'The Last Four Sorrows' of Our Lady' - Charles Journet

 

'The Last Four Sorrows of Our Lady'

Charles Journet

 

                      Fourth Sorrow

 

This was Mary’s sufferings while Jesus was making the way of the cross.  Pilate had delivered Jesus to the Jews.  The Roman soldiers had taken Him to crucify Him.  The custom was to make the condemned man carry his own cross.  No exception was made for Jesus: “And they took Jesus and led him forth.  And bearing his own cross, he went forth to that place which is called the place of the skull, in Hebrew, ‘Golgotha’ ” (John xix.16-17).  But they soon saw that Jesus was too weak and that he might die under the load. When, according to the Synoptic gospels, they were outside the town, “they laid hold of one Simon of Cyrene, coming from the country, and they laid the cross on him to carry after Jesus” (Luke xxiii.26). After that Jesus did not carry His cross.  He walked before the others on the road to Calvary. And, says St Luke, “there followed him a great multitude of people and of women, who bewailed and lamented him.  But Jesus turning to them said: Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not over me; but weep for yourselves and for your children” (Luke xxiii.  27-28). Let us pause at the fourth sorrow.

     Beyond the rabble of men and women, there to mock at Jesus, drawn to where He was by hatred and evil instinct,  there were a handful of women, some of whom doubtless had known and loved Him, their hearts filled with pity.  Among them was the Virgin.  She made no effort, as once at Capharnaum, to draw near her Son to protect Him.  Her natural love was by now utterly broken and offered up.  It was not for her to approach Jesus with consolation.  She of all people must respect the lonely dereliction in which the world’s salvation must be wrought.  She wept, then, hidden among the women.  And when Jesus stopped to speak, she knew from the beginning that for her He would have no word.  It was to the women of Jerusalem that He spoke.  He did not wish that they should weep for Him.  He wished for no natural consolation. Let them weep for themselves and their children.  But the Virgin, who wept in the midst of them – for her Child she had no need to weep.  She must weep for other women’s children, for the children of those who were bringing her Son to His death. She had accepted fully, totally. But she must be broken anew, her nature more utterly crushed.

     At that moment her task took on a new sublimity.  She wept for the sins of men, she suffered not for herself but for the world’s salvation. Her suffering bound close to His, was a co-redemptive suffering. She learnt what new regions of suffering love must seek out for itself if men were to be snatched from the terrible rigours of suffering that lay in wait for them.  What these rigours were Jesus lets us glimpse in one lightning flash of revelation.  To reveal the significance of the Passion, He draws aside for an instant the veils of the present and, in a phrase which is a supreme admonition of His love, lays bare before us the measureless demands of divine Justice.  “For behold the days shall come, wherein they will say: Blessed are the barren and the wombs that have not borne and the paps that have not given suck.  Then shall they begin to say to the mountains:  Fall upon us.  And to the hills: cover us.  For if in the green wood they do these things, what shall be done in the dry” (Luke xxiii.  29-31). If divine justice requires such suffering of the innocent, what does it hold in store for the guilty?  If to make its fire it will take the green wood, how shall it spare the dry?

     At that time the Virgin Mary knew the mysterious immensity of the Redemption.  On the one hand she saw all the extent of the world’s sins, and on the other the intensity and the infinite value of the sorrow at whose cost they were atoned.  In the steps of her Son, she descended still further, with all her being, into the depths of the redemptive suffering.

 

                        Fifth Sorrow

 

     Death was to break the last of the natural links still remaining mysteriously to bind the Virgin and her Son. “And when they were come to the place which is called Calvary, they crucified him there” (Luke xxiii. 33). “Now there stood by the cross of Jesus, his mother and his mother’s sister, Mary of Cleophas, and Mary Magdalene” (John xix.25)

Mary was at the foot of the cross whereon her Son was crucified.  This was the fifth of her sorrows.

     Mary stood at the foot of the cross. She showed no weakening. She was not upheld by the holy women.  On the contrary, in that moment she was upholding the whole Church by the irresistible upward movement of her love, strong as death. Standing erect she heard the Seven Last Words that came down from the height of the cross into the desolation of her heart.  Stabat Mater Dolorosa.

      Mary was close to the cross, but she made no move to embrace it.  She remained a little away. In that last hour above all she must remain, in spite of her love, separated from her Son. When He cried out “I thirst”, it was not she, but the soldiers who, putting a sponge full of vinegar about hyssop, put it to His mouth (John xix. 28-9).

