AN INVISIBLE BEAUTY
by Ottavio De Bertolis
After having stated that the whole of Scripture speaks to us of the Heart of Christ, since all of it reveals to us who He is, showing all of us his Heart through his words and his gestures, we can observe that some pages put before us almost physically the his Heart. We really want to start selecting some of them, to go deeper into what we have been talking about for some time now in these pages. We cannot help but start from the chapter. 19 of the Gospel according to Saint John, from which the well-known episode of the "transfixion" is taken: "one of the soldiers struck his side with a spear and immediately blood and water came out" (Jn 19, 34).
As is known, the entire spirituality of the Sacred Heart is grafted here: in the history of the Church we can say that all the faithful have been strongly impressed by it, as countless images of this episode and many pages of the mysticism of all times testify to us. We note that there is no mention of "heart", in the physical sense of the term: it is certainly alluded to, but the text speaks of the "side" of Christ, and this certainly refers to the image of Adam, put to sleep by God in the earthly paradise, from whose side Eve was born: thus from the new Adam, who is Jesus Christ, asleep in the death that had entered the human race through the first Adam, the Church is born. It is evidently a nuptial image: between Christ and the Church there is the same bond that existed between Adam and Eve, between a man and a woman. Christ is the husband of the Church because he gives himself for her, to her, and gives her her body: the Eucharist is the body of Christ that He gives to us every day. Let us therefore see how many symbols are hidden behind a single verse: spousality, which means that the love of Christ is that of a husband, and that his Heart is fully revealed as the heart of a husband, in love until death, and the 'Eucharist, the body broken in the breaking of bread which makes present on our alters that body that was pierced and that blood that was shed. Moreover, the text clearly says: "immediately blood and water came out." Beyond medical considerations on the serum produced during the Passion which must have looked like water coming out before the blood (and which is well testified by the linen of the Shroud in one of its most eloquent images), since ancient times the holy Fathers saw in these two words a clear reference to Baptism and the Eucharist. In fact, if the allusion to the Eucharistic blood is evident, it is also true that those who have been baptized into Christ have been baptized into his death, according to Saint Paul (Rom 6,3:XNUMX). Baptism is an immersion in that living water that flows from the Cross, it is like entering a tomb of water in which our old man drowns and from which our new man re-emerges, the man clothed in Jesus Christ and feelings of him. From here we see how the spirituality of the Heart of Christ leads us not only to writing, as it is born from it, but also to the Liturgy: in fact the Christian experience is "whole", in such a way that individual prayer cannot be divided from the community one, meditation from the celebration. But we will see how many other symbols are summarized, so to speak, in these brief words of the evangelist.