The Passion of Mary

In the Catholic church – to which I belong – today is The Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows. In my own terminology, I often refer to what I call “the Passion of Mary.” Any Christian is well acquainted with the “Passion of the Christ,” which gives Mel Gibson's famous film its name. All believers know about the crucifixion and its attendant redemptive suffering – the central event of Christian life and experience.

Jesus suffered agonies incomprehensible to us leading up to and including his crucifixion and death. Everyone knows about the horrible details – even non-believers get the gist of it; there's no need for me to scourge a dead horse here, as it were.

We usually – and rightly – see it in the context of the horrors that Jesus personally endured for our sake. But think for a moment what Mary endured through all of this. Any parent, if they think of their own kids, can imagine the anguish of another parent who experiences the loss of a child. Some, tragically, have lived it, God bless them.

The worst thing I can imagine as a Dad would be my child having been abducted and dying some ghastly death at the hands of, for instance, a sexual predator. We hear all the time of this unspeakable sort of thing. Any parent worthy of the name would eagerly wish such a fate happen to themselves rather than to their child if that were possible.

For all the fear and pain Jesus endured, Mary had to witness it happening to her own son. Don't you suppose that, if she could have effected it, Mary would have gladly switched places with him? She saw the unsurpassingly strong, self-assured, adult Jesus go through this. But how far removed from her heart could have been the little boy been whom she had held, nursed, laughed and played with all those years before -- with the love that any mother knows?

But for all of that, bolstered by God's presence and promises, Mary suffered through it unflinchingly. She accepted and took on board her heart being “pierced by a sword,” as the prophet Simeon had put it at the time of the infant Jesus' presentation at the temple. In my mind, this adds yet another layer to the complex economy of redemption that lies at the heart of our faith. And to add one more layer to that complexity, Jesus – being the earthly manifestation of God himself – knew and understood, not only his own suffering, but that of his mother. This was among the infinite human sufferings by which his own redemptive suffering led to “all things being reconciled to himself.”