Freedom is looking for. Enzo Bianchi and "The freedom of the Christian according to St. Paul"

Report held by Enzo Bianchi*, prior of the Bose community, to the cycle of meetings "Freedom is looking for"** On February 26, 2008, unbuttoning not revised by the author made by Carlo del Kairos group of Florence

The theme of the path you are doing concerns freedom and in particular the freedom in Paul - the apostle par excellence - and it is not an easy theme, above all because in Paul this theme presents sometimes different paths that intersect, that yes They overlap, sometimes they also seem to contradict themselves. I will try to reflect with you in a very simple way, well aware that the theme is very large and would deserve, beyond what I say, but I can't do this evening; Above all, it would deserve that we stop on the history of the exegesis of freedom in San Paolo, because this is one of the themes - let's not forget - which also marked the great theological turns in Christian history, and I would like to remember for everyone what this theme was at the time of the reform , where above all the Paolini of freedom texts have had a great eloquence and force, such as to reinterpret Christianity in Protestantism, in a new way compared to how it was interpreted until then in western Catholicism.

I begin simply by remembering that the faith of Paul, the faith of Israel, the faith that we know above all through the Scriptures of the Old Testament, places a salvific event of Liberation at the center, the Easter event. The Easter event is the center of the faith of Israel, and Easter is intended as a "getting out of" to "enter".
Leaving a condition of slavery to enter a condition of freedom. This lapidary phrase of Rashi, the great medieval Jewish commentator, seems important to me: “For us Easter is a transition from the Ivodah - Schiavitù - to Hetrut - freedom - to reach the Avodah Adonai, to the cult at the service of the Lord ".
But, I still remind you, that in the ancient rabbinic comment on the exodus that is reread in the Pasquale Seder, it is written: "You will make this Easter day a day of celebration, because it is the day my son Israel passed by darkness to light, from the yoke of iron to life, from slavery to freedom ".

Here then, simply by remembering the centrality of the liberation event in the faith of Israel, we can understand how Paolo, a son of Israel, who inherited the faith of the Fathers, could have understood that there is an event of liberation, Easter , which was fully accomplished in the Easter event of Jesus of Nazareth, the one that Paul confesses how the Kirius, the Lord, and Paul has perceived that Christ now - use his words - is our Easter, the immolated Christ - I refer to the expression in the first letter to the Corinthians. And then the liberating event of Easter is the death of Jesus, which means our liberation and therefore produces a condition of freedom.
All Paul's writings have as its central point the confession of the Easter of the Lord Jesus; Indeed, perhaps we do not realize it, but Paolo actually summarizes and recalls the whole life of Jesus, all his action and preaching, summarizes them in the event of death and resurrection.

In vain you would seek Paul of the hints at the birth of Jesus; In vain you would seek hints to his life, also to his preaching. Paolo summarizes everything in the great mystery of the death and resurrection of the Lord. And consequently in all his writings Paul speaks of the liberation made by Jesus and therefore speaks of the condition of freedom that derives from it, but it is above all we can say in the letter to the Galatians, and especially to the fifth chapter, that Paolo stops, reflects, meditated, on the vocation of Christians to freedom.
Kertelgel was able to say that Paolo is the apostle of freedom and that the fifth chapter of the letter to the Galatians is the Magna Charta of the freedom of Christians. But there are many references to the condition of freedom also in the letter to the Romans, in the first and second letter to the Corinthians. The theme was also within the Deuteropaoline letters and, consequently, it is a theme that is Paolino par excellence, although sometimes it is a theme developed by the posterity of those who have re -attributed their disciple in later letters of the apostle, But which bring its authority as a header.

