THE MARYS

St.  John’s Gospel tells us, “Standing by the cross of Jesus were His mother and His mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary of Magdala” (Jn 19:25). These three Marys were special witnesses of the Lord’s death.

Because of their faithfulness, each of the three Marys were the first  witnesses of the Risen Christ. They symbolize, faith, hope, and love,  the theological virtues present in the Easter mystery.

In various Catholic countries, particularly in the Kingdom of Spain, the Philippines and Latin American countries, images of the three Marys (in Spanish Tres Marías) associated with the tomb are carried in Good Friday processions referred to by the word Penitencia (Spanish) or Panatà (Filipino for an act performed in fulfilment of a vow). They carry attributes or iconic accessories, chiefly enumerated as follows:

Santa Maria Jacobe (2024 Good Friday processions, Philippines)

Mary Cleopas (sometimes alternated with Mary Jacob) – holding a broom

Mary Salome – holding a thurible or censer

Mary Magdalene – holding an alabaster chalice or jar.

The Blessed Virgin Mary is not part of this group, as her title as Mater Dolorosa is reserved to a singular privilege in the procession.

A common pious practice sometimes alternates Mary Salome with Jacob, due to a popular belief that Salome, an elderly person at this time would not have had the energy to reach the tomb of Christ at the morning of resurrection, though she was present at the Crucifixion.

Art:   “The Marys at the Tomb;  Colin McChan, 1950

ON THE ROAD

 

Who are these disciples  on the road to Emaus? (Luke 24:13-35) Cleopas is named  in the Gospel, but the other remains a mystery. Tradition and scholars often identify her as Cleopas' wife, Mary.They most probably were traveling together, sorrowing, after the death of Jesus. It could also be another male disciple, such as Simon or Luke. 

The main message of this story after the resurrection of Jesus is twofold:   One never knows when and where the Lord will turn up and secondly, the risen Jesus is present with us even in times of doubt or disappointment. Even when we are blind to His presence, He stays with us. 

As with us, Jesus does not force Himself upon the disciples, but He waits to be invited to stay and share a meal, highlighting the importance of inviting Him into our own lives, especially as we receive Him in the Eucharist..

                                                   

Art: Amanda O Mcconnell  (USA)

THE GARDENER

 

“Tell Them” 

Breaking through the powers of darkness
bursting from the stifling tomb
he slipped into the graveyard garden
to smell the blossomed air.

Tell them, Mary, Jesus said,
that I have journeyed far
into the darkest deeps I’ve been
in nights without a star.

Tell them Mary, Jesus said,
that fear will flee my light
that though the ground will tremble
and despair will stalk the earth
I hold them firmly by the hand
through terror to new birth.

Tell them, Mary, Jesus said,
the globe and all that’s made
is clasped to God’s great bosom
they must not be afraid
for though they fall and die, he said,
and the black earth wrap them tight
they will know the warmth
of God’s healing hands
in the early morning light.

Tell them, Mary, Jesus said,
smelling the blossomed air,
tell my people to rise with me
to heal the Earth’s despair.

                            Edwina Gateley (USA)

Art:  "New Gardener",   Janpeter Muilwijk (Dutch, 1960–)  2017.

HE IS RISEN

 

“I who have died am alive again today, and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth day of life and love and wings: and of the gay great happening illimitably earth.”  e. e. cummings

If in that Syrian garden, ages slain,
You sleep, and know not you are dead in vain,
Nor even in dreams behold how dark and bright
Ascends in smoke and fire by day and night
The hate you died to quench and could but fan,
Sleep well and see no morning, son of man.

But if, the grave rent and the stone rolled by,
At the right hand of majesty on high
You sit, and sitting so remember yet
Your tears, your agony and bloody sweat,
Your cross and passion and the life you gave,
Bow hither out of Heaven and see and save.

A.E. Housman

 

Art: Julia Stankova, Bulgaria, 2014 

ENTOMBED

"Jesus, lying in the borrowed tomb, was at peace – His suffering was over, His love was consummated, every hour of darkness moved closer to the light, closer to the morning of resurrection, closer to the time when He would rise from the dead to live forever.  

In every life of every Christian there are countless resurrections – just as there are always many times when every Christian is buried with Christ.

In the soul of the sinner Christ dies many deaths and knows the glory of many resurrections

In the souls that have served Him faithfully, too, there are long periods that seem like death, periods of dryness of spirit when all the spiritual things that once interested them have become insufferably tedious and boring, when it is very difficult, even sometimes impossible, to say a prayer; when the sweetness has gone out of the love of God, when the soul seems bound in the iron bondage of the winter of the spirit like the seed held in iron of the black frozen earth in the wintertime.

