The theologian is one who reflects on the encounter between the exodus, which is the human condition, and the advent of God, accomplished in the cross and resurrection of the Saviour, conjugating with the Cross of the Risen Lord the humble yet cumbersome cross of the suffering of our time. This is how theology speaks to our present day: the rose of the cross can only be plucked with the thorns of the present moment. The reflection that follows attempts to unite the two crosses around one simple but serious question: how Christians today are called as followers of Jesus Christ and to proclaim Him amidst the anxieties of the "post-modern" era, which the "global village", or the planet, has entered. In other words how faith in Him, which opens the eyes of the mind and heart to a theological interpretation of history, requires us to live the epochal appointment of this Jubilee 2000 so that it is not only a renewed experience of the encounter with Christ which causes conversion of life, but also the source of a new and passionate proclamation of Christ. To render account for the hope of the Cross i« the times, far from easy, in which we have the grace to live, is the great impulse which comes to us from the reflection proposed by John Paul II in the Tertium Millennium adveniente. To respond to this call means to recognize in the stigmata of our present times, the wounds of the Lord Jesus and so to actualize in them the Easter victory, the revelation of the Trinity’s infinite love.
1. Today: searching for lost meaning
a) The parabola of the modem era - of which we all are heirs - coincides with the process which goes from the triumph of "adult reason", characterized by great ambitions, to the widespread experience of fragmentation and nonsense, following the fall of the powerful horizons of ideology. The "long century", the liberal upper class 19th century, which began with the myth of the French revolution and ended with the tragedy of the First World War, was followed by the so-called "short century" (E. Hobsbawm) marked by the success of the extreme fruits of totalitarianism of ideological models and by their decline, of which the metaphor is the fatal 1989, the year of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The light - metaphor of the inspiring principle of modernity, modeled by the dream of reason able to explain everything, illuminating the world and life with the power of a concept - gives way to the night. As Max Horkheimer and Theodore W. Adorno say at the beginning of their Dialektik der Aufkldrung: philosophische Fragmente, published at the end of the Second World War, "The fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant" New York 1969, 3).
The dream which inspires the modern age’s great processes of emancipation - from those of the peoples of the so-called "third world", to those of classes exploited and races oppressed, to those of women in different cultural and social contexts - pushes "modern" man to desire a reality totally illuminated by concept, in which is expressed the power of reason. Reality must be made to bow to the power of thought: the total embrace of reason is therefore converted in totalitarianism. Nietzsche will denounce this dangerous germ calling it "desire for power": it is man’s desire to dominate life and history, and therefore also other human beings, to bend them to the demands of his own ideas. Neither by chance, nor by accident along the way, all the adventures of modem ideology, whether right or left, from upper class ideology to revolutionary ideology, have resulted in totalitarian and violent forms. The parabola of the ideologies is in this sense similar in its different formulations. It is precisely the historical experience of ideological totalitarianisms which produces the crisis of modem reason. Thought totally enlightened ends by causing*disaster triumphant. Far from producing emancipation, it generates suffering, alienation, and death.
b) If enlightened reason claims to explain everything, post-modernity offers its self as the time which is beyond the luminous totality of ideology, a time post-ideological or of the long goodbye, a time of the putting aside the totalizing violence of the idea and the decline of its presumptions. If for the adult mind everything had meaning, for the feeble thought of the postmodern condition nothing appears to have meaning. It is a time of shipwreck and fall. The crisis of meaning becomes the character peculiar to postmodern anxiety. In this time of poverty which - as Martin Heidegger observes - is the "night of the world" not because of the absence of God, but because of the fact that men no longer suffer because of this absence, the fatal illness is indifference, the loss of the pleasure of seeking the ultimate reasons for which it is worth living and dying, the absence of "passion for truth", as Fides et ratio says. This is the condition expressed in a Jewish saying: "Israel’s real exile in Egypt was that the Jews had learned to live with it". Exile begins not when we leave our home country, but when in our heart there is no longer any desire for the home country ...
