to imagine someone knocking: “I stand at the door and knock, if someone hears my voice and opens the door, I will go in and dine with him and he with me”, the book of the Revelation (3:20).
I tried to visualize Jesus on the basis of the images and iconography that I have stored over the years. The most spontaneous: dressed in white, with the red tunic sideways. I open the door and we look into each other’s eyes, in an unprecedented silence. The reactions in my heart are different, the first is: «I tried to follow you …», but also: «Did I get it all wrong? Did I understand you? »And I burst into tears; as in a flash those questions bring me back to the heart of Christianity, in that cum prehendere which is also an embrace. Then we look at each other again and I understand that he is not here to reproach me but only to love me and enable me to love.
The image of Jesus knocking on the door
I also tried to imagine another scene: that He knocked on the door and entered and listened to my thoughts and experienced my way of loving, my likes and dislikes, my “vaffa” or my “come here!” . I imagined that he observed my way of working, of doing things, of communicating. In all this, in some moments, I imagined the great closeness, in others the distance. I don’t know to what extent he could share what I do, but I still imagine him spurring me to continue: “Here try to do better, here you go on like this, here you see that underneath there is the tempter, try to unmask him” And in all this emerges the decisive question that He would ask me: “Where am I?”. The question at the heart of Christianity, of our living, of our love, of our actions, of our thinking. As Cardinal Ravasi affirms, Jesus is “a tireless provocateur of questions”. There is often a prophetic force contained in the question. The question, writes Ravasi again, “is the soul of religion.” Pope Francis on the eve of Easter returned to a fundamental theme of Jesus’ preaching and to the questions it raises in our times. Originally its being a “sign of contradiction” (Lk 2:34), the simple presence and word of Jesus are disruptive. But today, Pope Francis says, Jesus would be relegated to the news of a provincial newspaper. Implicitly, Francis confronts us with the question of Luke’s Gospel: “But when the Son of man comes, will he find faith on earth?” (18,8) The question is terrible, and terrible that the answer can be delivered to indifference. It is as if the Gospel urges us to imagine not only that Christ will return, but that he has returned, that he is here and now, and that it is up to us to correspond to his tangible presence.
The question is not what does humanity do? The real question we cannot avoid is: What do I do?
From the introduction to the book by Enzo Fortunato, «And if Jesus returns? The question at the heart of Christianity “, Edizioni San Paolo 2021, pp. 128, € 14.00