Here I would like to understand in a very simple way what to Paul the freedom, the Eleuterìa and what the condition of the Christian believer who is free, Eleuteròs, means. First of all, I think it should be affirmed that in the Christian faith there is a unique liberator who is certainly God but certainly his liberation action has been accomplished and brought fullness by his Son, Jesus Christ, the envoy of God, unique and definitive Mediator of salvation, therefore of liberation.
And this is the Concorde message of the whole New Testament. I remember very similar phrases and that are instead within different traditions. In Giovanni: "If your son will make you free, you will be truly free". Or Paul: "Christ has freed us for freedom" (Gal 5, 1). And again in Paul: "Where there is the Spirit of the Lord, there is freedom" (2Cor 3, 17).
And this liberation took place through the death and resurrection of Jesus: "Jesus crucified is our liberation" (1 Cor 18, 31). And that death on the cross, death in ignominia, death in solidarity with sinners, death of the one who was cursed by God and men - anatèa - well this cross is the event that sealed the love of Christ all Extreme, love lived for men and for God in total fullness.
At the end of wisdom in the Old Testament he insists that he remains the great enigma in front of everyone of death; Death as an event from which liberation is expected, but on which the writings of the Old Testament do not yet arrive at an explicit announcement.

Well for Paul, on the other hand, precisely because of the event of the death of Jesus, then, death was won; The sin of God's enemy man was destroyed, and man becoming a son of God, lives a condition of freedom.
Liberation event is the cross-resurrection, and therefore for Paul Jesus Christ it was the Goel-this was the title given to God on Easter night, the exit from Egypt. God the redemption, the Goel; But it is Jesus Christ now who deserves this title and who must be confessed as a liberator of Christians.
The event of the cross, we know, has been read in a multiple way in the New Testament, there is not a single reading of that event. It is died as a price of redemption. It is the sacrifice of the servant, of the AVED Adonai, for the remission of the sins of the rabbis and multitudes. But it is also solidarity with sinners, expressed above all by the presence of the crosses with Jesus, and by the condemnation of the legitimate authority of the high priesthood, concerning Jesus as a blasphemous blasphemer. And also requires human, so - in an unfair world - the right can only be condemned and cut from the land of the living.
But in every reading path that we do around the event of the Cross, the outcome of that event is always a liberation, so that believers, those who in faith and in the celebration, indeed, in participating in the Easter mystery, Well they are called to a condition of freedom.
But then let's ask ourselves: what were we freed from? And if freedom is the opposite of slavery from which slavery, from what enslavement, have we been taken out of Jesus Christ with the Easter event?
First of all Paolo sees this exit from the land of slavery, this liberation from alienation, as a liberation by law. And this surprises us, a hard language appears to our ears because it comes to us from the apostle that, first of all, Jesus freed us from what had been given by God to Israel, the Torah, the teaching, the law.

When you read Paolo, the recurrent controversy against the law is striking: "Christ was born to redeem those under the law" (Gal 4, 5). And he is still repeated in the Deteuropaolina tradition in Ephesians: "Christ with his death has suppressed the law with all his precepts" (EF 2, 15). But, Paolo declares it to the Romans in a lapidary way, and we could multiply these quotes: “Christ is the end of the law (Rom 10, 4). Liberation of the law given by God for Israel in Moses.
What does this mean? Here, I think it is not easy to understand it, we must confess it; But it is certain that liberation from the law means no longer depending on the law to be Christian, both because it is impossible to man fully observing the law - therefore Paul says: "We are all transgressors from the law, therefore all guilty" (Gal 3, 10) (but above all in Romans)-both because the law provides the believer the risk of boasting in his compliance, ending up camping merits against God (1Cor 1, 29-31; Rom 3:27).
Christians are no longer under the law, says Paul, but under grace, that is, they are under the free love of God that directly makes everyone, everyone forgives through endless love and without borders, the love that is been manifested in Christ who dies on the cross.
There is above all a song that if we meditated in the letter to the Romans chap. 5 is certainly one of the most scandalous songs, in my opinion the song that most recites the madness of the cross.
You will remember it. Paolo writes: “While we were sinners Christ died for us. While we were enemies of God, God reconciled us through Christ with him ".

