It is in situations like this that we can encounter the power of Jesus on the cross — Jesus Forsaken, who felt abandoned by everyone, “even by his Father.” Taking this approach will probably not make the situation easy, but it can turn it into an occasion of grace and healing. Let’s reflect a bit on how Jesus Forsaken brings hope into broken situations.
The experience made by Focolare founder Chiara Lubich and her friends of the healing power of Jesus Forsaken was not, at first, in connection with difficult people, but with other difficult situations, such as physical sickness and poverty. They reasoned out that if Jesus’ moment of agony on the cross was the one in which we could see his love for us most clearly, then our best response would be to love him precisely there, at that moment when we find him in his greatest suffering.
Chiara and her friends also discovered that this effort to love Jesus in such situations brings about a result so wonderful that she often referred to it as a “divine alchemy” that transforms suffering into love.
Jesus came to seek out and save those who were suffering and dying, as well as those who were lost because of sin, and to make himself one with them. Therefore, we can see as an appearance of Jesus Forsaken every situation of suffering of any kind, whether in ourselves or in others.
However, we may find ourselves recoiling at the thought of applying this kind of logic to someone whose behavior seems so un-Christ-like. How can I “love Jesus” in someone who seems so difficult, and sometimes maybe, even wicked? Well, Jesus has come into this world precisely to unite himself to this very person, and to us as well!
So we can begin first, to see the person through the eyes of Jesus, and second, to see the person as Jesus himself: not by mere similarity but by Jesus’ own expressed desire to identify himself with all those who are far from him.
Who, indeed, is more qualified to be included among those Jesus calls “the least of these brothers [or sisters] of mine (Mt 25:40)” than someone who is so unhappy as to live in bitterness, who seems to cause pain even deliberately? That person may seem the farthest from the goodness of God that we can imagine at that moment; but even if this were true, the person farthest from God is precisely the one on whom God has set his eyes and with whom Jesus identifies as he cries out on his cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mt 27:46).
So if we want to live especially for Jesus Forsaken, meeting with such a difficult relative is one of our key moments! To live this moment best would mean maintaining the will to love the other despite the bitterness, and even because of it.
Of course, it would be inhuman to love the bitterness for its own sake, just as it would be to love bodily suffering and death for their own sake. It is not these things but Jesus whom we love in such moments — Jesus in himself as well as Jesus in this difficult relative.
If we live this moment well, then a word of bitterness will be answered by us with a gently spoken word of caring, and a manifest desire and concern about hearing this person’s feelings, understanding his or her thoughts and knowing what their deepest desires are.
Certainly, in the process, we sometimes learn that we are not so proficient at Jesus’ way of thinking and acting either! Harsh words sometimes provoke harsh responses from us, especially when our first attempt at loving the other person has not yet cracked their tough shell.
When this begins to happen, it may be necessary to step away from the scene before things escalate, to avoid being swallowed up in the cycle of bitterness and even fueling it ourselves — despite our best intentions.
Another pitfall to be avoided is the temptation to “use” Jesus Forsaken as a tool for making things better instead of simply loving him in the moment. We may have experienced many times how loving Jesus Forsaken in difficult moments has transformed those moments miraculously, so that we expect to be able to employ him as a sort of push-button mechanism to make things better again. Then when the button seems to malfunction when pushed, we easily fall back into the cycle of bitterness.
But we cannot “use” Jesus Forsaken to fix people or things; we simply love him where we find him and let him be the one to do the healing and transforming.