This is the profile of the extreme face of the epochal crisis of the century which is coming to an end: the face of decadence (as Dietrich Bonhoeffer defines it with singular anticipation). Decadence is not the putting aside of values, it is not renouncing living for something which one thinks it is worthwhile. Decadence is the far more subtle process which deprives man of the passion for the truth, robbing him of the joy of fighting for a higher reason. Decadence tends to convince everyone of an ingenuous, universal optimism, costing little: it has no need to hold back the adversary’s negativity since it tends only to bend the adversary to its own calculation and interests, regardless of the truth. The decadent are ready to agree with everything, with everyone, in order to affirm self: decadence empties the power of value, because it is not interested in confronting it.
What we suffer most from today then is the absence of passion for the truth: this is the sad face of the postmodern condition. In the climate of decadence everything conspires to lead us to stop thinking, to flee the search and the passion for what is true, to abandon ourselves to what is immediately consumable, calculated only out of interest for immediate consummation. It is the triumph of the mask to the detriment of the truth: it is the nihilism of renouncing loving, where men flee the infinite suffering of the evidence of the void, making masks for themselves behind which to hide the despair of emptiness. In the climate of decadence, even love becomes a mask and values are reduced to mere coverings to display and so hide the absence of meaning and authentic passions: man decides for a "useless passion" (J P Sartre).
This path of the parabola of modernity, which from the inebriation of ideological passions reaches the fall of all values and the time of decadence, is the horizon of our present way of being and thinking as Christians: the "strong culture", the expression of ideology, has shattered into many rivulets of "weak cultures" in that crowd of solitudes, in which most evident is the absence of common horizons, the scarcity of "great" hopes. Each one is bent over the short horizon of his own particular interest. There where true hopes die, calculations of low condition triumph: reasons for living and living together are replaced by the claims of what is immediately useful and convenient, protest founded on short sighted interests, often obtuse and capricious. The end of ideologies appears truly to be the pale forerunner of the advent of the idol, which is the total relativism of one who has lost all confidence in the power of truth. Post-ideological culture presents itself everywhere poor in hope and great reasons: where passion for the truth is lacking, everything is possible, and even solidarism can espouse vulgar calculation...
c) The analysis of the parabola of modernity, which from the inebriation of ideological visions leads to indifference proper to the time of decadence, does not exclude signs of light and hope. There is a "longing for perfect and consummated justice" (Max Horkheimer), which reveals itself in the anxieties of the present day: it is a sort of search for lost meaning. It is not a question of "recherche du temps perdu", an operation of nostalgia, but rather a striving to rediscover meaning after the shipwreck, to recognize an ultimate horizon on which to estimate the path of that which is penultimate. The metaphor "shipwreck with spectator", chosen by Hans Blumenberg to define modernity and its results, shows at the same time how all the protagonists of present day complexity are children of modernity, the shipwrecked and the spectators of the shipwreck, and that - precisely for this reason - in them there is both the drifting and resistance against it.
It is possible to indicate a few expressions of this search for lost meaning: firstly a rediscovery of others. Our neighbor, by the simple fact of his existence, is a reason for living and living together, because he is a challenge to come out of oneself, to live the exodus without return of commitment for others, of love. Besides the "happiness of consummation" of the decadent, which desires only to reach his goal and consume it in an ever great void of meaning, there is a "happiness of production" which understands that the reasons for living are in making others happy, and that therefore we have an authentic reason for living when we have some one to love. Voluntary work, with all the complexity and even ambiguity of its forms, able to host at the same time gratuitousness and gratification, new interest for the less fortunate neighbor, growing awareness of the demands of solidarity, also at the world level, sensitivity for missionary service, can be seen as other expressions of the search for lost meaning.
Secondly, we should indicated a rediscovered "nostalgia of the Totally Other" (Max Horkheimer) a sort of "rediscovery of the Ultimate", there is a reawakening of a need, which could be genetically defined as religious, a need for foundation, meaning, ultimate horizons, an ultimate homeland which is not the alluring, manipulating and violent land of ideology. There is a new thirst for a horizon of personal meaning, able to build an ethical relationship as a relationship of love. Lastly it is possible to note a widespread need for a new consensus around ethical evidences. This is born of the need to define clearly things as they are and to do good not for the results which can come of it, but for the force of good in itself. There appears a desire to rediscover passion for the truth, love for something worth living for beyond all calculations or projects measured only by the penultimate horizon. Here too we see the true conflict at stake, the conflict between truth and the mask: despite the apparent triumph of decadence there emerge signs of a longing and a possible encounter
between our present time and the Gospel of salvation. The blowing of the Spirit is felt in this time of scarcity in the form of anxiety, expectancy, new awareness and commitment for others, for the Other, which offer reasons for life and hope. This was an intuition of the Second Vatican Council when it said that "We can justly consider that the future of humanity lies in the hands of those who are strong enough to provide coming generations with reasons for living and hoping". (Gaudium et Spes 31). The Other - ultimate foundation of reasons for living and living together - is the open question of the crisis of our present, nostalgia of the suffering of the time which we are given to live...
