'The Trial of Separation' - Charles Journet

 

                 'The Trial of Separation'

                     - Charles Journet

 

When death comes to take away a child there is heartbreak. But when the mother can have pride in her son, when she hears that he died in a desperate attack or for a noble cause, she finds consolation in the praises that wreathe his memory.  Her sorrow is not an unmixed grieving.

     But if with her own eyes she sees her son mocked, beaten, spit upon, what is there that can lighten her suffering? In such a moment she will ask one favour only, to be allowed to be near her son to protect him with her tenderness.  This favour Our Lady was not granted. And it was her Son who refused it.

     The episode is in the third chapter of St Mark’s gospel.  Jesus had not chosen His Apostles.  He had driven out demons and had begun to preach the Kingdom of God.  Crowds thronged about Him. He entered a house.  The crowds gathered there likewise, so that they could not even take their food.  “And when His friends had heard of it, they went out to lay hold on Him.  For it was said:  He is become mad.  And the scribes who had come down from Jerusalem said: ‘He hath Beelzebub and by the prince of devils he casteth out devils’.

     Thus the scribes looked upon Jesus as one possessed; but many thought He was merely mad.  “They said,” or “It was said: He is become mad.” Who said this? Not His relations, presumably. Certainly not His Mother. But His relations and still more His Mother were anxious.  They knew that He was alone, exposed to the ill-will of the people and the hatred of the scribes.  For that cause they came.

     Poor Mother!  She knew the bite of a new sort of suffering.  Up till now it had not occurred to her that the salvation of the world required that her Son, who was Wisdom Incarnate, should be treated like a madman, and that He in whom the word of God dwelt ineffably should be accused of being possessed by Beelzebub. These insults, these blasphemies were a new note in her heart’s agony.  She knew that her Son felt them likewise and that His heart was bleeding under them. For she knew that within the house, where the scribes had come, He sought to justify Himself before them: “How can Satan cast out Satan? And if a kingdom be divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand.”  He was alone against them all.

     She longed to enter, to take Him away with her, to show Him that her heart at least was faithful, to strain Him to her breast if He would allow her.  “His Mother and His brethren came.  And standing without, sent unto Him, calling Him.  And the multitude sat about Him.  And they say to Him:  behold thy mother and thy brethren without, seek for thee.”

     It was a moving moment, but Jesus was not moved.  He had been bearing the harshness of His enemies: yet the moment He meets tenderness, the moment He becomes for His Mother an object of compassion, in that moment He seems to grow harsh Himself. It almost seemed that He scarcely deigned to notice that poor maternal love that was offered to Him, that frail refuge that she would have made for him. “And answering them He said:  Who is my mother and my brethren?”  In that place these words seem hard, even cruel. What is the mystery contained in them?

     What that mystery is, He proceeds to show: “and looking round about on them who sat about Him, He saith, Behold my mother and my brethren.  For whosoever shall do the will of God, he is my brother and my sister and my mother.”  Beyond the bonds of  natural relationship appear the bonds of a new relationship, spiritual and outshining the first as the sun outshines the light of tapers. Natural relationship is not denied.  The bonds that bind husband and wife, parent and children, master and servant, still remain. Indeed, they are immeasurably ennobled (Eph. V. 21-vi. 9). But above them are the bonds that bind the children of the Kingdom in a mysterious, more intimate kinship; and these are more precious and more profoundly interior to us, are beyond the power of time and relate us to each other by what is closest in us to God.  Because this is so, the bonds of natural relationship become illicit and must be trampled underfoot whenever they so act upon us as to weaken the spiritual relationship: “If any man come to me, and hate not his father and mother and wife and children and brethren and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple” (Luke xiv.26). The saints are under no delusion as to what Our Lord means, as we shall see.