You see, Paul places us in front of the simultaneity between our enmity towards God, our rebellion towards God, our sin that is contradiction to God and, simultaneously instead, the love of God for us, free love that saves us and saves us Without the law, this is the regime of grace.
"Jesus - Paul says - was born under the law" - from the Jew (Gal 4, 4) and we know how Jesus had observance of the law but Jesus, precisely because he was born under the law, wanted to travel the path that the law It provided to be cursed by law, because: "The law cursed - says Paolo - the one who was hanging on the wood, the one who was crucified". And Paolo is pleased, noticed, of this scandalous event.
I try to decode because I am convinced that we Christians have ever taken seriously that Jesus died as cursed by God and men.
We say that his death was a sacrifice and this fills us, to some extent, of a spiritual and mystical fulfillment. But the death of Jesus is the antiSacrifying par excellence according to the law.
Jesus died in an impure place; He died outside the city and the letter to the Jews says: "He died in ignominia and shame". And we go out of the camp to meet him out and share his infamy. Jesus made an infamous death, Jesus was crucified and Paul, you know, especially in the first letter to the Corinthians, as protest that he has known only Christ and Christ Crucified. But the crucifix was hung on a pole to say that the earth did not want it and not even God wanted it: it is the most terrible death of the sinner, that of Jesus, the anti -seacrifice par excellence. In the nakedness of a frightening shame: for the Jews it is blasphemy of blasphemies.
It would be enough to read again the echoes of the controversy between Jews and Christians with Rabbi Tarphon (Trifone) and Giustino on this theme of the condemnation on the cross and of the scandal that even the Messiah can suffer a ignominious end of those who are cursed by God and men.

“Jesus-Paul says in Gal 3, 10-13-has made one of us sinners (anathema, excommunicated) and so we can say-and here I am a paraphrase-that in this condemnation suffered in the name of the law , Jesus won the law and made us free by law. It is for freedom, therefore, that Christ has freed you (Gal 5, 1). Extraordinary affirmation because certainly in the letter to the Galatians it was an invitation to Christians not to return to the ancient slavery of the law and Paul concludes, especially in a chiasmus; "But you have been called to freedom", always in chapter 5 verse 13.
But here is a discernment operation: to be freed by law, does it mean to be freed from the commandments? Does it mean that one can do everything he wants?
Certainly the risk of understanding Paul so there was. This, on the other hand, was the freedom of the Greek cultural world. We find an expression in Dione Boccadoro who plays: "Whoever can do what he wants is free, who cannot do what he wants is slave" (Orationes 64, 13). We ask ourselves: does it mean that everything is possible? And that there is no longer a principle of behavior? Paolo himself repeats several times: absolutely not.
And it warns: the freedom achieved does not turn into an pretext to live according to the meat, it is not turned into apharmè, which is the launch base for an effectiveness of self -centered existence, filautics, marked by the love of themselves.
True freedom, in part, had already understood the Greeks while thinking about it in individualistic and perhaps only intellectual terms, is always marked by virtue, by the Aretè.

"Only the wise is truly free, because she recognizes that she had to obey the law," says Epitto. And therefore the stoic thought. And then Filone, contemporary of Jesus: "The man who lives rightly is free".
But in Paul and in Christianity, this freedom is not reducible to independence and autonomy of the individual no longer forced from the outside and his inclinations, from what he suffers, the passions; Second epitty: "Freedom bears the name of virtue". Instead, it is offered as a gift from Christ and becomes a responsibility for love and service.
Freedom is not slavery but it is service. This game of words still resonates that all the rabbinic tradition does, when it talks about liberation from slavery for a service. Freedom is never without others, but it is a responsibility for others, to be a love for others. Freedom is not a possible choice between good and evil, true freedom is the ability to choose in freedom and for love.
I would like to emphasize this, because for me it is one of the most important knots on which all Christianity lies: the possible answer that Christianity demands from each of us, whether it is an operation of faith or hope or charity, this which gives the basis is that it happens in freedom and for love.
Allow me this digression, they are simple things: anyone of you have an ear and listen to the eucharistic prayers of the whole Church, the foundation of Easter is in freedom: "Freely laid down the arms", "freely went towards the passion, for the love of the men". At the time of the Eucharistic celebration of all rites, of all churches, in all the anaphore it emerges that the death, the Easter of the Lord, took place in his freedom and for the love of God and men. But this is the condition in which we can experience the freedom that was brought to us by the liberation of Christ.

