Jesus’s love and forgiveness do not deny the truth of pain and betrayal, but they do prevent evil from having the last word, Pope Leo XIV said yesterday. Source: OSV News.
“To forgive does not mean to deny evil, but to prevent it from generating further evil,” the Pope said at his weekly general audience in the Vatican’s Paul VI Audience Hall.
“It is not to say that nothing has happened, but to do everything possible to ensure that resentment does not determine the future,” he said.
Continuing his series of talks about Jesus’s final days, the Pope looked specifically at “one of the most striking and luminous gestures in the Gospel,” when Jesus offers a morsel of bread to Judas during the Last Supper, knowing his disciple is about to betray him.
“It is not only a gesture of sharing: it is much more; it is love’s last attempt not to give up,” Pope Leo said.
“The key to understanding Christ’s heart,” he said, is to realise that his love “does not cease in the face of rejection, disappointment, even ingratitude.”
“His love is stronger than hatred,” he said.
The Pope said Jesus recognises that “his love must pass through the most painful wound, that of betrayal. And instead of withdrawing, accusing, defending himself, he continues to love: he washes the feet, dips the bread and offers it” to all his disciples, including Judas.
Jesus is not ignoring what is happening, he said. Rather, he has understood “that the freedom of the other, even when it is lost in evil, can still be reached by the light of a meek gesture, because he knows that true forgiveness does not await repentance, but offers itself first, as a free gift, even before it is accepted.”
Judas accepts the morsel of bread, but does not understand its meaning, and “Satan entered him,” the Pope said. “That morsel is our salvation, because it tells us that God does everything – absolutely everything – to reach us, even in the hour when we reject him.”
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Christ’s love is stronger than hatred, Pope says at audience (By Carol Glatz, CNS via OSV News)
