Our Lady of Sorrows

Standing at the foot of the Cross is our mother. She is standing, not crying or fainting; she is there supporting her son with her presence. Silent tears run down her cheeks. And Saint John is also there, the celibate apostle, the one Jesus loved. Other women are there too. Women are stronger than men. Many artists tried to capture this moment but with different results. It is almost impossible to represent in a painting what happened at Calvary. Where are the other apostles? Where are the big guys? They said they were going to die for him. They ran away from the cross. We too are still running away from the cross. When are we going to stop running away? Today is a good day.

We can ask Saint John to help us to be at the foot of the cross, not to be afraid of the cross. We ask him to grasp our hand tightly and help us to remain there at this critical moment in human history. We are between him and Mary, hiding our face in our mother’s robes. We don’t want to see what’s happening. We can only hear.

The passion of Jesus is the passion of Mary. It is impossible to know what is happening through Mary’s heart. We can only imagine. Spiritual sufferings are more acute than physical ones. Why do we bring to our consideration something that happened 20 centuries ago? Because it is still affecting us. In eternity everything is present. We are the cause of their suffering, mother and son, united in their sorrow. The more we look at what happened at Calvary, the more we will try to avoid our sins. The more we love Jesus and Mary, the more we will avoid what is offending them. Our sins affect the people we love, the same way our love for them empowers them.

Jesus says: “Woman, behold your son.” It is not a detached expression calling his mother “woman”. He is reminding us that when Adam saw Eve for the first time, he called her “woman”, bones of my bones. Eve was the first woman. Mary is the second woman. The first one let us down because of sin. The second one was the cause of our redemption, of our healing. The Fathers of the Church loved this parallelism between Eve and Mary. Jesus called first his mother “woman” at Cana; at the beginning. Now it is the end. Then he changed water into wine; now the wine is becoming blood, Eucharistic wine. She still remembers that moment. For Jesus has to die for us; for her, to become our mother. She gave birth to him at Bethlehem without pain; now we are born at Calvary in a bloody and painful manner. We have caused her so much blood, so much suffering. This is what we are considering today, Mater Dolorosa, Sorrowful Mother, to foster our love for her: how much pain we have delivered to her, for her to deliver us. The more we suffer, the more we love. We contemplate her sorrows for us to react, to change our lives, to have a deep conversion. We cannot remain indifferent in front of her sufferings, specially knowing that she is there because she wants to be there, the fruit of her love for her son and for us.

“Behold your mother.” Now Jesus talks to us. First he asks his mother to look after us. Some people say that he wasn’t planning to give us his mother, but when he saw from the cross our feebleness, he decided to give her to us. Now he asks us to look after her. He gave us his treasure, his masterpiece. We are represented by Saint John. Nothing is left for him but the wood of the cross.

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Parables of the lost sheep and the coin

Sinners were attracted to Jesus and the Pharisees complained. Sinners followed Jesus because they saw an opportunity to leave their sinful life behind. That’s why we too are attracted to Jesus. We need him; without him we are nothing. The more we see ourselves as sinners, the more we feel Jesus’ attraction. Like a magnet; the closer it is to the iron, the more difficult it is to separate the two. Our world has lost a sense of sin, the natural pull from God. Our society moves around itself without a gravitational force to keep it steady, like a moon without an earth, to keep it from being destroyed by the sun. The lack of God is like a black hole that sucks everything into a void.

This grumbling of the Pharisees, gave an opportunity for Jesus to give us these parables of God’s mercy. In this broken world of ours, the consideration of a Merciful God is very important. When John Paul II was asked what impressed him most about God, he answered: “His infinite mercy.” God said to Saint Catherine of Siena: “Mercy is my darling attribute, and to that end, and for the incomprehensible love I felt towards man, I sent the Word, my only Son; I illustrated this by the representation of a bridge reaching from heaven to earth, uniting the human and divine natures.”

