3.02. Mater Dolorosa — Sorrow with Blessedness

CHAPTER II Mater Dolorosa — Sorrow with Blessedness

SIMEON holding the infant Christ in his arms had turned to the glad mother, and startled her by declaring, in the inspiration of a sudden prophetic insight, that through this child there would come to her anguish such as could only be compared to the thrust of a great sword or rude Thracian pike. Amazed as she must have been at the totally unexpected announcement of so doleful a destiny, Mary had many foreshadowings of it in subsequent years before the horror pierced her in its extreme cruelty. Following the few hints that are dropped by the evangelists, themselves intent on quite another subject, we discover that every time Mary appears in the history of Iter Son it is to receive some thrust of pain. The one scene from the boyhood of Jesus that has been preserved for us by a single evangelist affords an instance of this distress in its mildest form. It will become more and more acute as we proceed. There was a perfectly natural occasion of anxiety for Mary and Joseph in the discovery, at the end of the first day’s journey on the road down from Jerusalem, that their child was not as they had supposed among their friends in the troop of returning pilgrims. Still He was twelve years of age, and a score of trivial chances might have occasioned the separation.

Very likely maternal anxiety would be unreasonably swift to imagine some serious disaster; that would be only natural, only what any mother might have felt under similar circumstances. No doubt the weariness of a long and fruitless search among the crowded streets and bazaars of the noisy city must have deepened the sense of a vague foreboding that something very terrible had happened, and with it a keen feeling of self-reproach for not having looked more carefully for the child before leaving. This too we must regard as in no way unique, except indeed in so far as the charge of One of whom Mary know at least in some degree the nature and desting must have given rise to an exceptional sense of responsibility. It is not here that we come upon Mary’s peculiar and characteristic distress. That appears at the interview between mother and Son when He is found among the temple rabbis.

Mary addresses her Boy with some irritation of manner. Had He forgotten His parents? Would He not have imagined that they must have been anxious about Him during this long and unaccountable separation? Her feeling is perfectly explicable, most natural. The position of affairs did seem to be very provoking. Distressed, wearied, hot and flustered, after hours of vain searching, Mary suddenly coming upon Jesus finds Him in no corresponding alarm at being lost, apparently not even aware that He has been missed, certainly quite oblivious of the trouble His absence has occasioned. How could He have acted in this way. He who of all children had been the example of submission to parents? Yes, it was natural that for the moment the poor mother should feel some annoyance. And yet her Son’s striking answer must have conveyed to her a rebuke. We cannot suppose that Jesus intended anything of the-kind. He was far too dutiful a son to be found taking upon Him the part of Mentor to His mother. We should do a gi-eat wrong to our idea of the Perfect Child if we credited Him with conduct which in any other boy of twelve years would be justly designated priggish. Most assuredly He spoke in absolute simplicity — “ Did you not know that I must be in My Father’s house? “ He had not imagined that they would search the whole city before looking for Him in the temple. He had assumed that if they had wanted Him this was the first place where they would have looked for Him, because it was the most natural thing iu the world that He should be there. What more likely place is there in which to find a child than his father’s house? But if this was all that He meant — an utterance of pure surprise expressed in the absolute simplicity of innocent childhood — to Mary it must have been pregnant with painful significance. His Father’s house! Then He was conscious of a higher claim than that of His mother. He was drawn to duties and occupations that would carry Him into regions far beyond the little circle of homely interests to which apparently hitherto all His life had been confined. Was she to lose Him in a much more real and permanent way than she had supposed while Ho had been only a day or two out of her sight? At that innocent saying of His, spoken in the simplicity of childhood, Mary felt the first chill approach of the terrible sword which was to pierce her to the heart in the later years. Here was something for her to ponder over; and at this point St. Luke repeats his significant statement, that “ Mary kept all these sayings in her heart.” [1] Yet he is careful to tell us that Jesus still remained “subject to His parents.” The next occasion on which Mary appears is only mentioned in the fourth gospel; but there the narrative is given with a fulness of detail that proclaims the eyewitness. This is the narrative of the marriage at Cana in Galilee. From the way in which St. John introduces Mary in the first instance, and then adds that “Jesus also was bidden, and His disciples,” [2] it would appear that His mother may have been present as a near relative of the bridegroom to assist in the arrangements of the feast. The absence of any reference to Joseph, now and henceforth, leads us to the inference that he must have died before this time. Mary, then, is a widow. She has [1] Luk 2:51 [2] John 2:1, John 2:2 suffered the loss of a kind and considerate husband. What that meant to her only they who have felt the awful wrench of the separation, and faced the blankness of the long dreary years that follow, can understand; and they will understand it so perfectly that no comments are needed to make it more clear.