2. Jesus Christ: where the Other lives
For the Christian faith it is the cry of the ninth hour which pierces ideology’s totalizing closing, letting the sovereign imminence of the Ultimate break into the penultimate. Christ crucified is the place in which the Other came in fullness to reveal himself and (hide himself) for us. The encounter with the Word of the Cross frees and changes heart and life: Christ before Pilate reminds us that truth is not something which exhibits itself like a logical system or a castle of well constructed words. Truth is the Innocent one, who reaches us with the discretion of his presence of love: Truth is not something we posses, but rather Someone who possesses us in the communion of His faithful people. To recognize the face of the Other, who alone can vivify today the complexity of cultures, we must then ask ourselves what traits of Christ the Church must rediscover and witness in herseV in order to speak credibly of Him to this time of scarcity of passion for the Truth after the crisis of modernity and the arrival of postmodern anxiety, in the face of the abandonment of totalizing meaning and the appearance of a newly found longing for meaning. The Trinitarian itinerary towards the Jubilee was also a pressing call to respond to this demand...
a) In the first place the Lord Jesus offers himself as the Word which has come out of Silence, God’s exodus from himself out of love for us, the holy and living shrine, in which the Son’s otherness with regard to the Father opens us to the Trinity of God. In the theological tradition of the modern age this decisive aspect has been overlooked: the dialectic of revelation, made of opening and hiding, of word and silence, expressed in the term re-velatio (re-veil, lifting the veil and replacing it again, just as in the Greek apokalupsis), has been forgotten in favour of the idea of revelation as total opening (Offenbarung in German, from offen to open). This paved the way for the triumph of ideology, and therefore the presumption of understanding everything - including the mystery of God! - which generated a totalitarian vision of the world, matrix of every possible violence to neighbour.
The God of Jesus Christ is not at all the God of total and indiscreet manifestation: he is the God who resists being resolved in ideological formulas attempting to explain everything. To revelation we must respond not with ideological arrogance but with the attitude defined by the New Testament as the obedience of the faith (upakoe tes pisteos). Here too etymology enlightens and clarifies: ob-audire, upo-akouein, means "listening to what is beneath, behind, hidden". The response to revelation is obeying the word, as disciples of the only Word of God: but the Word is a door which introduces us to the abyss of divine Silence. This is why the encounter with Christ in the obedience of the faith is an invitation to transcend the Word towards the abysses of Silence to which it introduces, and it is therefore the radical no to any ideological reduction of Christianity. If Christianity is the religion of revelatio and obedience in the faith, it must not be made contraband with ideological or political totalising formulas, nor can it be undersold as a support for one of the forces in play in history. Faith in revelation is nourishment for permanent critical vigilance. We obey the Word by listening to Silence: "The Father pronounced a Word, who was his Son, and he repeats it in an eternal silence; so in silence this Word must be listened to by the soul" (St John of the Cross, Sentences. Thoughts of love, n 21). Therefore if Christ is the "revelation" of the Father, of Him we must speak by being silent and be silent by talking. The Church is called to a style of missionary proclamation made of presence not loud and which nevertheless evokes, irradiant in its discretion, so as to stimulate the greatest love, without violation of man’s reality or heart. A style of testimony, which confirms the word, and of a word which illuminates the silent eloquence of gestures...
b) Jesus of Nazareth offers us the gift of reconciliation with the Father by means of an ulterior twofold exodus: exodus from self to the abandonment of the Cross, and an exodus towards the Father in the power of the resurrection. Accepting to exist for the Father and for mankind, Jesus is unconditionally free of himself. In him the experience of otherness becomes freedom to love: the existence of the Son in the flesh is totally an existence accepted and given. So if there is a constant characteristic, which the Gospels emphasize about the Prophet of Galilee, it is to present him as a free man. It suffices to recall that his public life opens and closes with two great agonies of freedom: the agony of temptation and the agony of Gethsemani. What are these agonies if not being faced with a radical alternative and to exercise the choice for freedom? Augustine comments this aspect of the life of Christ and of the Christian with a powerful formula, which speaks of the great choice of freedom; "Love of self to the point of forgetting God or love of God to the point of forgetting oneself (De Civitate Dei XIV, 28). Christ is the one who made a radical choice for God, free of himself, free to exist for others.
