It's Easter Beyond all evil

The disciples' Easter experience and the wisdom of one of the most beautiful parables found in the Gospel of Matthew remind us that forgiveness is the fruit of a redeemed, clear, and farsighted memory. As Simon Weil teaches, it means renouncing, first, the right to a certain permanence and, second, the presumed right to compensation for every effort, labor, suffering, or desire. In fact, our debtors are all beings, all things, the entire universe: "But all the credits we believe we have can be traced back to an imaginary credit from the past to the future. It is this imaginary credit that we must renounce. To have forgiven our debtors means to have renounced the entire past. It means accepting that the future is still virgin and whole, rigorously linked to the past by ties unknown to us, but completely free from those bonds that our imagination presumes to impose on it. It also means accepting the possibility that the future will come to pass, and in particular that anything may happen to us, and that tomorrow will render our past life sterile and vain.

It is about dying to the past—especially the glorious or at least beloved past—as the Lord Jesus does on the cross when, amid the torments of his suffering, he finds the strength and glory to say with the candor of an invincible innocence: "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do" (Luke 23:34). The Lord Jesus dies not only without a past, but, with the very broad gesture of his forgiveness, he decides to die to the past. This living dying is already the insurrection of the resurrection, which has the flavor not of revenge, but of ultimate fulfillment. The Lord dies praying and forgiving. In this way, he transmits to us the secret of a successful life, which does not consist in finding oneself sheltered from failure, but in learning to die free from every useless burden of unresolved bonds and unresolved issues. This journey toward great liberation begins with the feeling of owing nothing to anyone, because every debt of gratitude and unresolved issues has been forgiven. Asking for the forgiveness of debts, committing to do the same, frees us from resentment, regret, and the poison of bitterness, thus allowing us to "move beyond" (Exodus 12:13) and find ourselves far beyond our "unfinished business."

Jesus' prayer testifies to his life and death as faith in God and trust in humanity. All this is revealed in compassionate forgiveness during the "days of his earthly life" (Hebrews 5:7) and is fully manifested in the forgiveness of the Crucified One, which becomes the forgiveness of the Risen One. In the Paschal forgiveness of the Crucified-Risen One, there is no longer any contamination between his freedom and the evil he has suffered: only forgiveness can accomplish this. When a ship has a leak, it must be sealed, otherwise it sinks. Forgiveness has this ability to prevent the shipwreck of the hope of being able to love always and in any way. In the Paschal experience of Christ Jesus, the isolation of evil is perfect in the sense that his forgiveness closes the gap of death before it threatens one's choice to love unconditionally. The evil that Jesus endures in his Passion does not undermine the resolve of his heart, which remains whole in the desire for boundless and unconditional love.

Brother Michael Davide Semeraro
Benedictine monk, prior of the Abbey of Novalesa
NP April 2026