"...for you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man." Later, Peter will understand the profound meaning of pain and sacrifice; he will feel joyful alongside the other Apostles to have suffered on account of the name of Jesus8.
We Christians know that our salvation and the path to Heaven lie in the loving acceptance of pain and sacrifice. Is there ever a fully fruitful human life without suffering? "Are spouses sure of their love before having suffered together? Is friendship not strengthened through common trials, or simply by having endured the heat of the day together, or by having shared the fatigue and danger of a climb?"9. To rise with Christ, we must accompany Him on His way to the Cross: accepting setbacks and tribulations with peace and serenity; being generous in voluntary mortification, which purifies us interiorly, makes us understand the transcendent meaning of life, and affirms the mastery of the soul over the body. As in apostolic times, we must bear in mind that the Cross proclaimed by Jesus is a stumbling block to some, and seems foolishness and nonsense in the eyes of others10.
Today, we also find many who do not set their minds on the things of God, but on the things of man. Their eyes are fixed on the things down here, on material goods, upon which they rush without restraint, as if they were the only real and true things. Humanity suffers from a wave of materialism that seems intent on invading and penetrating everything. "This contemporary paganism is characterized by the pursuit of material well-being at any cost, and by the corresponding forgetfulness—it would be better to say fear, sheer terror—of anything that might cause suffering. From this perspective, words like God, sin, cross, mortification, eternal life… become incomprehensible to a great number of people, who are ignorant of their meaning and sense"11.
The hedonistic ideology, according to which pleasure is the supreme end of life, particularly saturates the customs and ways of life in more economically developed nations, but it is also "the lifestyle of increasingly numerous groups in poorer countries"12. This radical materialism stifles the religious sense of peoples and individuals; it directly opposes the doctrine of Christ, who invites us once more in the Gospel of the Mass to take up the Cross as a necessary condition to follow Him: *If anyone would come after Me*, He tells us, *let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me*.
God counts on pain, on voluntary sacrifice, on poverty, on the illness that arrives without warning… All of this, far from separating us, can unite us more intimately with Him. We go to Jesus next to the Tabernacle and offer Him everything that we find difficult and burdensome, verifying how "through Christ and in Christ, the enigma of pain and death is illuminated"13. Only then will we lose the fear of suffering, which, in very different ways, will accompany us throughout life, and we will know how to accept it with joy, discovering in it the loving will of the Lord: "this has been the great Christian revolution: to transform pain into fruitful suffering; to make a good out of an evil. We have stripped the devil of that weapon…; and with it, we conquer eternity."
HCD