       Can it then have been that Our Lord’s kinsfolk had come to Capharnaum to dissuade Him from preaching - that, under the impulse of too earthly an affection, they were trying to deflect Him from the mission entrusted Him by His Father in heaven, of founding the Kingdom

     Yet how magnificent these privileges become once we grasp that they are the efficacious sign, the instrument, of the highest graces.  Our Lady’s motherhood according to the flesh, with all the agony and renunciation it demanded, becomes immeasurably more splendid when we know it as the cause of the purest love ever granted to a creature. Completed by Jesus’ answer, the words of the great-hearted woman of Galilee begin to reveal the fullness of their meaning. Thus, the Church can repeat them.  In the Mass ‘Salve sancta Parens’  (of which the gospel is taken from this same passage of St Luke), she joins them to those of Our Lord.  She repeats them at the Communion, when Christ enters into us to communicate to us sacramentally a little of that love which on the day of the Incarnation he communicated to the Virgin in such abundance: “Blessed is the womb of the Virgin Mary which bore the son of the eternal Father!”  By setting down here, in a more perfect light, the acclamation of the unknown woman, the Church continued to fulfil through the ages the Virgin’s prophecy: “Behold from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed” (Luke i. 48).

     A sword shall pierce her soul, and all generations should call her blessed – blessed because in the likeness of her son, she bore suffering and desolation in their fullness.

     Is the interpretation we have given of the passages of scripture concerning the Blessed Virgin necessarily the true one?  Is it certain that Jesus, under the external semblance of repulsing His Mother’s tenderness, was actually binding her to Him still closer by an interior love and associating her with Himself in the work of redemption?  An episode which took place at the beginning of His public life but which we have held in reserve till now, seems to put the matter beyond question.  It is the episode at Cana (John ii. 1-11).

                          MARRIAGE FEAST AT CANA  -  Gerard David 1456

There was a marriage in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there.  And the wine failing, those who were giving the feast were ashamed. Jesus’ mother saw this and said to her Son: “They have no wine.” Verbally, this was a mere statement of fact. Actually, she was asking for a miracle.  Then came Our Lord’s mysterious answer:  “Woman, what is it to me and to thee? My hour is not yet come.” The literal translation is as we have given it – What is it to me and to thee? The bearing of this phrase, used to this day by the Arabs in Palestine, is roughly expressed by the words “Leave it to me”. The whole meaning depends upon the tone in which the phrase is uttered – it might signify impatience or rebuke or indifference.  In the present instance, all three of these possible implications are negatived by the event.  But they can also bear within them great tenderness, signifying: “Do not be disturbed, I have seen all, all is well, leave it to me.”  And it was thus that Jesus spoke to His Mother.

     He called her Woman, as at the hour when He was nailed to the cross (John xix. 26) – a word of reverence, for He was speaking to her as God in regard to a solemn matter, one that went beyond the framework of family relations, for it touched upon the destiny of the Kingdom of God.

     It reads as though Jesus was quite clearly refusing the implied but unspoken request of His Mother.  He did it with great gentleness and He gave her His reason – that the hour for the inauguration of His public life of preaching and miracles was not yet come. The meaning seems perfectly clear:  Mary must trust in Him without reserve, must leave the whole matter entirely in His hands: and so, indeed, she had done from the beginning.

     But here what seemed so clear is suddenly cast into darker mystery. Jesus had just told His Mother that His hour was not yet come, and she acted as if He had said the reverse.  She seemed to take the miracle for granted.  “His mother said to the waiters: Whatsoever he shall say to you, do ye.”

     Here is the key to the mystery. If there had not been the prayer of Mary, the hour fixed from all eternity for the inauguration of Jesus’ public ministry would have come later, and Jesus, who was to accredit the message He bore to men by signs and wonders, would have awaited some other occasion to manifest Himself – would have made a paralytic walk, or given sight to a blind man, or cleansed a leper.  This is what Jesus Himself was affirming when He told His Mother that in this sense His hour was not yet come. But at the same moment, by a secret illumination with which He filled her heart, He willed her to know that from all eternity the hour of His public ministry had been advanced because of the humble prayer she had just uttered.  There is profound tenderness, an infinite delicacy of love half-hidden under the mystery, restraint and even, as some readers feel, coldness of the words recorded by St John.  Marvellous, too, the power of the Virgin’s prayer. A thought of her heart, a word uttered by her with the desire to relieve the mildest of human embarrassments – the thought and the word were foreknown from all eternity, and from all eternity the hour was set forward at which Jesus should begin the public preaching of the Kingdom of God. Nothing so great has ever been said, or ever will be said, upon the might of her intercession as the gospel story of the miracle of Cana. It was the hour of Mary’s power.

