“Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God.
And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call
his name Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High;
and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will
reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and his kingdom will have no end” (Lk
1:30-33).
Mary remembered these words. She often returned to them in
the secret of her heart. When she met her Son on the way of the Cross, perhaps
these very words came to her mind. With particular force. “He will reign... His
kingdom will have no end”, the heavenly messenger had said. Now, as she watches
her Son, condemned to death, carrying the Cross on which he must die, she might
ask herself, all too humanly: So how can these words be fulfilled? In what way
will he reign over the House of David? And how can it be that his kingdom will
have no end?
Humanly speaking, these are reasonable questions. But Mary
remembered that, when she first heard the Angel’s message, she had replied:
“Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done to me according to your
word” (Lk 1:38). Now she sees that her word is being fulfilled as the word of
the Cross. Because she is a mother, Mary suffers deeply. But she answers now as
she had answered then, at the Annunciation: “May it be done to me according to
your word”.
In this way, as a mother would, she embraces the cross
together with the divine Condemned One. On the way of the Cross Mary shows
herself to be the Mother of the Redeemer of the world. “All you who pass by the
way, look and see whether there is any suffering like my suffering, which has
been dealt me” (Lam 1:12). It is the Sorrowful Mother who speaks, the Handmaid
who is obedient to the last, the Mother of the Redeemer of the world.
O Mary, who
walked the way of the Cross with your Son, your mother’s heart torn by grief,
but mindful always of your fiat and fully confident that He to whom nothing is
impossible would be able to fulfill his promises, implore for us and for the
generations yet to come the grace of surrender to God’s love. Help us, in the
face of suffering, rejection, and trial, however prolonged and severe, never to
doubt his love. To Jesus, your Son, honor and glory for ever and ever.
~Bl. John Paul II, Stations of the Cross for Good
Friday, 2000
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