It has been suggested that possibly Mary had removed to Cana after the death of her husband, or when her Son had gone away to join the disciples of John by the Jordan. This would account for her being at the wedding. If Cana of Galilee was the place now known as Kefr Kenna — and the identification is generally admitted to be probable — Mary would only have to go some six or seven miles over the hill to the north-east of Nazareth to reach the spot where the houses of this little town are pleasantly grouped on the slope in terraces, one above another. In any case she might well be known in so near a place, and have friends there.

Mary’s appeal to Jesus when she heard of the wine running short is an indication of the relation that had grown up between her and her Son. It shows that she had learnt to look to Him in times of perplexity. Since she had lost her husband, her Firstborn was now her natural support and comfort. Instinctively the habit of the home life asserts itself. Her wise, strong Son has often helped her in moments of anxiety; surely He will find some way out of the present difficulty in which her friends are placed. That she actually anticipated a miracle is hardly to be supposed. The apocryphal stories of wonders wrought in His childhood, some of them grotesque, some repulsive, are evidently false; and St. John expressly tells us that this miracle at Cana was the first He wrought. What we are to imagine is rather that Mary appealed indefinitely to her Son, without the least idea as to what He might do, simply confiding in the wisdom and kindness of which He must have given evidence on many occasions during their quiet life at Nazareth. The answer Mary received from Jesus cannot but strike us at a superficial reading of it as inaccountably harsh. But his language would not have made this impression on a contemporary. The address, “Woman,” which would be unpardonably offensive if used by a son in speaking to his mother in England to-day, was not considered in any way ungracious or inappropriate among the Jews. Jesus used the same word in His affectionate farewell on the cross while committing His mother to the charge of St. John, at a moment when none but the tenderest feelings could have been in his heart.(John 19:26) Then the words, “ What have I to do with thee?” have a tone of rudeness to us which is entirely absent in the original, the Aramaic in which Jesus would haves spoken. The phrase is a Hebrew idiom, difficult to translate into English. Jephthah uses it in his message to the king of the Ammonites, (Jdg 11:12) David in speaking to the sons of Zeruiah,(2Sa 19:22) the Sidonian woman in addressing Elijah,(1Ki 17:18) Elisha to the king of Israel,(2Ki 3:13) demoniacs addressing Jesus.(Mat 8:29; Mark 1:24) Plainly it was quite a familiar form of speech adopted in a great variety of circumstances. And yet when all has been said that can be said to mitigate the severity of these words, they convey a painful impression. Jesus clearly implies, though with no unkindness of manner, that He cannot permit His course to be directed by any influence short of the Divine — not even His mother’s. His times are in His Father’s hands. No interference from any, even the nearest and dearest human authority, can be admitted. Think what that must have meant to Mary. She was losing her Son. It is one of the difficulties of parents to discover that the authority they are accustomed to exert over their children cannot be maintained indefinitely; that there must come a time when the children claim liberty, and justly claim it; that the son or daughter who has attained to adult age is right in taking up the responsibilities of an individual conscience, and gently declining any interference with the law of that august ruler within. But in the case before us the shock was the stronger for the perfect obedience which Jesus had shown in His boyhood, and which may have been unconsciously taken advantage of in later years by Mary for the undue assertion of her will. And then this was a very marked step towards a region of independence which must be His alone, and whither she could not follow Him even in thought. That must have been a moment of painful forebodings for Mary when she heard her Son’s unexpected words. It is not to be forgotten that His action met her anxiety and allayed it more effectually than she could have hoped. Still she would have been more than a woman if she had accepted this as an adequate compensation for the loss of her old authority. When we return to the account given in the earlier gospels the next scene in which Mary appears is at Capernaum, where she appears to be living now, perhaps with Jesus, but also with her younger sons, while her daughters are still at Nazareth (Mark 6:3), probably married and in homes of their own. Jesus is now in the thick of His most continuous and exhausting work. So great is the strain on Him — pressed on all sides by an eager, selfish crowd, the sick continually appealing to Him for the help of His healing, His disciples needing careful training, the multitude hanging on His utteiunces in great assemblies gathered by the sea-shore, the Scribes and Pharisees ever on the watch to catch Him in His words — He has no leisure for retirement, no time for rest, not even an opportunity for taking food during the long, busy day.