     The Virgin had all power over the heart of her Son. She had done His will too utterly for Him to refuse to do hers – Voluntatem timentium se faciet (Ps. cxliv. 19) – the Lord will do the will of them that fear Him with the loving fear of a child for its father. And in fact Jesus speaks: “Fill the water pots with water."

And they filled them to the brim.  And He said to them:  "Draw out now and carry to the chief steward of the feast ----- This beginning of miracles did Jesus in Cana of Galilee and manifested his glory.  And his disciples believed in him.”  It was to the intervention of the Virgin that they owed their belief in Him thus early.

     Mary was close to her Son in the bond of love. But at the same time, the suffering of separation, which had lain in her heart from the day the Child had slipped away from her in Jerusalem, began to grow and did not cease its growing from the moment when His public life opened.  That suffering held supreme tests in store for her.

  Ack. 'The Mary Book', published Sheed and Ward, 1950

    

    

The First Three Sorrows of Our Lady - C.C. Martindale S.J.

 

The First Three Sorrows      -    C.C. Martindale  S.J.

“The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me.”   Genesis  iv.  10.

 

Eve, so named because she was “Mother of all living” (Gen. iii. 20), became for that very reason, Mother too of all who should die.  When – the first Mater Dolorosa – she held upon her knees the murdered body of her son Abel, she stood at the head of a long history of Death, which, so far as human bodies go, is not even yet completed.  Indeed, Abel was seeming to her just then her only son; for though Cain was alive, he had fled; she could not see him: she knew nothing save that he was “in the land of wandering”.  As for Cain, he foresaw well enough that he had originated a tale of vengeance – “whosoever findeth me, shall kill me!”

            But even for him, in the hour of his despair, God provided at least this consolation – he and his race should not be exterminated: nay, on anyone who should kill him, vengeance should be wreaked “seven-fold”. Yet also, even this became the occasion for a sneer and for new bloodthirstiness in that tainted race.  His descendant Lamech made a song:

 

‘As for me, I will slay a man for merely wounding me!                                 Yes, a young man for so much as bruising me!                                                  If Cain shall be avenged seven-fold,                                                          Then Lamech, seven and seventy- fold! '

 

And ever since there has been in our wretched world a race of the violent and the outcasts – of Cains, and Ishmaels, and Esau’s.                

But to Eve a better consolation was appointed.  She bore another son, and called him Seth, exclaiming: “God has given (or assigned) me another seed instead of Abel”, for Seth is assonant to the word sath, “assigned”.  So once more Eve became Mother of the Living.

            Life, Death, and Life may be said to be the history of Mary, too, albeit there was no sin in her. 

            You may say that Our Lady’s self-sacrificial life began when she made (as we cannot but believe that she did) her decision to remain virgin. This certainly involved, for her, the renunciation of any hope that she should be Mother of the Messias.  The prophecy of Isais did not create or perhaps even witness to a general tradition that the Messias should be born of a virgin. The humble child experienced the inspiration thus to dedicate herself wholly to God, and, obedient as ever, as ever His handmaiden “whose eyes are upon the hands of her mistress”,  she listened to the heavenly prompting and was content to wait, to hope and to pray, and would have given the most unselfish homage to the Messias’s Mother, should she have been allowed, someday, to meet her. She was happy in her self-sacrifice:   but it was a “whole burnt offering” of herself and her future that she made.  No more extreme instance of so losing one’s life that one finds it!

            The episode of the Visitation must have been one of pure ecstasy: but, had it not been that Mary   “waited”   thus “upon the Lord”, and interposed no conditions of her own upon the sequence of events, the period of St Joseph’s bewilderment must have been agony, and even Bethlehem a very shadowed joy, seeing that she can hardly but have felt that He had   “come to His own , and His own received Him not”.

                                               

     First Sorrow.  