     It might seem that she had now given all, that there was no more to be stripped from her.  But Jesus required of her one last separation more agonizing than all.  To lose her Son, she must not wait till He was dead.  Whilst He still lived He must break once for all the last bond of that purest of natural love that He felt rising toward Him from the foot of the cross.  It was His will to die poor, without even a mother.  From now she must accept that another should be the object of her maternal tenderness. “When Jesus therefore had seen his mother and the disciple standing whom he loved, he said to his mother: ‘Woman, behold thy son’” (John xix. 26)

     For John the words were a joy unspeakable.  But to Mary they were shattering.  Of course she loved the disciple Jesus loved. But what an exchange.  “For Jesus,” cried St. Bernard, “she was given John: for the Lord, the servant;  for the Master, the disciple; for the Son of God, the son of Zebedee; for the true God, a mere man.” In the same sermon St Bernard tells us that “It was sharper than a sword, it pierced her very soul, unto the division of soul and spirit … Be not amazed, my brethren, if it be said that Mary knew martyrdom in her heart.”

     Yet she remained erect at the foot of the cross. She was still there, when the soldiers, having broken the legs of the two thieves, came to Jesus: “When they saw that he was already dead, they did not break his legs.  But one of the soldiers with a spear opened his side: and immediately there came out blood and water” (John xix. 33-34). At that moment the suffering of the Saviour was at an end, the world’s Redemption was accomplished. But the co-redemptive suffering was not ended; it must go on till the day when, under the pressure of a love that grew without ceasing, body and soul came to the separation of death. In the deepest depths of her soul, Mary felt the thrust of the lance. It was the crowning agony of the fifth sorrow.

 

                          Sixth Sorrow

“And when it was evening, there came a certain rich man of Arimathea, named Joseph, who also himself was a disciple of Jesus. He went to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus.  Then Pilate commanded that the body of Jesus should be delivered” (Matt. xxvi. 57-8). St. Luke (xxiii. 53) and St. John (xix. 38) give us the detail that Joseph of Arimathea himself took down the body of Jesus from the cross.  There is no doubt that the holy women helped him in this, nor that Mary received her Son’s body at the foot of the cross. Thus the Liturgy tells further that when the body of Jesus was brought down from the cross, His Mother received Him in her arms and held Him close to her; and it compared her with the Sunamitess (4 Kings iv. 20) who when the child miraculously announced to her by the prophet was dead, had held it upon her knees.  Thus soberly, in three or four words, the Liturgy calls up the image of the Pieta which has so powerfully moved the souls of Christian people.

     At last the Mother could embrace her Son. All the lovely memories of His childhood were in the embrace, but alas only to sharpen the pain. She could hold Him to her because He was beyond the reach of consolation. All alone, without aid from any human creature, He had drunk the chalice of His Passion and Death.  In her arms she held with measureless reverence that sacred body which, though separated from His soul, yet remained immediately united to the very Person of the Word.  She saw the wounds, but it was too late to heal them. “From the sole of the foot unto the top of the head, there is no soundness therein: wounds and bruises and swelling sores” (Isa. i. 6). And even this poor contact was only for a short space.

 

                      Seventh Sorrow

 

     Yet there was no movement of rebellion in her, no violence of outcry against those who came to take her Son’s body and place it in the tomb.

     Joseph of Arimathea had brought fine linen to wrap His body (Mark xv. 46), Nicodemus was with him.  “They took therefore the body of Jesus and bound it in linen cloths, with the spices, as the manner of the Jews is to bury.  Now there was in the place where He was crucified, a garden:  and in the garden a new sepulchre, wherein no man yet had been laid. There, therefore, because of the Parasceve of the Jews, they laid Jesus because the sepulchre was nigh at hand” (John xix. 40-2). It was a new sorrow for the Virgin to have to leave her Son.  But there was no weakening in her.

