We have seen Jesus’ Mother, a stranger (Simeon) made to help His load lighter and now a woman struck with compassion breaks through the crowd and past soldiers to offer her veil to wipe His face, perhaps even risking her own life, as one never knew what the soldiers would do. Each of these people and the weeping women of Jerusalem soon to come into play, make up the “Way of the Cross” Each gives us an insight into the suffering of Jesus as He makes His way to His death.
"Now
that face of infinite majesty and compelling beauty is unrecognizable.
The eyes which could see into the secret places of men’s souls are blinded,
swollen from the long sleepless night of trials and judgment and filled with
sweat and blood. The cheeks are bruised and dirty, the mouth swollen, the
hair “like ripe corn” is tangled by the crown of thorns and matted with
blood. Certainly there is no sign now of the beauty that could win a
man’s heart by a single glance, or of the power that can rule the tempests and
give life to the dead. On the contrary, here is a man who is the very
personification of humiliation, who is ugly with wounds and suffering, who is
in the hands of other men who have bound Him and are leading Him out to die,
and who is not even able to carry His own Cross alone.
It is all this, from which His close friends have fled, which drives this woman to Him. It is the ugliness and the helplessness, which frightened those whom He called His “own” away, that draws her to Him; it is her compassion that gives her the courage to come close to Him.
She comes with a veil in her hands, a cloth on which to wipe the poor disfigured face. She kneels as we kneel to wipe the tears from the faces of little children. Gratefully the head bowing over her sinks into the clean linen cloth and for a brief moment is covered by it. Then He raises His head, and she kneeling there, her own face lifted, sees the face of Christ looking down at her, and behind it the great beam of the cross. The two are together within the shadow of the cross on the street, Veronica and Christ.
She sees the majesty that was hidden, for now she has wiped away what she can of the blood and sweat and tears, she sees that they hid a face that is serene in its suffering, calm, majestic, infinitely tender. The swollen mouth smiles; the exhausted eyes are full of gentleness; the expression, after all, is not one of defeat and despair but of triumph and joy....
Until someone comes to reveal the secret of Christ indwelling the sufferer’s soul to Him, He cannot see any purpose in His pain. There is only one way to reveal Christ living on in the human heart to those who are ignorant concerning it. That is Veronica’s way, through showing Christ’s love. When someone comes – maybe a stranger, maybe someone close at home but whose compassion was not guessed before – and reveals Christ’s own pity in herself, the hard crust that has contracted the sufferer’s heart melts away, and looking into the gentle face of this Veronica of today, the sufferer looks, as it were, into a mirror in which he sees the beauty of Christ reflected at last from his own soul.
Until Veronica came to him on his way to Calvary, Christ was blinded by blood and sweat and tears. The merciful hands of Veronica wiped the blindness from His eyes; looking into her face, He saw his own beauty reflected in it. He saw His own eyes looking back at Him from hers. She had done this thing in the power in which alone she could do it, the power of Christ’s own love.
In the compassion on her lifted face, Christ saw, in the hour of His extreme dereliction, the triumph of His own love for men. He saw His love, radiant, triumphant in her, and in all the Veronicas to come through all time, in them and in those sufferers in whom His own divine beauty would be restored by their compassion." (Caryll Houselander)
Art: Church of the Holy Cross, Sisak, Croatia
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