Our Lady Saint Mary

by J. G. H. Barry

PART TWO

CHAPTER XVI

HOLY WEEK I

Then all the disciples forsook him and fled.
S. Matt. XXVI, 56.

Through the intercession of the Holy Mother of God, accept, O Lord, our prayers and save us.
May the Holy Mother of God and all the saints be our intercessors with the Heavenly Father, that He may deign to be merciful to us, and in pity save His creatures. Lord God all-powerful! save us and have mercy upon us.
Through the intercession of the Holy Mother of God, the Immaculate Mother of Thine only Son, and through the prayers of all the saints, receive, O Lord, our supplications; hear us, O Lord, and have mercy upon us; pardon us, bear with us, and blot out our sins, and make us worthy to glorify Thee, together with Thy Son and the Holy Ghost, now and ever, world without end. Amen.

Armenian.

e try to see our Lord's passion through the eyes of His Blessed Mother. We feel that all through Holy Week she must have been in direct touch with the experiences of our Lord. Her outlook would have been that of the Apostolic circle the record of which we get in the Gospels. Our Lord's ministry had showed a period of popularity during which it must have seemed to those closest to Him that they were moving rapidly to success; and then, after the day at Caeserea Phillipi, when His Messianic claims had been acknowledged, they would have been filled with enthusiasm for the mission the meaning of which was now defined. Then came a period of disappointment. Our Lord declined to become a popular leader, and by the nature of His preaching, the demands that He made upon those who were inclined to support Him lost popularity till it was a question to be considered whether the very Apostles would not desert Him. Then came the flash of renewed enthusiasm which is evidenced by the Palm Sunday entry, bringing, no doubt, renewed hopes to those nearest our Lord who seem to have been utterly unable to accept the view of His failure and death that He kept before them. But the hope vanished as quickly as it was roused. In less than a week the rejoicing group of Sunday followed Him from the Upper Chamber to the shades of Gethsemane. The betrayal, the trial, the end, come quickly on.

This to S. Mary was the piercing of the sword through the very heart. These were the days when the meaning of close association with Incarnate God, with God Who was pursuing a mission of rescue, came out. The mission of the Son for the Redemption of man meant submitting to the extremity of insult and torture, and it meant that those who were closest associated with Him should be caught into the circle of His pain. As our Lord was displaying the best of which humanity is capable, so was He calling out the worst of which it is capable. These last days of the life of Jesus show where man can be led when he surrenders himself to the dominion of the Power of Evil and becomes the servant of sin. The triumph of demoniac malice through its instruments, the Roman governor, the Jewish authorities, of necessity swept over all who were related to our Lord. The storm scattered the Apostolic group and left the Christ to face His trial alone. Yet not alone: He himself tells us the truth. "Behold the hour cometh, yea, is now come, that ye shall be scattered, every man to his own, and shall leave me alone: and yet I am not alone, because the Father is with me." It was what the Prophet had foreseen: "All ye shall be offended because of me this night: for it is written, I will smite the shepherd, and the sheep shall be scattered."

We do not know where S. Mary was during these days, but we are sure that she was as near our Lord as it was possible for her to be. We know that her own thought would be of the possibility of ministering to Him. We know that she would not have fled with the Apostles in their momentary panic. She was at the Cross, and she was at the grave, and she would have been as near Him in the agony and the trial as it was possible for her to be. And she too was in agony. Every pang of our Lord found echo in her. Every blow that fell upon His bleeding back, she too felt. Every insult that the soldiers inflicted, hurt her. Our Lord in the consciousness of His mission is constantly sustained by the thought that His Passion and Death is an offering to the will of the Father,--an offering even for these miserable men who are brutally treating a man whom they know to be innocent. Her sorrow is the utter desolation of seeing the One Whom she loves above all else suffer, while she can bear Him no alleviation in His suffering, cannot so much as wipe the blood from off His wounded brow, cannot even touch His hand, and look her love into His eyes. She follows from place to place while our Lord is being hustled from Caiaphas to Pilate and from Pilate to Herod and back again; from time to time hearing from some one who has succeeded in getting nearer, how the trial is going on, what the accusation is, how Jesus is bearing Himself, what answers He has made, what the authorities have said. Once and again, it may be, catching a distant glimpse of Him as He is led about by the guards, seeing Him always more worn and weary, always nearer the point of collapse. Herself, too, nearer collapse; yet going on still with that strength that love gives to mothers, determined at the cost of any suffering to be near Him, as near as she can be, till the very end. So we see her on that day in the streets of Jerusalem, and think of the distance travelled since the morning when Gabriel said to her, wondering: "Hail thou that art highly favoured.... Blessed art thou among women."