We can well imagine how an anxious mother must have regarded such a mode of life. It was cruel. The strongest could not stand it. Something must be done to save Him from the people, to save Him too from Himself. He is at the call of all who need Him. He has no thought of Himself. Then His friends must interfere. But the crowd is so great it is impossible for any of His relatives to come near Him. The anxiety must be very intense which leads to the extreme course that is now adopted. A message is passed through, handed on from one to another, till at last it reaches the Speaker, interrupting Him in one of His entrancing discourses. It says that His mother and His brothers who are waiting on the fringe of the crowd, want Him. The people would suppose that some urgent reason had prompted them to interfere in this very abrupt way. Had this been the case we cannot suppose that He would have refused to comply with the wish of those who in the way of nature would have the first claim on Him. If He would permit a discourse to be interrupted by the intrusion of a sick man let down through the roof, as we know He did on one memorable occasion, He could not have refused a similar appeal from His own family. But He must have known very well that it was simply for His own sake that the message had been passed up to Him. We may suppose that before this His mother had had conversations with Him on the subject of the risks He was running. That dread of His over-working Himself is a touch of nature which every mother will understand; but behind it was the darker fear of danger from His antagonists, now embittered by jealousy at His immense popularity.

Just in proportion to the tenderness of the maternal solicitude that had prompted the act of interference, must have been the shock of pain that Mary received on hearing how Jesus received it with the question, *’ Who is My mother? and who are My brethren? “ and then the added answer as He stretched out His hand towards His disciples and declared, “ Behold My mother and My brethren. For whosoever shall do the will of My Father which is in heaven, he is My brother and sister and mother.” Mat 12:48-50 We rejoice in these words as at once a proof of His large humanity and an indication of His absolute devotion to the will of God. Wherever that will is done there are those whom He will own as nearest akin to Himself. A most gracious admission! But what must the great utterance have meant to Mary? She would not have been a woman if she could have learnt without keen distress that other women were placed on a level with herself as mothers to her Son. We may be sure that it was painful to Jesus to have to speak thus. Only the high claims of His mission could have induced Him to say what He knew must hurt His mother. This was part of the great sacrifice He had to make. We are in danger of being entangled in the subtle snares of a family selfishness, a selfishness that is all the more enslaving for the fact that it shelters itself under the name of love. But while Jesus escaped from a temptation which must have been exceptionally urgent to His intensely sympathetic nature, certainly at a great cost to Himself, one would think that in Mary the perception that her motherhood was thus to be reduced to ashes on the altar, a burnt-offering of supreme devotion to the will of God for the benefit of all who do that will, would have roused a feeling of resentment as at a cruel wrong, an outrage on the rights of nature. She may have attained to so strong a faith in her Son that even this severe strain, the most severe it had yet received, did not shake it. Faith may have remained; but joy must have fled, giving place to pain — destined henceforth to be her inseparable companion. A confirmation of this position is to be found on the very next occasion when we encounter any allusion to Mary, Luk 11:27-28 that where a woman in the crowd, unable to restrain her admiration, bursts out into an exclamation of congratulations for the mother of such a Son. Dear soul! Had she been denied the privilege of motherhood herself, and so led to envy them in one to whom they had come with exceptional honour 1 or had she once possessed a son who had since been snatched from her by the hand of death 1 or, far worse than that, had she suffered the awful agony of seeing her son grow up utterly unworthy of the ocean of love she had lavished upon him 1 We know nothing of her circumstances; we are supplied with no details with which to fix her identity, St. Luke only describes her as “ a certain woman out of the multitude.” Yet she was a real woman; it was a woman’s heart that uttered itself apparently in an unpremeditated exclamation, though, as has been pointed out, in words that echoed a rabbinical saying.[1] Still, she little dreamed what she was saying. Evidently she had not the faintest suspicion of Mary’s peculiarly painful experience. How often would envy be turned to pity if we knew the secrets of those towards whom it is directed! In spirit and scope the words with which Jesus answered this singular interruption are closely allied to what He had said on the previous occasion — “ Yea, rather, blessed are they that hear the word of God and keep it.” Again the area of privilege is extended; again the disciples of Jesus are all embraced in the great circle; again it is obedience that is especially accentuated. It has been suggested that Jesus disapproved of the sentimental tone of the woman’s remark. He disliked the descent into mere emotionalism. The rapture of feeling was not what He desired to encourage. He turned to the healthier regions of truth and service. Discipleship and obedience are the roads to true blessedness. But this could not but tend further to separate Mary from her Son, if a report of it reached her. The news of the incident must have been accompanied by another thrust of the sword in her side.