Those who choose love and reject hatred is the free man. We certainly are facing oxymorons, in which freedom is called what seems to oppose: in Christianity the language of the cross asks us precisely this understanding.
Not only liberation from law, but also liberation from the "powers".
But still: liberation from what? Here is Paolo does not speak ... and from the meat. Died for our sins, offering his life to his father, because our sins were put back, Christ freed us from the other powers, as well as by the Exusia of the law. He freed us from the fatal influences of the powers of the air, the dominant ones that are present and permeate our world.
For Paolo, but for all Judaism, and in any case especially in the New Testament, there are powers, Exusie. Paolo sometimes even from a whole series of names by taking them from the world, especially of the angelic powers of the inter -setting. That is, there are real powers: Paolo comes to say in 1 Cor 8, that there are real theoi and real Kirioi, real and real gentlemen, even if for us there is only one God and one Lord. Powers who live in the universe, who exercise their influence on us men and all creation.

Well with his death and resurrection Jesus has disarmed these powers; That is, Jesus won what the power par excellence, the devil, in reality with his ministers had as power and Christ has freed us from this power.
And if these powers act on us and in us, it is mainly due to the flesh: this too is a difficult expression Pauline, the Sarx, because Christ wanted us to free us also from the power of the meat.
We are meat. Attention! This does not indicate that we have a body, this is positive. But we are meat and not only in the sense that we are fatal, but in the sense that we suffer this influence that establishes us in a situation of revolt, of enmity towards God (Rom 8, 7-8), but also in a situation In which the selfish will of living without others prevails in us and also against others.
Precisely in our condition of the flesh, the spiritual intent of the law was shipwrecked (Rom 7, 10 - 8, 3). Just in the flesh we sin, fail and contradict our relationship with God and our relationship of justice with the brothers.

Here then the sin as an alienation experience known by all men. We have all sinned. We are all without the glory of God, writes Paul in Rom 3, 23, and so each of us is forced to confess - with an expression that echoes Ovid, but that is really much stronger: "I don't do the good I want, But the evil I don't want, I do "(Rom 7, 19). And Paolo explains it again: "But if I do what I don't want, it is not me that I act but it is the sin I lives in me".
Here is the tyranny of sin, here is the slavery of the flesh that puts us in an old man's condition, and Paul uses the expression: "sold to sin" (Rom 11, 32). But precisely from this tyranny Christ has freed us, because he made us die with him to sin and placed us in a condition of new creatures.
Death to sin or freedom from sin are real events, for Paul, that we live above all in baptism, which is a dying with Christ to be reborn to a new life. And this is a conscience that with difficulty has imposed itself within the Christian community. Baptism, be careful, is not so much a washcar possibly as a fault, as above all a being immersed in the death of Christ to be recalled to new life with him and resurrect with him. This is truly Paolino. And the great developments that we have again in Deuteropaolo, especially in Colossians and Ephesians, are due, I would say, in this centrality of Paul who sees how we participate in the saving event of the Easter of Christ, especially with the celebration of baptism.

We, involved in faith and sacramental experience, are involved in the affair of Christ: we live with him, we died with him, we are buried with him and we are risen with him. Or rather: no. We are not resurrected: we will certainly be with Christ called to a resurrection similar to his (Rom 6, 1-14).
The Christian is therefore freed from the slavery of the flesh, as by an old man and, as a new creature, lives in Christ and with Christ. And yet the Christian is not irreproachable because he continues to know the experience of fall and sin, the experience of enmity with God.
But the justifying action of God is an effective action and that does not fail, nor can it be made ineffective by the sins that the Christian commits: because above all, the Holy Spirit - which is the Spirit of Christ - is melted in the hearts of Christians, It performs and completed the work started in baptism; and therefore renews the possibility of liberation, liberation from selfish autonomy, efilautic, which is the subjectivity of sin.
Therefore, the Christian is not even asked for self -employment, a path of perfection: the Christian according to Paolo is never told: "You must!". But he is told: "You are!".
And he is only asked to prepare everything so that the Spirit of the Lord can act in him and, therefore, the liberation energies of the crucified and risen Christ can constantly lead him to freedom.

