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By Sister Janet Fernández
When I hear the word cross today, I return to so many experiences I have shared with people who are suffering: brothers and sisters with terminal illnesses; families facing difficult economic situations; loved ones mourning deaths caused by the violence that affects not only my country but the entire world.
Many times, I have heard phrases like: “This is happening to me because of something I did… God is punishing me… I’m paying my debt for all the wrong I’ve done.”
And I often ask myself: “When did we begin to view the cross as a silent punishment? When did it become a measure of how much we can endure, as if God were sending us trials to test our strength or to ‘pay’ for our sins?”
When I contemplate Jesus carrying his cross, a passage from the Gospel of Matthew comes to my heart: “If anyone wants to come after me, let him take up his daily cross and follow me.” Throughout my life, I have seen how these profound words are sometimes interpreted as an invitation to endure everything, to resist like beasts of burden, believing that the more we suffer, the holier or purer we will become in the Kingdom of God. It is such a deep-rooted belief that it is very difficult to change it.
But Jesus takes up the cross freely. And that freedom challenges me deeply. What did it mean for him to carry his cross? In prayer, I discover a simple and, at the same time, immense answer: Jesus carried his cross out of love. He did not do it to become holier or to be more loved by God, nor as penance or punishment. He did it because he believed in humanity, because he looked upon us with hope.
However, recognizing hope today can be difficult. How can we look to the future with hope when every day we are confronted with news of death, abuses of power, violence against women and against the earth, forced displacements, painful migrations, governments that steal the little our people have, leaving behind hunger and desolation? How can we see hope when our people no longer truly live, but merely survive?
And still, from the cross Jesus reminds me that love is freedom… but it is also hope. A steadfast hope, not naïve, not blind. A hope that does not deny pain, yet refuses to surrender to it.
Jesus carried his cross because he loved freely. So, I ask myself, how can I look at my own crosses through that same lens of love? How can I recognize, with hope, that I do not walk alone, that he sustains me through my community, my family, my ministry? How can I learn to take up my cross without looking back?
I would like to close this reflection with the words of Gustavo Gutiérrez, father of liberation theology, which profoundly illuminate this path: “Hope really is to look forward, but to act; not wait for it to come to me by chance.” Jesus found peace in the midst of pain, yet he did not look back to the past. He moved forward with hope. He acted and did not let himself be carried away by those who praised him one day and the next called for his death.
May Jesus, who took up his cross out of love, also teach us to walk with hope and to recognize in every burden the living presence of the One who never abandons us.