Today, the Friday before Good Friday, in Malta and Gozo is celebrated the devotion of Our Lady of Sorrows. Today, all Malta and Gozo stand in silence before the image of the Pieta, Mary with her Son Jesus dead in her hands.
Many are those who today feel the call to go to Mass, confession and review their spiritual life. The churches are full with people who normally would not dare to enter a church; today simply step in, go for confession and receive the eucharist. Obviously such moments are ones of great grace for the person who risks saying yes to God. The question naturally is: Is today’s devotion going to be a real grace for one’s authentic conversion or simply an alienation in that one keeps doing what he and she used to do before without any trace of real repentance? I really support my brother priests who today would say to their flock: Let us keep coming for Mass every day and resort to confession more frequently and not once a year.
Apart from this pastoral note, today’s devotion brings back the importance Mother Mary has in our Maltese history. Malta and Gozo are replete with Marian Shrines. A good number of people are still praying the Rosary and saying those most powerful three Hail Mary’s every day. Others also put on their chains the miraculous medal or any other medal, particularly that of Our Lady of Ta’ Pinu whose wonderful shrine is on the sister island of Gozo.
While looking at the marvelous statues Malta and Gozo have of Our Lady of Sorrows one is perforce to reflect on the suffering Mother went through. It is unimaginable the pain she had to withstand when she saw her Son Jesus dying on the Cross. If, as the prophet Isaiah told us in his prophecy of the suffering servant, that he had no form or comeliness that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him (Isa 53:2), imagine how Mary’s heart was pierced right through with grief and sorrow at this tragic sight. Hence, it is appropriate today to be with Mary as she is mourning for the death of her Son Jesus.
Jesus’ crucified remains God’s most original answer to all the suffering and injustices which still are being perpetrated in our world. By his passion, death and resurrection Christ brought that much needed healing of reconciliation in our world. On the other hand, Mary’s presence at the foot of the Cross reminds us also that we are to entrust the suffering of fellow brothers and sisters to her because thanks to her powerful intercession that reconciliation her Son brought by what he did on the Cross for us can be trickled into every suffering situation.
Pope Benedict XVI brought out clearly this point when, in his homily of Sunday, 14 September 2008 at Praire in Lourdes, on his apostolic journey on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary there, he said:
Are we able to understand that in the Crucified One of Golgotha, our dignity as children of God, tarnished by sin, is restored to us? Let us turn our gaze towards Christ. It is he who will make us free to love as he loves us, and to build a reconciled world. For on this Cross, Jesus took upon himself the weight of all the sufferings and injustices of our humanity. He bore the humiliation and the discrimination, the torture suffered in many parts of the world by so many of our brothers and sisters for love of Christ. We entrust all this to Mary, mother of Jesus and our mother, present at the foot of the Cross.
In his Angelus address of Sunday 17, September 2006, Pope Benedict gives us a beautiful and succinct explanation of what Mary’s standing at the foot of the Cross means for you and me.
The Evangelist recounts: Mary was standing by the Cross (cf. Jn 19: 25-27). Her sorrow is united with that of her Son. It is a sorrow full of faith and love. The Virgin on Calvary participates in the saving power of the suffering of Christ, joining her “fiat”, her “yes”, to that of her Son. Dear brothers and sisters, spiritually united to Our Lady of Sorrows, let us also renew our “yes” to God who chose the Way of the Cross in order to save us. This is a great mystery which continues and will continue to take place until the end of the world, and which also asks for our collaboration. May Mary help us to take up our cross every day and follow Jesus faithfully on the path of obedience, sacrifice and love.
The Greek word which St John uses is παρά (para) which means beside, near, from, in the presence of, with, by. Pope Francis has an interesting meditation on παρά which he translates as Mary’s standing by the Cross (John 19:25). In his catechesis of Wednesday, 10 May 2017 he says:
The Gospels are laconic, and extremely discrete. They record Mary’s presence with a simple verb: she was “standing by” (Jn 19:25). She stood by. They say nothing of her reaction: whether she wept, whether she did not weep … nothing; not so much as a brushstroke to describe her anguish: these details would be tackled later by the imagination of poets and painters offering us images that have entered the history of art and literature. But the Gospels only say: she was “standing by”. She stood there, at the worst moment, at the cruelest moment, and she suffered with her son. She “stood by”.
Mary “stood by”; she was simply there. Here again the young woman of Nazareth, hair now grayed with the passage of time, still struggling with a God who must only be embraced, and with a life that has come to the threshold of the darkest night. Mary “stood by” in the thickest darkness, but she “stood by”. She did not go away. Mary is there, faithfully present, each time a candle must be held aflame in a place of fog and haze. She does not even know the future resurrection her Son was opening at that instant for us, for all of mankind: she stands there out of faithfulness to the plan of God whose handmaid she proclaimed herself to be on the first day of her vocation, but also due to her instinct as mother who simply suffers, each time there is a child who undergoes suffering. The suffering of mothers: we have all known strong women who have faced their children’s suffering!
We will find her again on the first day of the Church; she, mother of hope, in the midst of that community of such fragile disciples: one had denied, many had fled, all had been afraid (cf. Acts 1:14). She simply stood by, in the most natural of ways, as if it were something completely normal: in the first Church enveloped in the light of the Resurrection, but also in the trepidation of the first steps that had to be taken in the world.
Mary, you who have remained faithful to Jesus until the end obtain for me the grace to be faithful to Him like you. Keep encouraging me to follow Jesus, your beloved Son, wherever He may go and focus my whole being one doing the Father’s will as He and you did so marvelously. Mary, pray that I shall be infected with Jesus’ and your extraordinary determination in fulfilling the Father’s plan for me at all costs. Amen.