Memorial of Our Lady of Sorrows
Sharing in the Suffering of Our Lord
By Frank Savadera, SJ
Our feast today is dedicated to the spiritual
martyrdom of Mary, Mother of God, and her compassion with the sufferings of her
Divine Son, Jesus.
Catholic tradition speaks of the so-called "Seven Sorrows of Mary," namely the following:
The IMPASSIBILITY OF GOD principle asserts the FULL DIVINITY OF GOD and therefore, he must be beyond all
forms of human emotions, including suffering.
He is the UNMOVED MOVER and as such NO MAN can prevail upon Him; He
cannot be influenced by anyone; he cannot be swayed nor be made to do nor feel
anything ... precisely because He is God.
But stories in SCRIPTURES seem to reveal otherwise. In Genesis, we see a God who is capable of
expressing a certain GLADNESS: He looked
at his creation and says: That is good! How many times in the historical books of the
Old Testament did Yahweh seem to be EMOTIONALLY involved bargaining with His
people (i.e., if there are 50, 30, 20, 10 or 5 good people in Sodom/ Gomorrah
... then I can spare the entire city from destruction; OR also sparing a king and withholding
punishment after a time of fasting and sprinkling ashes on one’s head). The apparent UNMOVED MOVER seemed to have
been MOVED a countless times ... even in Scriptures.
The HEIGHT of descriptions about a God capable of going
through PAIN and SUFFERING comes in the depictions of the PASSION as endured by JESUS
CHRIST Himself. People of old had real
difficulty asserting that Jesus is God because of the graphic descriptions of
suffering we pick up from the Gospel.
In the letter to the
Hebrews: “In the days of His flesh, He offered up both prayers and
supplications with loud crying
and tears to the One able to save
Him from death, and He was heard because of His piety.
Although He was a
Son, He learned obedience from
the things which He suffered.”
Thus, to protect notions of an UNMOVED MOVER, some asserted
that the HUMANITY of Jesus that suffered on the CROSS is totally different from
His divinity; that the SPIRIT of the DIVINE simply inhabited the human body and
was FREE to leave the body at the time of the passion and crucifixion. Of course, we know this now as a heresy (i.e.
MODALISM, subordinationism etc.)
One perspective that addresses this problematic is the
assertion of the FULL PERFECTION of God.
God’s involvement in the life of the world ... in the life of His
creatures is ALL TOO PERFECT ... in that it involves ALL feelings and
sentiments ... PERFECT as they are ... THEY ARE DIFFERENT from the way man/
women feel. God’s involvement in the
life of the world is PERFECT .... such that when he gives ... he gives without
REMAINDER; when He gives, he gives
without LOSING anything ( a totally different reality with humanity).
IF JESUS therefore is God, we ascribe to Him this brand of
perfection. He gives without REMAINDER
and LOSS (the TRIUMPH of the CROSS).
Nothing is LOST; Everything is MORE SO GAINED.
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN THEREFORE alongside our assertion that
MARY, the Blessed Mother shared in
the suffering of our Lord? From
the time the prophet Simeon prophesied that a thorn will pierce her heart, the
Holy Family’s flight to Egypt, the loss and finding of Jesus in the Temple,
meeting her son enroute to CALVARY and seeing him die on the cross, the pain of
cradling the dead body of her son (PIETA) and eventually depositing her son’s
body into its final resting place. MARY
CRIED; MARY FELT; MARY SUFFERED ... and we say:
THIS WAS HER SPIRITUAL MARTYRDOM ... she shared in the PERFECT
SELF-GIVING and SELF-EMPTYING OF HER SON.
Jesus' emptying himself (kenosis)
and becoming like a slave (in the Letter to the Hebrews) ... and therefore being exalted and meriting a name above
all names ... applies as well to our EXALTATION of Mary (on a different plane
of course ... not as God but as a human being).
The RELEVANCE of this to us therefore can be quite
clear. JESUS, the FULLNESS OF GOD’S
REVELATION had shown us ... through His BRAND of PASSIBILITY (his capacity to
be involved in the life of his creatures) is the PERFECT KIND ... a KIND of
GIVING that is perfectly FULL ... a giving without remainder ... and a kind of
giving that fears nothing LOST.
The little that we suffer ... the pain the we often need to
endure ... can be a kind of OFFERING that we can make ... which though not
perfect ... may mean also for us a kind of a SPIRITUAL MARTYDOM ... much like
the experience of Mary Our Mother, can GIFT us with a level of BLESSEDNESS
which Jesus in His humanity had already shared with us.
