15th February 1944.
23 Jesus says:
«You contemplated the sufferings of My spiritual agony on Thursday evening. You saw
your Jesus collapse like a man struck mortally, who feels his life flee through the
wounds bleeding him, or like a person overwhelmed by a psychic trauma exceeding his
strength. You saw the growing phases of the trauma culminate in the shedding of blood
brought about by the circulatory unbalance that had been provoked by the effort of
controlling Myself and withstanding the burden that had fallen upon Me.
I was, I am, the Son of the Most High God. But I was also the Son of man. I want this
double nature of Mine, equally complete and perfect, to emanate very clearly from
these pages.
My word, which has accents that only a God can have, bears witness to My Divinity .
My necessities and passions, and the sufferings that I show you and I suffered in My
flesh of a true Man, and that I propose to you as an example for your humanity, as I
teach your spirits with My doctrine of true God, bear witness to My Humanity.
Both My most holy Divinity and My most perfect Humanity, in the course of ages,
through the breaking up action of “your” imperfect humanity, have resulted disparaged
and distorted in their explanation. You have made My Humanity appear unreal,
inhumane, as you have made My divine figure look small, denying so many parts of it,
because it was not convenient for you to recognise them or that you could no longer
recognise with your spirits impaired by the tabes of vice and atheism, of humanism, of
rationalism.
I am coming, in this tragic hour, a prodrome of universal misfortunes, to call My
double-figure of God and of Man back to your minds, so that you may know it for what
it is, you may recognise it after so much obscurantism, with which you have concealed
it from your spirits, and you may love it and go back to it and save yourselves by means
of It. It is the figure of your Saviour and he, who knows it and loves it, will be saved. The
In these past days I have made you acquainted with My physical sufferings. They
tortured My Humanity. I have made you acquainted with My moral sufferings, as
connected, interlaced, blended with My Mother's, as are the inextricable lianas of the
equatorial forests, which cannot be parted in order to cut only one, but it is necessary to
break them with a single stroke of a hatchet to force one's way through, killing them all
together; just like the veins of a body, one alone of which cannot be deprived of blood,
because only one liquid fills them all; better still, as it is not possible to prevent the
creature that is forming in its mother's womb from dying, if its mother dies, because it
is the life, the warmth, the nourishment, the blood of the mother that, with a rhythm
responding to the movement of the mother's heart, penetrates through the internal
membranes, as far as the baby-to-be, making it a complete living being.
She, oh! She, My pure Mother, bore Me not only for the nine months during which
every woman bears the fruit of man, but for all Her life. Our hearts were united by
spiritual fibres and they always beat together, and no motherly tear ever fell without
leaving a trace of its salt on My heart, and there has never been any internal moaning of
Mine that did not resound in Her, awakening Her grief.
You feel sorry for the mother of a son destined to death by an incurable disease, for the
mother of a man condemned to death by the rigour of human justice. But think of My
Mother Who, from the moment She conceived Me, trembled considering that I was the
Condemned One, think of this Mother Who, when She gave Me Her first kiss on the
delicate rosy flesh of Her new-born baby, felt the future wounds of Her Child, think of
this Mother Who would have given Her life ten, a hundred, a thousand times to prevent
Me from becoming a Man and arriving at the moment of the Sacrifice, think of this
Mother Who was aware of and had to desire that dreadful hour to accept the will of the
Lord, for the glory of the Lord, out of kindness towards Mankind. No, there has been
no agony that lasted longer and ended in a greater grief than My Mother's.
And there has been no greater and more complete sorrow than Mine. I was One
with the Father. He had loved Me from eternity as God alone can love. He had taken
delight in Me and had found His divine joy in Me. And I had loved Him as a God alone
can love, and in My union with Him I had found My divine joy. The ineffable relation-
ship that ab aeterno ties the Father to the Son cannot be explained to you even by My
Word, because while it is perfect, your intelligence is not, and you cannot understand
and know what God is until you are with Him in Heaven. Well, like water that rises and
presses against a dam, I felt the rigour of the Father grow hourly towards Me.
