'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).
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.
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