This freedom reaches the point of exodus from self with no return, of the hour of the Cross: at the apex of his journey of freedom Jesus offers himself as the Abandoned One of the cross. In the silence of Good Friday the choice of the Prophet from Galilee reaches its summit: "In humilitate et ignominia crucis revelatur Deus" (Luther)! If we were to forget the face of the Crucified One we would forget the Gospel of His love. This same freedom he asks of his disciples to enter into the gift of divine life to carry it to the world: the Church of the Crucified One appears first of all then as a community free of worldly interests, determined not to use mankind but to serve mankind for the cause of God and the Gospel, a community which lives following the Abandoned One, ready to let itself be recognized in the gift of self with no return, even if in human terms this should prove unproductive or alienating: free from self so as to give no thought to success or gain in this world, free for God, ready to pay the highest price to live in obedience to the Lord’s will. "He loved them to the end" (Jn 13,1) means that the love of Christ is the love through which He accepts to be totally thrown towards death, abandoned for us, paying the price to the end: the Church which proclaims salvation to the world with missionary enthusiasm and passion is first of all the Church which follows the Crucified One, the Abandoned One, the "Ecclesia Crucis".
c) Lastly, Jesus is the Christ, the Risen one, the Lord of life, who lives the exodus from this world to the Father, the "reditus" to the gloria from which he came. He is the witness of God’s otherness compared to this world, the Ultimate, compared to what is penultimate, revealed as such in the judgement of the Cross and the Resurrection of the Poor One. He is the giver of the Holy Spirit, the living water that flows from the eternal sources to actualize in time the gift of God and lead mankind to the glory of the One who is all in all. "Tu solus sanctus, tu solus dommus, tu solus altissimus", sings the faith of the Church. This means that Christianity is not the religion of the victorious negative, it is and it will always be, despite everything, contrary to everything, the religion of hope and that therefore, even in a world which has lost the taste for questioning itself about meaning, Christians must have the Eternal at heart, continuing to live and to propose the passion for the saving Truth as the meaning of life and of history. To bear witness to the greatest horizon, disclosed by the liberating promise of God: this is proclaiming the Gospel of charity to the senseless restlessness of post modem nihilism. Charity is not only sharing freedom which loves or the cross which pays personally for this love, it is also the joyful and irradiant proclamation of a horizon of hope which founds life, motivates the fatigue of living. Mission is proclamation of hope that does not disappoint!
3. Following Jesus Christ today.
Reading the suffering of this era as a crisis of the false security of ideologies and relating this crisis with the revelation accomplished in the Lord Jesus, Crucified and Risen, allows us to affirm that today, as never before, Christians - committed to living and operating in this changing world - are called to explain the reason for the hope they nourish with gentleness and respect for all (cf. 1 Pt 3,15), becoming a place of eruption and presence of the Other as: a) disciples of the Only one; b) servants out of love; c) witnesses of meaning. This is the foundation of their missionary duty following the Father’s Missionary, consecrated and sent to carry the good news to the poor (cf. Lk 4, 16ss), who entrusted them explicitly with the mission of proclaiming the good news of the Kingdom to every creature (Mt 28, 16-20; Mk 16, 15-20) and realizing the grace of this Kingdom by means of the sacraments of the new life,
a) Faced with the fall of meaning, faced with a renouncing of self-questioning about meaning, believers are called first of all to place Christ at the centre of their life and their proclamation, qualifying themselves as His disciples, with a passion for His Truth, which alone saves and frees. "Come, follow me/’ is the call which sounds today more than ever for all believers, because today more than ever we must say with our life that there are reasons for living and living together and that these reasons are not in us, but in that ultimate horizon which, as faith helps us to see, is revealed and given in Jesus Christ. We must rediscover the primacy of God in the faith and therefore the primacy of the contemplative dimension of life, understood as faithful union with Christ in God, with the heart attentive to the ultimate horizon, which in Him is offered. This means living the memory of God with us, staking in him our whole life. This requires adult Christians, strong in their faith, experts in life in the Spirit, ready to explain the reason for their hope. In this sense, the greatest charity asked today of the disciples of the Lord, Crucified and Risen, is to be with our life disciples and witnesses of the One who is the authentic meaning which does not disappoint, missionaries-in-love with truth which saves. We must also be ready to renounce what may seem secure, so that God in Christ may shine at the centre of our heart, at the centre of the Church. We are asked then to live the primacy of the faith, hidden with Christ in God, and so be enabled to vivify from within with His love every action and every relation: like Francis, of which it is said in the Vita Seconda by Tomma-so da Celano, "he was not so much a man of prayer; when he prayed he was a living prayer".
