John, highlights how God sent His Son Jesus into the world not to condemn it, but to save it through Him.
Francis so loved the Crucified One and for Him and in Him the Cross on which He was confined for the salvation of the world, that he received the gift of the stigmata.
Made like Christ, therefore Alter Christus. He had always fixed in his mind the Gift of the Father to humanity, in the Son.
The Sources illuminate in this regard:
"And we give thee thanks, because as thou hast created us through thy Son, so by thy holy love, with which thou hast loved us, thou hast brought forth the same true God and true man from the glorious ever-virgin most blessed Saint Mary, and, by the cross, blood and death of Him hast willed to redeem us from slavery" (FF 64).
And again: 'For he said that nothing is more important than the salvation of souls, and he proved this very often by the fact that the only-begotten of God deigned to be hung on the cross for souls [...] He did not consider himself a friend of Christ, if he did not love the souls He loved' (FF 758).
"One morning, as the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross approached, while he was praying on the side of the mountain, he saw a figure like a seraphim, with six wings as bright as they were fiery, descending from the sublimity of the heavens [...] He came close to the man of God, and then there appeared between his wings the effigy of a crucified man, who had his hands and feet spread out and confined on the cross [...He understood by divine revelation the purpose for which divine Providence had shown him that vision, that is, to make known to him in advance that he [...] was about to be transformed wholly into the visible portrait of Christ Jesus crucified [...] by the fire of the Spirit" (FF 1225).
Passing through pain and death would be the triumph of Life. A Cross blossomed in the Paschal Mystery.
"For so God loved the world that he gave his Son, the Only Begotten, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have the life of the Eternal One" (Jn 3:16).
Exaltation of the Holy Cross (Jn 3:13-17)
