Tuesday of Holy Week
“It was night”
Fr. Jean GOTTIGNY (Bruxelles, Belgium)
Today, Holy Tuesday, the liturgy emphasizes the scene about to be unleashed and that will end with the crucifixion on Good Friday. “So Judas took the morsel and left at once. And it was night” (Jn 13:30). It is always night when we move away from He who is “Light from Light, true God from true God” (Symbol of Faith: Nicene Creed).
The sinner is the one who turns his back on the Lord to gravitate around the created things, without referring them to its Creator. St. Augustine describes sin as “a love of self to the point of despising God.” That is, a betrayal. A prevarication that is the fruit of “the arrogance which makes us want to be liberated from God and left alone to ourselves, the arrogance which makes us think that we do not need his eternal love, but can be the masters of our own lives” (Benedict XVI). We may understand that Jesus felt that night “deeply troubled” (Jn 13:21).
Fortunately, sin is not the last word; the last word is God's mercy. This means, however, a “change” on our part; a reverse of the situation consisting in detach from creatures to become attached to God and find again the true freedom. Nevertheless, to change to God we should not wait to become sick of the false freedom we have been using. In words of the Jesuit Louis Bourdaloue, “we would like to convert when we would get tired of this world or, rather, when the world would get tired of us.” We should know better than that. Let us make up our mind right now. Easter time is the adequate time. In the Cross, Christ opens his arms wide to all of us, nobody is excluded. Every repented thief has his place in Paradise. On condition, however, to change his life and remedy his shortcomings, like the thief in the Gospel: “And indeed, we have been condemned justly, for the sentence we received corresponds to our crimes, but this man has done nothing criminal” (Lk 23:41).