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.
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.
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