 These are the winters of the spirit indeed!  But just as Christ suffered everything that all those who were to follow Him would suffer, all those “other Christs” who have come after Him have suffered, and will suffer in a spiritual sense, everything that He suffered in His human life on Earth.

One of these things is lying in the tomb, bound and restricted in the burial bands.  There come times in every life when the soul seems to be shut down, frostbound in the hard, ironbound winter of the spirit; times when it seems to be impossible to pray, impossible even to want to pray; when there seems to be only cold and darkness numbing the mind.

These indeed are the times when Christ is growing towards His flowering, towards His spring breaking in the soul – towards His ever-recurring resurrection in the world, towards His glorious resurrection in the hearts of men.

Again and again He has referred to Himself and to His divine life in us as seed buried in the earth, and so it is.  There are times when we experience no sweetness, no consolation, no visible sign of the presence and the growth of Christ in us; these above all other times are those in which Christ does in fact grow to His flowering in us.

There seems to be nothing that we can do in these times to honor God, but by ourselves there is nothing that we can do at any time.  In Christ we can do just what He did, remain quietly in the tomb, rest, and be at peace, trusting God to awaken us in His own good time to a springtime of Christ, to a sudden quickening and flowering and new realization of Christ-life in us.

 There are many deaths before the death of the body.  There are many, many resurrections, before that last eternal resurrection that will reunite our bodies and souls forever, to live forever full lives of love and endless bliss that will never be interrupted again.

All those little deaths of the spirit show us the mystery of that last death and that endless rising from the dead.

Death is not something to fear.  Fear will be over and done with when it comes.  Then the possibility of sin will be over, the danger of ever again being parted from Christ will be over, the pains and the desolations of body and soul on Earth will be over… We have nothing to fear. Christ has died each of our deaths for us.  He will be with us all, saint and sinner alike, in our rising from the dead. 

It is to each one of us that He spoke on the night before He died, saying, “Peace is my bequest to you, and the peace which I give you is mine to give; I do not give peace as the world gives it.  Do not let your heart be distressed, or play the coward,” (John 14:27). (Caryll Houselander)

Art: Andrea Mantegna (d. 1506), The Lamentatiom over the Dead Christ", Italian 

RELEASED

" They took His body down from the cross and laid it in His mother’s arms, and she held it upon her heart; and in it, all those Christs to come to whom she was mother now.

That first birth of Christ in Bethlehem was painless, because Mary, his mother, was sinless and He was the Son of God.  But this mysterious birth of Christ on Calvary began in the travail and agony of the whole world borne by one man and one woman, God-made-man and Mary, His mother: because this was the birth of Christ in us, Christ the redeemer born in the souls of sinners; and every sinner who would receive Him in all time became Mary’s child, even her only child; every sinner who would be indwelt by Christ was laid in Mary’s arms, and she received them all.

Mankind was born again.

 Already even in the agony of that night of sorrow, Mary, who had shared Christ’s passion shared His peace.  In the consummation of His pain, and her pain and suffering, she knew the beginning of the joy that would never end; she knew the birth of life in the souls of men that would be immortal life, never ending.  She knew the utter joy of experiencing the consummation of His love for men, and of loving them with all His love.

 She herself was indwelt by Him now as really as her body had been indwelt by His advent.  Now she who had given Him life would live His life forever; her life would be His, her words His words, her acts His acts; her heart beating, the beating of His heart 

She who had said long ago in Nazareth, “Let it be unto me according to thy word,” was the first of all human creatures since Christ was conceived to be one with Him.  She gave Him her life, and He gave her back her life in His forever.  He gave His life, too, to all those who would receive Him through the ages: “And I have given them the privilege which thou gavest to me, that they should all be one, as we are one; that while thou art in me, I may be in them, and so they may be perfectly made one,” (JohnJohn 17:22-23).

 As the dead Christ lay in His mother’s arms she laid to her heart all those sinners to whom He would give not only life but His own life: in baptism, that first stream of the waters of birth, cleansing and irrigating the souls; in the sacrament of penance, restoring the soul of the sinner to its primal innocence.  She saw them as God sees them.  No matter how battered and bruised they had been by sin, the innocence of Christ was restored to them, they were restored to His beauty; no matter how darkened their minds and hearts had been by evil and by the oppressive sadness that follows upon evil, they shone now with the purity, the glory, of Christ of Tabor, clothed in His loveliness that burns with the splendor of a fire of snow.  No matter how cynical and faded and old their sins had made them, they were restored to their childhood now, to Christ’s childhood.  Now they could possess the Kingdom of Heaven in a wild flower, a stream of water, or a star, and now in the body of Christ Mary took them, each of them as her only child, to her sinless heart.