The Holy Spirit is the power and strength of Jesus Christ who, present in us because he donated, leaves us freedom as a dimension and as a force that can determine us. In short, the freedom of Christ blows towards us and since there is the Spirit there is freedom (2cor 3, 17), then we are constantly regenerated by the spirit to freedom.
Here, I believe it is important to understand freedom not as a condition acquired simply with the event of baptism. This is in root, but then there is a dynamic in which we are constantly made free. You know that there is an extraordinary saying of the fourth century which is above all narrated as an apoptem of the desert fathers. “What do you do monks? What is specific to your vocation? ". But I believe it can be said: "What is specific to the Christian vocation?". And the response of this essay Apoftegma Syrian is: “We fall and get up. We fall into sin and get up. We still fall into sin and get up, because the spirit gets up ".
It is the dynamic of freedom and Christian liberation. But, here, it will be enough that we let ourselves be guided by the Spirit and then, says Paul we will be children of God. It will be enough that we let ourselves be guided by the Spirit and then we will be enabled to say Abba to God, dad (Rom 8, 15). It will suffice that we let ourselves be guided by the spirit and we will be without shyness, but we will even be able to pray with the moans of the spirit, which establishes us in a firm communion with the Father and with Christ.
And in this freedom to God that we should also exercise ourselves to a frankness, to Parresìa - this word, dear to Paul - to say the freedom and frankness of the Christian before God. Be careful: Paul says that we Christians, now , thanks to the Spirit we live a condition of Parresìa in front of God, we are not afraid, we are faced with God. But above all we must know how to exercise it in the world, and above all in the face of the powers to the Arcontes, the Dominators. of this world.
Yes, Paolo does not only have the term, certainly the most eloquent, of Eleuberia to say freedom, but also Parresìa is a term that echoes it. Freedom that should never be beaten!

Remember freedom, do not beat it, not even in the Church; Because freedom is practiced and nobody wonders to be free, not even to the authority of the Church, not even to the Arcovas of this world. This is decisive for the Christian. And we know that Paul, since conversion, has been able to speak with Parresìa of Jesus.
All his preaching, the acts insist, was a preaching with Parresìa: freedom before God, freedom before the same authorities of the Church, for which Paul dared to place himself in Pietro's face, when Pietro was unable to Parresìa And it was in the wrong (Gal 2, 21). Freedom in front of the powerful of this world, kings, governments, judges. Yes, behaving with Parresìa, talking to Parresìa is necessary to manifest and exercise that Christian freedom that has been given to us and that would be really serious sin to contradict.
Finally, liberation still from what? In Paolo, as indeed throughout the New Testament - we can say - Liberation is not there, if not even from death.
Therefore, only those who are freed from death, will be truly and totally free. If the Christian faith lives on the good news of the evangel, that is, of the news of the resurrection of Jesus from death, then his announcement can only be that of liberation from, what Paul calls, "the last enemy" that for now not It is still destroyed, if not in Jesus Christ, but which will be annihilated forever by him, on the day in the glory of the Son of man.
Yes, on this liberation from death we must grasp how already now, thanks to the faith and thanks to the new creation of which the Christian is part, there is an effective action of the resurrection that occurred once and for all in Jesus Christ, who is living Lord that it no longer dies. A liberation action in hope; A liberation action that for now, however, we do not know in all its reach, because we continue to die. We die and die next to us those who were for us, those who lived with us.
It is true, we continue to die, we continue to know that the last enemy for now wins us and we confess, however, that Jesus Christ has already won it on the third day when he was recalled by the Father by death.
Well I allow myself here to remember, the letter to the Jews in chapter 2, verses 14 and 15, where it is declared that: "Jesus has become a participant in our flesh and blood, to reduce the death through death, the one who of the Death is the power, that is, the devil and thus freeing those who, for fear of death - Fobo Tanatos - were subject to alienation, to slavery for a lifetime ".