As evidence against brute-men, who did not want to understand who I was, during the
time of My public life, He had opened Heaven three times at the Jordan, at the Tabor
and in Jerusalem on the eve of My Passion. But He had done that for men, not to give
relief to Me. I was already the Expiator.
Many times, Mary, God makes men become acquainted with one of His servants, so
that through him they may be roused and dragged to Him, but that happens also through
the suffering of that servant. It is he who, by eating the bitter bread of God's rigour,
pays personally for the comfort and salvation of his brothers. Is it not so? The victims
of expiation know the rigour of God. Then comes the glory. But after Justice has been
appeased. It is not the same as happens with My Love, that kisses His victims. I am
Jesus, I am the Redeemer, He Who has suffered and knows, by personal experience,
how painful it is to be looked at by God with severity and be abandoned by Him, and I
am never severe, and I never abandon anyone. I consume just the same, but through the
fire of love.
The more the hour of expiation approached, the more I felt the Father move away.
The more I was separated from the Father, the less My Humanity felt it was supported
by the Divinity of God. And because of that I suffered in every possible way. The
separation from God brings fear, attachment to life, languor, tiredness, boredom. The
deeper it is, the stronger are its consequences. When it is total, it leads to despair. And
the more he who, by God's decree, experiences it, without having deserved it, the more
he suffers, because the living spirit feels the excision from God, as live flesh feels the
excision of a limb. It is a sorrowful prostrating stupor that one, who has not
experienced it, cannot understand.
I experienced it. I had to know everything in order to be able to plead with the Father
for everything in your favour. Even for your despair. Oh, I experienced what it means
to say: “I am alone. Everybody has betrayed and abandoned Me. Even the Father, even
God no longer assists Me.” And that is why I work mysterious wonders of grace in
poor hearts overwhelmed by despair, and I ask My beloved ones to drink the cup of so
bitter an experience, so that they, those who are shipwrecked in the sea of despair, may
not decline to accept the cross that I offer as anchor and salvation, but they may grasp at
it and I may take them to the blessed shore where only peace reigns. On Thursday evening, I alone know whether I needed My Father! I was a spirit
already in agony because of the effort of having to overcome the two greatest sorrows
of a man: to say goodbye to a beloved mother, to have an unfaithful friend close by.
They were two sores that scorched My heart: the former with Her tears, the latter with
his hatred.
I had to share My bread with My Cain. I had to speak to him in a friendly manner in
order not to denounce him to the others, as I was afraid they might react violently, and
in order to avoid a crime, which in any case would have been useless, as everything
was already written in the great book of life: both My holy Death and Judas' suicide.
Any other death was useless and disapproved of by God. No other blood but Mine was
to be shed, and was not shed. The halter strangled that life, shutting up his impure
blood, which had been sold to Satan, in the filthy sack of the traitor's body, blood that
was not to be mixed, falling on the Earth, with the most pure blood of the Innocent.
Those two sores would have been sufficient to make Me suffer agony in My Ego. But I
was the Expiator, the Victim, the Lamb. A lamb, before being sacrificed, experiences
the red-hot brand, it suffers blows, it endures being shorn and sold to a butcher. And
finally it feels the cold of the knife that cuts its throat, bleeds it and kills it. First it must
leave everything: the pasture where it was brought up, its mother at whose breast it was
nourished and warmed, the companions with which it lived. Everything. I, the Lamb of
God, experienced everything.
That is why Satan came, when the Father was retiring in Heaven. He had already
come at the beginning of My mission, to tempt Me in order to divert Me from it. He
was now coming back again. It was his hour. The hour of the satanic sabbath.
Crowds and crowds of devils were on the Earth that night, to accomplish the seduction
of hearts and make them willing to request the killing of the Christ the following day.