  But, with that alternation of pain and consolation which, we saw, was God’s method from the outset, the Presentation in the Temple made up for that, at least for a moment.   Ample, indeed manifestly miraculous, was Simeon’s recognition and acceptance of the Child he took up into his arms: how, amid all that throng, could he have singled out the working man and his young wife and her Baby, save by divine illumination?  And magnificent indeed was the prophecy of his Psalm!  But at once the shadow fell again. Turning to Mary herself, he said:

            “This Child is set to bring about the fall, as well as the uprising, of many in Israel – to be a Sign, but a Sign that shall be contradicted - that so the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed – yes! - and thine own soul a sword shall pierce!”

            We have placed Simeon’s parenthesis after the words that follow it in St Luke, for clearness’ sake.  Simeon had most clearly foretold the Messiah-hood of Mary’s Son – that He should be a light for the Gentiles no less than a Glory for the Jews.  But His victory was to be no more than partial. Not all would receive that Light nor walk in it.  While some should rise and stand upright because of Him, others should fall because of Him, and thus should be revealed that most mysterious thing -  the innermost “set” of the soul, obscure till some shock or challenge brings it to light:  St Luke’s word dialogismio  means more than ‘thoughts’; it means the whole mental movement; the putting this against that and the assessing of the result:  the Child could not but become a sign: something set up high and inevitably noticed: but some would say this about it; some that.  In a thousand ways Mary’s heart should be pierced as by a sword: her love for her people, which was God’s people: her anguish when she should watch them rejecting their Saviour:  her love for her Son and her desire to see Him universally triumphant; and her resignation to God’s Will, which did not intend to coerce human wills so as to ensure that universal triumph: her longing that her little Child should be happy, and, her perception, ever growing, that He was marked for  Martyrdom: yes, and that she, inseparable from Him, would have to share in that which we now know to have been Calvary.

                                                          

'Mother and Child'   -  Montagna

 Second Sorrow

            The months went by (perhaps a year or more) a breathing–space. Then came the strange joy of the Magi’s visit, followed forthwith by the news that in direct consequence of that visit Herod was seeking the Child’s life.  The Holy Family fled:  true, Egypt was not far: its northern part was full of Jews who even had a sort of model temple there.  Mary and Joseph would have found their own talk, customs, and compatriots.  And they were safe.  But apart from the tormenting anxiety of the actual flight, and the heartbreak due to the murder of the Innocents of which echoes may easily have reached her, it must have seemed bewildering to Mary that already the “Sign” was being spoken against – humanly speaking, everything seemed to be going wrong.  Even when Herod died, and they felt safe in returning to Bethlehem (where I think Joseph had meant to go on living), they were too frightened to stay there once they heard that Herod Archelaus had inherited Judea. He was a worse monster even than his father. So they returned to Nazareth.

            Even there, life was no suave idyll.  When Jesus was about ten years old, the turbulent north-country Galileans made a raid on an armoury of Herod Antipas at Sepphoris, visible from the hillcrest over Nazareth.  The Romans, to make an example, crucified two thousand men of that townlet and the neighbourhood.  Jesus and Mary must have been accustomed throughout their lives to the sight of men dying upon crosses.

 

   Third Sorrow

            But a true turning-point was imminent.  Jesus seems to dissociate Himself from these two souls who loved Him so dearly. The Holy Family went yearly to Jerusalem for the Pasch.  Jesus was now twelve years old – on the eve of coming “of age”.  When the caravan returned, He was not to be found.  The first stage of such a pilgrimage is said to have been short:  next morning, therefore, they were back in Jerusalem, hunting in anguish for Him.  Not till the next day did they find Him under the Temple colonnades where Rabbis held classes and taught the scriptures to children.  And there was Jesus, “listening and asking questions”. When they on their side catechised Him, “they were all of them out of themselves” at the intelligence shown by His answers.  But when His parents saw Him, they were “thunderstruck”, and Mary said: “Son, why have you done so to us? Your father and I have sought you in anguish!” But He said:  “How was it that you sought  Me? Did you not know that I must be–it was My duty to be–in My Father’s House?”  X   “Thy father and I?”–No: God was His Father.  The house at Nazareth? -No: His native home was God’s House – the Temple.

X   The Douay version has “about My Father’s business”.  The Greek phrase might mean either.           

            Ack. 'The Mary Book' published Sheed and Ward 1950.