Look, this is a song on which little is reflected, but for me it is the key to truly understanding from what we are freed. I repeat because since it is not a known song and has its own difficulty, if someone has escaped all its reach. I emphasize the novelty and I dare say, only here, in the New Testament there is this announcement: “Jesus has become a participant of our life, fully flesh and blood to reduce impotence, dying, the one who is the power of death , the Devil and free those who, for fear of death, - Fobo Tanatos - were subject to slavery for life ".
Look that this is an indication that, among other things, reaches - perhaps today we understand it better, thanks also to the kit we have of human sciences. That is: there is a fear of death that is the first cause for which we are alienated.
Try to ask you these questions: why are we bad? I do them in everyday and non -theological language. Why are we bad? Or with a little more theological language: why do we sin? ASK IT REALLY.
Because there is a reason why we are bad; And it is the reason, that we know or not, but that we are under the slavery of death. We are afraid of dying. But be careful, not the fear only of the event: because that fear of the event, allow me to say, hardly have the twenty -year -olds and the thirties, the forties. Then he begins to come and when you are my age you know better. The fear of death in us and in depth and who asks us to live against others and without others.
After all, within an anthropological reading of the dominants of sin because we, in the end, do we want to live in an erotic dimension at any cost? I say it in the sense of eros, not in the spley sense. Because we are convinced like this, not only to celebrate life, but to increase our life.
Why are we attacked by Libido Possidendi? Because we have the more we have weapons against death. Why are we taken from Libido Dominandi? Because the more we dominate, the more we are alive and the more we move death.

Whether we want it or not this is the law that is even inside - allow me to say - of all that phenomenon - and I don't want to enter the paths with science, I hope you understand me - but that we call the law of evolution , in which the tendency is to live without others and against others at the cost of taking life to others, because we are afraid of death. A deep, deaf, secret fear that we are not always able to look in the face.
But the letter to the Jews highlights it: we, our alienation. Note, that in Paolino language, slavery is always slavery of sin. Here are slaves, we are alienated for this fear of death. The fear of death is truly slaveizing: indeed death is the king of fears, according to a more veterotherastical expression - in Job to chapter 18 Versetto 14. And it is the root of all our fears: and it is precisely this slavery due to the fear of death which becomes instigation to Filautia, to the love of ourselves.
Then we understand the words of Jesus: "Whoever wants to save his life will lose her but those who lose his life, in reality, finds it".
Yes, the fear of death is instigation to Filautia, to selfishness, to live without others and also against others.
The fear of death is the one that instigates us to paths that contradict the relationship, the communion, the shared responsibility. The fear of death is the cause of sin and evil that we commit. Yes, then of course, the letter to the Jews also says it, at the head of this instigation there is the power of the devil, but the devil would not act without this possibility of fear of death.
What was on the other hand - sorry for the reference but to give you, given perhaps the novelty for Akcuni of this - but what was the fault before the first men. "If you eat this fruit you will not die, but you will live forever." The old dream is only one, who is in us. Then moved by fear, we men, we want to preserve ourselves, our life, we want to live without others and against others, or using others. We want to possess for ourselves and everything, we want to dominate on others.

This is the sin that we are pushed into our lust to live, to counteract death. Here is our slavery on the paths of death, of our Filautia, who does not choose communion, but chooses one's life to be kept at any cost. But faith in the resurrection of Jesus, faith in eternal life, the hope that death is no longer the last enemy, is no longer the last word, to make us free from the fear of death.
Sad yes. Grieved by death. We are absolutely not asked for a situation in the face of the death of apathy. But not crushed by the power of death. Paolo is the one who invites us to sing, echoing Isaiah, but going further: “Oh death, where is your victory? Oh death where is your sting? " (1Cor 15).
We can be sure, however - says Paolo - that death no longer has the last word, it does not have the last victory. And the last victory, Paolo says, has love. At the end of this hymn, and then in chapter 8 of the letter to the Romans, he says: "Nothing can separate us from the love of Christ. Neither death, nor life, nor powers. Nothing can separate us ”. So if nothing can separate us from the love of Christ, here we can do not the experience of the resurrection - no! We are careful: we are men who live in light, not of vision, but of faith, says Paolo in the second letter to the Corinthians. We have not yet risen with Christ, but we can live by starting to experience not being afraid of death.

