"Now
Christ is followed by a great multitude of people, among them women who mourn
over him, who weep loud for him. A strange thing happens. He turns
to them and says, “It is not for me that you should weep, daughters of
Jerusalem; you should weep for yourselves and for your children”: strange
because at first sight it seems that he, who accepts every straw of compassion
with pathetic gratitude, refuses the brave, open compassion of these
women! It is, or seems to be, a contradiction; it is not like him to
refuse anything from anyone.
We have seen how until
now, and indeed all through his passion, he has accepted the compassion of
anyone at all who would give it to him, accepting even the forced helped of
Simon. But this accepting on Christ’s part began long before the hour of
his passion struck; it was part of his plan of love from all eternity, his plan
to depend on his creatures, to need them, to need all that they could and would
give to him to fulfill that unimaginable plan of his love!
What,
then, is the meaning of this curious refusal of the compassion, of the tears,
of the women of Jerusalem? “It is not for me that you should weep,
daughters of Jerusalem; you should weep for yourselves and for your children.” Is this a refusal, a rebuke, or a warning?
In a sense
it is none of these, but a showing, a pointing to something which, if these
women miss, and if we miss today,
they and we will have missed the meaning of Christ’s passion. Which
if we miss, all our devotion to the person of Jesus Christ in His historical
Passion, all our meditations and prayers, will be sterile and will fall short
of their object to reach and comfort the heart of Christ. He is pointing
to His passion in the souls of each of those women, in the souls of each of
their children and their children’s children all through time. He is
pointing to all those lives to come through all the ages in which His suffering
will go on.
For Himself the consummation of His love for the world is close: He is very near to
Calvary now, in a few hours it will be over; He will be at peace and He will
have entered into his glory. But in the souls of men His suffering will
begin again, and it will go on all through the years to come. Evil will
go on gathering strength all through the centuries to come; the Christ in man
will be assaulted and threatened by it.
There will
be many who will follow literally in Christ’s footsteps, who will enter into His glory with Him through His sacrifice – martyrs who give their lives for
their faith, young men who willingly give their lives for their country,
children who die Christ’s own redeeming death because they die in the full
power and splendor of innocence. It is not for these that we must weep,
though we may weep for ourselves in our seeming loss of them. They are
the privileged ones whose love is immediately consummated in Christ’s
love. We must weep for ourselves, and for our fellows in whom Christ
suffers on, still laboring, stumbling, falling on the Via Crucis, still mocked and goaded and assaulted
on the way, still in the midst of the struggle.
There are
those in every age in whom the suffering of Christ is manifest, almost visible,
the beauty of His love shining through the ugliness of their
circumstances. It is not for Christ in them that we must weep. It
is for Christ whose beauty is hidden, Christ in the outcast, in the man who is
wrestling with temptation, who is unrecognized, uncomforted; Christ in those
whom we pass by without seeing, without knowing, whom we allow to stagger on,
on His way, loaded with His too heavy cross, unhelped, unwept, uncomforted.
It is in
order that we should seek Him and give our compassion to Him, weep for Him in
these, that Christ showed His need for sympathy in His Earthly life and on the
way of the cross. We must weep for Him in these and in our own souls, in
these days, the days of the dry wood: “It is not for me that you should weep;
you should weep for yourselves and your children. Behold, a time is
coming when men will say, It is well for the barren, for the wombs that never
bore children, and the breasts that never suckled them. It is then that
they will begin to say to the mountains, “Fall on us,” and to the hills, “Cover
us.” If it goes so hard with the tree that is still green, what will
become of the tree that is already dried up?” (Caryll Houselander)
Art: Virgil Cantini- Pope Paul Cultural Center, Washington, D.C.
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