The Gospel

The Gospels are not simply a religious text in Giovanna’s conversation with Roberto; they become the point at which her questions about suffering meet his refusal to treat faith as settled or easily explained. Their exchange turns on the passion and the cross, and on what it means to encounter silence where an answer is expected.

Giovanna’s Reading and Objection

Giovanna explains that she began reading the Gospels because Roberto had spoken about them in church and made her curious. Her reading does not resolve her doubts. Instead, she objects to the story of Jesus as the son of God who performs what she considers pointless miracles, is betrayed, and dies on the cross. She presses the moral problem further: Jesus asks his father to spare him, yet God does not intervene or spare him torment. Giovanna asks why God did not suffer himself, why he placed the burden of his creation’s failure on his son, and whether doing the father’s will means draining suffering to the last drop.

Roberto’s Response

Roberto initially shakes his head, and the irony in his manner disappears. When Giovanna raises blasphemy as a possible way forward, he does not answer by forbidding doubt. He says that he likes God and would do anything, even what offends God, to draw closer to him. He advises her not to overturn everything in haste, but to wait and allow the Gospel story to say more than she presently finds in it.

Roberto’s answer makes rereading part of the exchange’s meaning. He directs Giovanna back to the Gospels’ account of the passion and the cross, identifying suffering as the element that most disorients her. His appeal is not that the text immediately supplies a clear solution, but that her present reading need not be final.

Silence, Speech, and the Text’s Significance

Giovanna answers that silence is what disorients her. Roberto points out that she, too, had been silent for half an hour before speaking. The observation gives their exchange a small, concrete turn: silence is not only the apparent absence of a divine answer but also a human interval that can end in speech.

The Gospels therefore remain unsettled in the conversation. For Giovanna, their account of suffering exposes a painful question about divine responsibility; for Roberto, the same account is a reason to continue reading rather than discard belief. The text does not close the disagreement. It gives their differing responses to suffering and silence a shared subject, and leaves faith suspended between Giovanna’s demand for an answer and Roberto’s counsel to wait.