b) Secondly, Christians are called today more than ever to be servants out of love, living the exodus from self with no return following the Abandoned One, building the way in communion, in solidarity particularly with the weakest and the poorest of their traveling companions. If Christ is at the centre of our life and the life of the whole Church, if He is the one to whom we cling, conquered by his Cross, enlightened by his Resurrection, then we cannot avoid the history of suffering and tears in which he came and in which he planted his Cross in order to extend over it the power of his paschal victory. The disciples of Truth who saves, are never alone: they are with Him at the service of neighbour, living in this way the company of God with us. We cannot fulfill the missionary task entrusted to us by the Master, we cannot build God’s tomorrow in the present time of humanity through solitary adventures or flights from the responsibility of service: Christians are asked to bear witness together to the possibility of being together proclaiming the Gospel on the strength of their communion and of the charity which vivifies this communion and from which it is radiated. To want to be Church, to love the Church, is to render the Church community livable, welcoming, attractive, a place in which to feel welcome, respected personally, reconciled in charity: and this is living the mission as the irradiation of the Gospel, which draws the universal pilgrimage of the peoples announced by the prophets (cf. e.g. Is 2,1-3; cf. Mi 4,1-3; Zc 8,20; 14,16; Is 56, 6-8; 60, 11-14). After Demerging from the shipwreck of ideological totalitarianism, the world has more than ever need of this charity, concrete, discreet, able to accompany life and build the way in communion, irradiating Christ the Saviour. The renewed witness to the Lord Crucified and Risen which the Jubilee demands, asks believers to offer concrete models of lived communion in which people can feel welcomed and loved, to be the image of the compassionate God. Certainly this style of service in solidarity will also mean taking a stance, denouncing: to love people concretely means also to reverse their way of acting. It is a question of putting in first place not a worldly interest or a political calculation, but the exclusive prophetic interest for the cause of the truth of Christ and His justice; in the name of this justice we must risk our life, through testimony, if necessary carrying the cross, seeking always with everyone the way in communion. The suffering of our time, the absence of hope which is the real leprosy of the soul, demands from the Church of the Jubilee 2000 bold gestures of charity significant and unequivocal following the Abandoned One of the Cross... 
c) Lastly, disciples of God only in "imitatio Christi crucifixi" faced with the sad lack of passion for truth, we are called to be witnesses of meaning, the greatest meaning of life and history, with faith in the One who has completed His exodus towards the Father and opened for us the doors of the Kingdom, as a living prophecy of God with us. This means we must love Truth and be ready to pay its price in the daily fatigue which relates us to that which is penultimate: only in this way can we be His witnesses for others. We must find again the power of the passion for the truth, on which is based, in the most authentic manner, the missionary dimension of ecclesial life. This means not simply making a choice for the meaning of our life and of history as revealed in Jesus Christ, but to offer convinced witness of hope as a service to others, with our gaze set on God who comes. This is the position of those who believe that truth has revealed itself in Jesus Christ and must be proclaimed as the way and the promise of the Kingdom. To love the truth means to long for the completion of this promise. New missionary impulse connected with "new evangelization" demands witness to the pure and powerful otherness of God, revealed in Jesus Christ, the only one who can fill our heart with hope and peace. To be ready to pay the price of this truth in all our actions is the dimension of missionary charity required, today in particular, of believers in Christ, especially on the journey of renewal prompted by the Jubilee 2000. It is a question of maturing an adult conscience, anxious to please God in everything and ready to pay the price of fidelity to Him in every decision.