It is significant, and you know it, that the first Christians loved to call themselves those who are not afraid of death. That is, free from slavery, capable of communion, because on every occasion, in life, in illness, in violent death, in death at the end of life, they know that the victory is given to love, that love of Christ from which there is no We can separate. That love that Paul, inside the ANO to love in 1 Cor13, says: "He will remain forever". Because faith will disappear at a certain point, hope will disappear; Love, on the other hand, will not disappear. And of course Paolo does not arrive at that summit of John in the first letter to the fourth chapter that comes to say: "So God is love". But without this lapidary declaration which is the summit, certainly there Paul tells us, if love remains, it is like saying, the living God remains that it is love.
Conclusion: Christian life is truly in the sign of freedom, freed for freedom, called to freedom.
But, I think you understood, that this freedom is nothing but libertinism! Nothing more demanding than Christian freedom, because the Christian is free for the service; It is free for communion; It is free to live with Christ and with all those who are in Christ Jesus.

It certainly appears extremely eloquent in Paul to have perceived, perhaps the only author of the New Testament, to have perceived that Christ has meant an event of great struggle between love and death.
Do not forget the song of the Canticles, which is significant, has a great value but not so much for the events in my opinion and the ventures that are before between the two boys, but because their love story finds in a final verse the whole His strength and justification: “strong as death is love. Tenace like Sheol is love. " Where is said what Greek thought also understood, Eros and Tanatos, who if there is a true enemy of death is love.
Here you see: in Christ love has won death. And be careful, I really conclude. When we say that Christ is risen, you Christians do not stop, and above all you do not answer that Christ is dead and risen because he is the son of God. It is too short a message, that nobody can receive today. The real message is that Christ, having loved to the extreme, having been love, he won death.
The reason for the resurrection lies in love lived by Christ. Not simply because he was the son of God: too short message that he would say nothing to non -believers and would say: "It is a message that does not concern us!".
But if those who have won death is the love and love lived by a man, Jesus Christ, then this message concerns everyone, also the other Christians. So we can say with Paolo: "What will separate us from this love?". Nothing, not even death, for which Christ has freed us, and in hope we believe that we will be freed with him.

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* Enzo Bianchi He is founder and prior of the monastic community of Bose. Former director of the Biblical Magazine Word, Spirit and Life, he is a member of the editorial staff of the international magazine Concilium. He is the author of numerous texts, translated into many languages, on Christian spirituality and on the great tradition of the Church, always taking into account the vast and multifaceted world of today. He collaborates in La Stampa, Avvenire and places of infinity.

** We publish for the first time the unbuttoning of the contributions presented to the cycle of meetings "Freedom is looking for"(Florence, November/April 2008), which attempted a reflection at 360 degrees on freedom, faith and society. Six meetings, on a monthly basis, in which witnesses of our time such as the Prior of Bose Enzo Bianchi, Gian Enrico Rusconi Editorialista de "La Stampa", Sergio Givone Professor of Aesthetics, Mariagrazia Contini Pedagogista, Luigi Lombardi Vallauri professor of philosophy of law e Elmar Salmann theologian at the Pontifical Gregorian University of Rome, tried to trace new paths of life and thought.
An initiative conceived and wanted by the dissolved group of Christian training "Villa Guicciardini" in Florence, consisting of children aged 18 to 35, with the collaboration of the Culture Office of the Archdiocese of Florence and with the unpublished and unofficial help of Various Florentine Catholic realities. The initiative then considered too open, by some conservative sectors of the Florentine church, was no longer repeated despite the great response received. This is the underground of the interventions, edited by Kairos group for the group of "Villa Guicciardini" in Florence.