And there from the summit of Calvary, at the foot of the cross with her dead child in her arms, Mary saw how in all the centuries to come Christ would be born again day after day, hour after hour, in the sacred Host.  She heard the multitudinous whisper of the words of consecration coming to her on Calvary from every part of the world, from every place on Earth: from the great cathedrals of the world; from the little village huts that are makeshift for churches; from the churches themselves, whether they were beautiful or cheap and tawdry; from the chapels and wards of hospitals; from prisons and from concentration camps; from the frozen forests of Siberia – from dawn till dusk, and from dusk till dawn, the words of consecration on the breath of men, and Jesus lifted up, as he had been lifted up on the cross, in the Sacred Host.

 And she saw, through the darkness that covered Calvary, how at all those Masses those who were to be her children and the children of God would flock to the altars to receive her son in the Host – little children clothed in the white muslin and gossamer of their First Communion clothes, old people leaning upon their sticks, young men and women who would carry Christ in their hearts to face and conquer the workaday world.

She saw, too, how he would be carried into prisons and hospitals and concentration camps, to be given to the lonely and the sick and the dying.  And how in all these people, in every one of them, sinners as well as saints, Christ, her son, would live again and overcome the world.

So it was that when Jesus was taken down from the cross, Mary received her dead son into her arms and took the whole world to her heart."  (Caryll Houselander)

 

DEATH

 

In Jesus’ passion and death, we see the suffering of the world, past and present. Our faith tells us that in our own suffering and death, which leads to the tomb, we will one day wake with Him in everlasting life.

 If anything, this walk with Christ during these days of sorrow, must reveal to us- and to a world that will listen- His infinite love for us. To paraphrase the refrain after each Station of the Cross: We adore You, O Christ, and we bless You, because You love us”. 

"As Christ died on the cross He drew all those to Himself who would die His death and enter with Him into the mysterious glory of it, all those who by dying would redeem other men: those whose lives seem to be failures, to be cut off before they have come to their flowering; those people who could have had brilliant careers, who could have benefited their fellow men immeasurably, but are cut off at the very beginning of manhood, or who die in childhood; deaths that seem to be nothing else but waste to which we cannot reconcile our hearts.

He identifies Himself with all the young men who would die in battle, all the men and women who would fall in the squander of destruction that is war, all those children who would die in innocence with the burning splendor of His purity still radiant in their souls, with His passion of love still whole and not frittered away.

 He identifies Himself with the old people who, when death comes, will think their lives were wasted, who will think that they have done nothing for God’s glory, taken no part in the world’s redemption, but who in reality are dying His death and saving the world in the power of His love.

 Christ on the cross is God and man, He is wholly human; He knows the utter desolation and loneliness of death as no other man will ever know it.  He knows the grief of leaving those whom He loves – His mother, His friends, Mary Magdalen who seems utterly dependent on Him.

 He feels abandoned by His Father.

He is dying all our deaths.  Death is too big a thing for any one of us to face alone.  It separates us, for a time, from those we love on Earth.  It is difficult for us Earthbound, rooted creatures to want Heaven; it is impossible for us to realize what the glory of God will be to us.  It is loving God, and that only, that can make Heaven, Heaven.  Here imagination does not help us: we cannot really imagine ourselves loving the “Supreme Spirit” – we even want to cling to our human frailties and comforts, to our human weakness

It is now that Christ takes over.  He has died all our deaths on the cross; now we are going to die His; it is Christ in us who surrenders to God.  It is not with our own heart and our own will that we can long for God, but with Christ’s.  And Christ has given His heart and will to us.  In this is the supreme mercy that comes to us in the hour of death.

“Father, into thy hands….”  We can say it with Christ’s love and trust in the Father.  “Father, into thy hands not only my spirit, my body and soul, but those people whom I love, and whom you love infinitely more than I 

Now I love God with Christ’s will, with Christ’s heart, with Christ’s trust; and because He has taken whole possession of me, in the hour of my death I shall at last love my friends too with His loveNot only will my suffering of mind and body, molten into His in the fire of His love, be the beginning of my blessed purgatory purifying me; it will also be Christ’s sacrifice on the cross offered for those whom I love.

Of each one surrendered wholly to Christ in the hour of death, we can say: “Greater love than this no man has, that he lays down his life for his friends.”  (Caryll Houselander)

Art:  Gianpaolo Berto- Italian