Thus right through His public ministry, and indeed even in some degree before this, from His boyhood, though then He had lived in the subjection of dutiful obedience to His parents, Mary suffered from repeated shocks of pain at her Son’s treatment of her. In some respects this is always so. The pains of maternity do not end with birth; they only begin there. Nor is it only the thoughtless or unworthy child who causes distress to his parent. The example of Jesus shows how the best of children, even by reason of their very sense of the paramount claims of duty, may be compelled to inflict suffering on those who love them most intensely. Such is the irony of life. It may well be considered that so cruel a condition of existence is an indication of mal-adjustment, the derangement caused by some great wrong, but the wrong may be neither in the child nor in the parent. It was the sin of the world that made Jesus “ a Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief”; and it was what that sin necessitated in His mission that was stabbing the heart of Mary. The Son’s sorrow is reflected on the mother. Because He is the Man of Sorrows she must be the Mother of Sorrows. This is the more clearly apparent at the end. Mary’s was the agonising privilege of being the mother of the Crucified. The mocking and insults that were flung at Him struck her. The cruel scourging that fell on his flesh smote her heart. The nails that were driven through His hands and feet also passed through the very nerves and fibres of her soul. His fearful weariness and exhaustion, His thirst, His agony, were the tortures she endured in her bruised and bleeding motherhood. Not a word of all this is recorded in the gospels. Painters have tried to set it before us in pictures of the pale face and sinking form, as Mary stands supported by the friendly arm of John, or falls fainting among her women friends. Their work is wholly of the imagination. The evangelists are intent on other matters. Three of them make no mention of Mary in this last dread scene. It is John only who tells us that the mother of Jesus was in the little group of friends who had ventured near the cross, and he drops no hint of any word or action on the part of Mary. But the bare fact that Mary was present at the crucifixion is not without significance. It is not every woman who would have found it possible to be there. The story of the cross has been handled so much as a topic of cold abstract theology, while any real experience of what it means is so very remote from the world in which we live that the actual horror of it does not affect us in any degree proportionate to the facts of what must have taken place. A man nailed to the beams, hung up in the blazing sun, dragged, strained, longing to shift his posture in an agony of cramp, yet unable to do so, and his slightest movement sending a fresh thrill of torture through his body; then a burning thirst, a throbbing head, the weight of which on the weary neck grows intolerable; and all this to continue — since no vital organ has been touched — till the relief of death only supervenes from sheer exhaustion, when long-enduring nature can hold out no longer. We shrink with horror from the contemplation of the ghastly spectacle.

Now, this was witnessed by Mary, if not to the very end, still in the agony of its tortures. And the Sufferer was her Son. Could any sword pierce the soul as hers was pierced now? Nor was even this the sum of her sorrows. We know that to Jesus the greatest suffering was not the bodily torment He endured. The dark and dreadful burden of the world’s sin was upon Him. It is scarcely probable that Mary entered far into this dread mystery, even if she knew anything about it. But her motherly heart must have been quick to discern that a great and terrible grief of soul was breaking the heart of her Son. If she could not at all comprehend what this was, the burden of the unknown secret must have been all the more intolerable to her. But one thing she could see, and that must have been a strange, sad perplexity to her. Her Son was dying, dying in His youth, apparently before He had accomplished His great mission; dying because rejected by His people, the people He had come to redeem. “Was this all that the great hopes she had cherished concerning Him had come to? Was this to be the end of her fond dreams? And were they only dreams, dreams such as any foolish young mother might have entertained in those quiet, happy hours when she was watching the babe at her breast? Had she not received strange premonitions? Were those scenes of her youth no better than the fancies of hysterical girlhood? Was there no ground for the gratitude of the Magnificat? Was Simeon’s prophecy no more than the maundering of an old man in his dotage? And that wonderful career of her Son with its brilliant opening in the rapid gathering of so many followers, was it but a hollow delusion of no real significance 1 How rapidly the popularity had died away! For long He had been deserted by all but a very few. Then her hopes had revived at that happy scene when He rode in rustic triumph among the Hosannas of the people as they strewed His path with greenery and even flung down their garments for Him to ride over? And now had it come to this — this shame and horror and ruin of all her hopes 1 What was the meaning of the prophecies that went before and the promises of His later career if this was to be the awful end of all — this lurid sunset of the day that had dawned in celestial radiance?