Each member of the Sanhedrin had his own, Herod had his, so had Pilate, and every
single Judaean who would invoke My Blood upon himself. Also beside the apostles
there were their tempters, who made them drowsy while I was languishing, and who
prepared them to be cowardly. Take notice of the power of purity. John, the pure
disciple, was the first among all of them to free himself from the demoniac claws, and
he came at once near his Jesus and understood His unexpressed desire, and brought
Mary to Me.
But Judas had Lucifer, and I had Lucifer. Judas in his heart, I beside Me. We were the
two main characters of the tragedy, and Satan was attending personally to both of us.
After leading Judas to the point from which he could not withdraw, he turned towards
Me.
With perfect artifice he showed Me the torments of the flesh with unsurpassable
realism. Also in the desert he had started from the flesh. I defeated him by praying. The
spirit dominated the fear of the flesh.
He then showed Me the uselessness of My death, and the usefulness of living for My
own sake, without worrying Myself about ungrateful men, leading a rich happy life full
of love. Living for My Mother, ensuring that She did not suffer. Living so that by
means of a long apostolate I could take back to God many men, who, if I had died,
would forget Me, whereas, if I had been their Master not for three years, but for many
many years, would end up by becoming one with My doctrine. His angels would help
Me to seduce men. Could I not see that the angels of God were not intervening to assist
Me? Later, God would forgive Me seeing the crowds of believers that I would lead
back to Him. Also in the desert he had tried to convince Me to tempt God through
imprudence. I defeated him by praying. The spirit dominated moral temptation.
29 He showed Me My abandonment by God. He, the Father, no longer loved Me. I was
laden with the sins of the world. I disgusted Him. He was absent and was leaving Me to
Myself. He was surrendering Me to the mockery of a cruel crowd. And He would not
even grant Me His divine comfort. I was alone, all alone. In that hour there was but
Satan near the Christ. God and men were absent, because they did not love Me. They
hated Me or were uninterested. I prayed to cover the satanic words with My prayers.
But My prayer no longer ascended to God. It fell back on Me, like stones of lapidation
and crushed Me under its rubble. My prayer, that had always been for Me like a caress
given to the Father, a voice that ascended and was answered by a fatherly caress and
word, was now dead, heavy, uttered in vain to a closed Heaven.
I then tasted the bitterness of the bottom of the cup. The flavour of despair. It was what
Satan wanted: to lead Me to despair, to make Me a slave of his. I overcame despair and
I overcame it only with My power, because I wanted to defeat it. Only with My strength
of a Man. I was nothing but the Man. And I was nothing but a man no longer helped by
God. When God helps you, it is easy to lift even the world and hold it up like a child's
toy. But when God does not help us any more, even the weight of a flower is a burden
to us.
I defeated despair and Satan, its creator, in order to serve God and you, by giving you
the Life. But I became acquainted with Death. Not with the physical death of
crucifixion – that was not so dreadful – but with the total conscious Death of the fighter
who falls after triumphing, with a broken heart and blood pouring out of him in the
trauma of an effort exceeding all endurance. And I sweated blood. I sweated blood to be
faithful to God's will.
That is why the angel of My sorrow showed Me the hopes of all those who have
been saved through My sacrifice, as a medicine for My dying.
Your names! Each name was a drop of medicine instilled into My veins to invigorate
them and make them function, each of them was for Me life coming back, light coming
back, strength coming back. During the cruel tortures, to avoid shouting My grief of
Man, and in order not to despair of God and say that He was too severe and unjust to
His Victim, I repeated your names to Myself, I saw you. Since then I blessed you. Since
then I have carried you in My heart. And when the time came for you to be on the
Earth, I leaned out of Heaven to accompany your coming, rejoicing at the thought that a
fresh flower of love was born in the world and would have lived for Me.
Oh! My blessed ones! The comfort of the dying Christ! My Mother, the Disciple, the
pious Women were present at My death, and you were there as well. My dying eyes
saw, with the tormented face of My Mother, also your loving ones, and they closed
thus, happy to be closed because they had saved you, who deserve the Sacrifice of a
God.»