If you could describe Pope Francis’ summary of his pontificate with one word it is “Mercy”. He declared in 2015 a Holy Year of Mercy. He wrote a book titled: “The name of God is mercy”. He says with boldness that “mercy is the first attribute of God.” He wants to remind the modern man living in a field hospital, surrounded by casualties, that “there are no situations we cannot get out of, we are not condemned to sink into quicksand. God does not want anyone to be lost. His mercy is infinitely greater than our sins.” Saint Therese found a weakness in God the Father: “He has one great infirmity. He is blind. And so ignorant of arithmetic that He cannot even add up.”

Jesus gives us two parables that are very similar. Both depict the same actions: loosing, searching, finding and rejoicing. This is our own story, constantly getting lost, God going out searching for us, finding us if we allow him to, bringing us back to him, rejoicing in our encounter with the angels and saints, and lifting us up to a higher level than before. Every time he finds us, instead of punishing us, he rewards us by bringing us a bit closer to himself. God uses our sins to lift us up, to enrich us, to cover our nakedness with his graces.

But both parables emphasise different aspects. In the lost sheep Jesus appears as a Good Shepherd, ready to place us on his shoulders. It is the earliest image we have of Jesus in the catacombs. It shows God’s love for us, ready to leave the other 99 in search of us. Jesus never gives up, always persistent in his search for us, and rejoicing when we come back. Give him the joy of finding you. It’s only if you don’t want to be found, that he won’t be able to bring you back to the flock. The parable of the lost coin shows that every soul is important, that we are unique in God’s eyes, because as in every coin there is normally the face of a ruler, we have the imprint of his image in our soul engraved at Baptism. Make sure you keep it bright and shining.

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Conditions for following Jesus

Today in the Gospel Jesus gets very serious. He looks at the people following him and he realises that many of them were there for human reasons. They were following him because they wanted to experience miracles, because they were fed with tasty bread and fish, because that man spoke very well, because he had a go at the Pharisees, or he defended the poor and he could become a political power. The same thing happens with us: we are here because we feel good, because it is the right thing to do or because of what others are going to say about us. Jesus uses a very strong expression to bring his message across: to love him we need to hate everything else. Some scriptural authors tried to soften the expression, but Jesus wanted to emphasise a point: we are either with him or against him.

What he says today is about him and about us. Other religions put across their main message in different ways. Most religious leaders, Buddha, Mohammad, or Luther, gave us some ideas to follow, some doctrine to upheld, but none of them commanded us to love them. Only Jesus demands a complete love for him. His claim is very strong, one that doesn’t allow half measures: unless you love me more than anything else, you cannot be my disciple. Either he is right or he is a mad man. Either he is the Son of God or he is a fool.

In the light of what he says we have to make a choice. If he is right, everything else takes to second place. And of course, he is right. We are created for him and we have experienced that it is in only following him that we are truly happy, that he is the only one who can fill all the desires of our souls. We know it in the depth of our hearts. To put him first, we need to acknowledge what is taking the place of Jesus in our lives. We need to be sincere. There are other things in our lives that don’t belong to Jesus and we should slowly, through a good examination of conscience, find out what they are and bring them to Jesus, or if necessary, get rid of them. We should react against what is holding us back, against what is not allowing us to become closer to him.

We have the example of the saints that managed to win their war against themselves. Saint Francis of Assisi was dependent on his father; he gave everything back to him, even his clothes, and was naked in front of everyone. Saint Thomas of Aquinas had to fight against his family who didn’t want him to become a Dominican; they locked him in a castle for a year and he had to escape. Saint Catherine of Siena didn’t want to marry the husband her mother had prepared for her; she cut her beautiful hair off and the husband to be didn’t want to marry a bald girl. Saint Anthony when his parents died sold all his possessions and went to the desert; he was attached to his riches and thanks to his generosity he became the father of the desert fathers. Saint Maximilian Kolbe changed places with another man who was going to be killed at Auschwitz; he gave his life for him, like Jesus did for us.

We don’t need to go to these extremes, but we have things in our lives that don’t belong to Jesus. We can ask Mary our Mother to help us to give them back to him.

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