Questions such as these may well be imagined to have coursed through the distracted mind of His mother as she stood at the foot of the cross where Jesus hung dying. This was the worst sword-thrust of all. It is of this moment that Mrs. Browning writes: —

“Mother full of lamentation, Near that cross she wept her passion, Whereon hung her child and Lord.

Through her spirit, worn and wailing, Tortured by the stroke and failing.

Passed and pierced the prophet’s sword.” And yet a gleam of light falls on the page in this darkest passage. St. John only introduces Mary here for the sake of that one point of relief in the dreadful story. Jesus is not so absorbed in the endurance of His own sufferings as to forget the needs of His mother. Provision must be made for her now that He will be no longer at her side. The fact that Jesus has to meet this necessity is suggestive in several ways. It shows that she has been accustomed to look to Him for protection. Evidently she has no home of her own at this time. What was probable before is now quite certain; Mary is a widow. But at an earlier period she appeared with the brothers of Jesus. Mat 12:47 How is it that they are not now able to take charge of her? Dr. Lightfoot took this incident in John as a decisive proof that the “ brethren of the Lord “ could not be Mary’s children, and must therefore be either children of Joseph by a former marriage, or children of a sister of Mary, and only cousins to Jesus.[1] But this does not entirely explain the situation, because in the earlier incident they are closely associated with Mary, and now she is alone and needing some one to care for her. May it be that the unbelief of the brothers had led to a division in the family circle; they forsaking Jesus, while His mother still clung to Him? If that were the case we could understand how in this moment of extreme tension it would have been difficult for Mary to find any consolation among them.

Whatever may have been the precise cause, Mary is now left quite desolate. With the considerateness of a true Son, in spite of what He had said before apparently pointing in another direction, Jesus now commits His mother to the charge of the beloved disciple, who can be no other than John— “Woman, behold thy son! “ — “ Behold thy mother!”

“In the wild heart of that eclipse These words came from His wasted lips.”[1]

If we are to take his language in its strict sense, John acted immediately on this command of his Master and removed Mary from the unendurable spectacle of her Son’s death, so that she was spared the agony of witnessing the very last scene. “ And from that hour,” says John, “ the disciple took her unto his own home.” At this point we begin to lose sight of Mary. The four evangelists give us various lists of the women who went to the tomb of Jesus; but none of them include the name of His mother. She had been with some of these women at the cross, for John says, “There were standing by the cross of Jesus His mother, and His mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene.” [3] All these women are met with again at the grave, except Mary the mother of Jesus. She was now apart from the women friends who had stood by her during the crucifixion, the evangelist would suggest, in retirement in St. John’s house. We can readily imagine that she had no heart for those dreary ministries to the dead which, singularly attractive to some natures, are just as painful to others. But what is more remarkable is that we have no hint that Jesus ever appeared to His mother after His resurrection. None of the evangelists mention His being seen by any members of His family, though from St. Paul we learn that He appeared to James. It is commonly assumed that when He appeared to “above five hundred brethren at once,”* Mary would have been of the company, and there is a reasonable probability that this would have been the case. Still, even if we make the most of that, the mother of Jesus only comes in as one of five hundred, while to His intimate disciples He appears in private, and that on several occasions. We have but a few small scraps of information about the appearances of the risen Christ; and of course we cannot tell but that He may have visited His mother for the comfort she must have so sadly needed, though no mention is made of the fact. Here we must leave the matter, with this certain conclusion that at all events Mary was not regarded by the evangelists as a very prominent personage in the church.

We have but one more glimpse of Mary. In those early days before the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, but after their last sight of their Liord when He had ascended from the Mount of Olives, the apostles were in the habit of meeting together in the upper chamber where He had taken the last supper with them; and with the apostles were certain women, among whom was Mary the mother of Jesus with His brethren. This is most significant. The family is now united; and it is in closest association with the eleven. At this point Mary fades entirely out of view. One tradition relates that true to his trust, St. John remained in Jerusalem watching over her till her death, and did not go to Ephesus till after that event — a likely enough conjecture.

Another less probable tradition carries her with the apostle to Asia. These traditions are too late to be of any historical value whatever. Mary’s part was wholly concerned with the obscure early life of her Son. Nothing can be more clear than that she stood in no kind of relation to His later public mission, that she was in no way concerned with His supreme work in the redemption of the world. His loneliness in that work is reflected in her sorrow. Because she is the mother of the Christ she cannot but be the Mater Dolorosa.