     From now a new life began for her.  Her role henceforth was to be at the heart of the Church Militant, sustaining it by the silence of her contemplation and her love.  Action was for others. The gospel speaks of Mary Magdalene and the other Mary who, after Joseph of Arimathea had gone, remained seated near the sepulchre (Matt. xxvii. 60-61), while the other women went off to prepare spices and ointments (Luke xxiii. 56), for the embalming of Jesus could not be long delayed.  We hear of them again on the morning of Easter Sunday, and we hear of John to whom the Virgin had been given as Mother, and of others beside. But of the Virgin herself, no word. All her life was within. Long ago she had heard the first words of Jesus and had kept them in her heart.  And now she had heard His last words, the Seven Last Words, the least of which would have given her matter for meditation for all the time still remaining to her upon earth.

     She knew that the work of Christ in Himself was consummated, and that the work of Christ in the totality of His members, the Church, had begun. She had not preached;  she had contemplated, loved, suffered during the public life of Jesus.  And now that He had founded the church in His blood, her part was still not to preach, but to contemplate, love, suffer.  Scripture mentioned her once more --- before Pentecost—but only to show her prayer mingled with that of the apostles, the brethren of Jesus and the Christian community: “All these were persevering with one mind in prayer, with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brethren” (Acts i. 14).  On the evening of His burial, when Joseph of Arimathea had gone and the lights of the Sabbath had begun to shine in Jerusalem, she knew of her own knowledge that from now on she had no-one here below upon whom she could lean, she knew what a weight of suffering Jesus had laid upon her in making her our Mother. It was the seventh of her sorrows.

     O all you who come into this world to suffer, “behold and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow.”  And you, my brother, for whom she has wept, over whom she had wept, “do not forget, in the depth of your heart, the weeping of your Mother, that the propitiation and benediction of those days may be accomplished in you.”

     “Thy own soul a sword shall pierce.”  From the first sorrow to the seventh, the sword of Simeon’s prediction had cut steadily deeper into her heart, bringing her the realised knowledge of ever-new suffering.  Now at the end she was more desolate even than the Jerusalem of the prophet’s lamentation: “To what shall I compare thee, or to what shall I liken thee, O daughter of Jerusalem?  To what shall I equal thee, that I may comfort thee, O virgin daughter of Sion?  For great as the sea is thy destruction” (Lam. ii. 13). But she remained strong in sorrow. Neither her soul nor her frail body knew an instants wavering. If in the strict sense she did not actually undergo martyrdom, her love and courage immeasurably surpassed the love and courage of the martyrs.  And her suffering likewise exceeded theirs; she bore more than they of the terrible burden of the world’s sin.  She was a martyr eminently, as the philosophers say, if not formally. She surpasses all virgins in purity and all martyrs in fortitude; so that the Liturgy can hail her in the last responsory of Matins as first rose of martyrs, lily among virgins:

     Ave princeps Generosa,

     Martyrumque prima rosa,

     Virginumque lilium.

 

And at the Communion of the Mass of the Seven Dolours: “Happy the senses of the Blessed Virgin Mary who without dying, earned the palm of martyrdom beneath the cross of Our Lord.”

     Who then, so well as the Virgin of Compassion, can reveal to us the depths of the mystery of the Passion?  If only we too before death might have some small fragment of her knowledge of that mystery. At least we can long for it and pray with the church: “O God, at whose Passion, as Simeon foretold, the most sweet soul of Mary thy glorious Virgin Mother, was pierced by a sword of sorrow, mercifully grant that we who reverently meditate upon her sorrows may reap the happy fruit of thy Passion.”

 

     St John of the Cross speaks, in The Living Flame of Love, of the transfixion of the heart as a marvellous grace,  granted to the small number of souls which have been faithful to love to the end and above all to those whose love and whose spirit are to be carried forward through the ages in a succession of sons;  for, says the Mystical Doctor,  God deposits in the founders a richness of spiritual power capable of vivifying all the long line of their followers.  It is as though their hearts must be pierced in order that the flood of grace may pour out for the enrichment of the rest.

     The transfixion of the Virgin’s heart is a mystery of love and suffering still higher and more radiant than the prodigious transfixion granted to St Francis and St Teresa. Erect at the foot of the cross, the Virgin received, in that heart which was opening to the whole world, a spiritual love so strong and flaming, and tender and universal, that it could reach out to embrace every single one of those whom her Son had given to be her sons to the end of the earth and the end of time.  Thus the transfixion of the Virgin’s heart approached nearer than any other the transfixion of the Heart of Jesus, the sole source of the world’s redemption.

  Ack. 'The Last Four Sorrows'  -  Charles Journet. Published in 'The Mary Book' - Sheed and Ward, 1950.