IN THE BEGINNING
WHO
IS GOD?
God
is a supreme being who existed before the creation, who existed on His own, the
Alpha and Omega. The creator of the universe, the I am that I am.
Now
the scripture teaches us in the Gospel according to John 1:1-14 which say “In the beginning
was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the
beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made
that was made. In him was life; and the
life was the light of men. He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and
the world knew him not. He came unto his own, and his own received him not. But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name: which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth”. We are still explaining who that word is but already made clear to us by John 1:1-14. And still yet people do not believe what John said about the word.
the world knew him not. He came unto his own, and his own received him not. But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name: which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth”. We are still explaining who that word is but already made clear to us by John 1:1-14. And still yet people do not believe what John said about the word.
Also
the scripture tells us in the Book of Isaiah 9:6 “For unto us a child is born, unto us a son
is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be
called Wonderful, Counsellor, the Almighty God, The everlasting Father, and the
Prince of Peace”.
That
child is to be born into this world, but has not yet come, by the scripture
above “The son
shall be called Almighty God” tells us that the child is God in
flesh.
However
the Book of Isaiah brought known to us that a woman will bring forth that child
Isaiah 7:14 “Therefore
the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and
bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel”. Immanuel simply mean
GOD IS WITH US. This clearly shows us that God will come and stay with us in
the future.
Now
God’s promise has been fulfilled. He (God) has come to dwell with us, to live
with his chosen ones, his created.
The
Gospel according to Luke explained how the God of Israel came to us through a
virgin named Mary.
THE
INCARNATION OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY
“Hail, thou that art
highly favored, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women. And when she saw him, she was troubled at his saying, and cast in
her mind what manner of salutation this should be. And the angel said unto
her, Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favor with God. And, behold, thou shall conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son,
and shall call his name JESUS. He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest: and
the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David: And he shall
reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be no
end”.
It
is very rare to see an Angel of the Lord greet a mere human being. Looking back
into the Old Testament, Abraham saw angels and he ran to them and greeted them,
called them into his house, prepared food for them and even made tents for
them. The Angels were only passing by; they did not greet him or say any word
to him.
The
Angel of the Lord has appeared to so many Prophets and God’s own people but none
has an Angel of the Lord greeted as a sign of respect, for Angels are being
respected by humans.
However it is still surprising to me, why the
Angel Gabriel greeted and showed respect to the Virgin named Mary. Moreover we only show respect to
those who are superior to us. It shows that the Virgin Mary is far much superior to the Angels; this is why she was
respected by the Angel Gabriel.
You
will believe me that Angels never appear to people unless being sent by God
Almighty. Angels are being sent with a particular message because they are
messengers of God. And they say and do exactly what has being said by God who
sent them.
The
message God sent the angel to deliver was that the Virgin will conceive and
bear a son and that she will name him Jesus.
And that the child will be called the son of the Most High God.
This
is the son “That word” which was promised to us, he has finally come through a
woman. However the Gospel according to Luke went on to say Luke1:34-37 “Then said Mary
unto the angel, how then this shall be, seeing I know not a man? And the angel answered and said unto her, The
Holy Spirit shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow
thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be
called the Son of God. And, behold, thy
cousin Elisabeth, she hath also conceived a son in her old age: and this is the
sixth month with her, who was called barren. For with God nothing shall be impossible”.
By
these words “The
Holy Spirit” it also signifies God Almighty. Now let us explain this
saying that ‘The
Holy Spirit will come upon her and she shall conceive’ means that
the Holy Spirit (God) will automatically be her husband (Spouse). Therefore
making Mary the Spouse of the Holy
Spirit.
The
Bible tells us still in that same Luke 1:38 that the Virgin answered the
Angel’s message saying “And Mary said, Behold I am the handmaid of the Lord; be it
unto me according to thy word. And the angel departed from her”. By Mary’s acceptance to
the message the Conception took place and she became pregnant by the Holy
Spirit (God).
MARY VISITS ELIZABETH (THE VISITATION)
Soon
after Mary got that message, the
bible tells us in the same Luke 1:39-40
“And Mary arose in those
days, and went into the hill country with haste, into a city of Judea; entered
into the house of Zacharias, and saluted Elisabeth”. Just imagine , the
ordinary greetings made by the Virgin Mary
who is already carrying God in her, the bible tells us still in Luke1:41 “And it came to pass,
that, when Elisabeth heard the salutation of Mary, the babe leaped in her womb;
and Elisabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit”:
It is still surprising
to me how Elizabeth knew that the Virgin Mary
was with a child so great, or was she eavesdropping when the Angel Gabriel left
the message? No she wasn’t but by the Power of the Holy Spirit she exclaimed
with that great Joy.
However,
to be sincere with ourselves, if it were to be you Elizabeth by the Power of
the Holy Spirit said those praising words to, what could you have said? Nothing
but you will just smile with happiness and get to other important things. But
it was totally different in the case of
the Blessed Virgin Mary. She
immediately returned all the Glory and Praises poured on her by Elizabeth to
God Almighty through her song which we Catholics call the Magnificat.
THE
MAGNIFICAT
The Gospel Luke 1:46-56 told us how Mary sang her song as thus
The word “henceforth all generations shall call me blessed”
above should proof to you why the world calls her Blessed Virgin Mary. That was how she praised God
through that wonderful and touching song of praise.
THE
BIRTH OF JESUS
Joseph
and Mary went up from the town of
Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he
belonged to the house and line of David. He went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to be married to
him and was expecting a child. While they were there, the time
came for the baby to be born, and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She
wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no guest
room available for them.
There were shepherds living out in the fields
nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. So an Angel of the Lord
appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were
terrified. But the Angel said to them,
“Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy
for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has
been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a
sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.”
When the Angels had left them and gone into heaven,
the shepherds said to one another, “Let’s go to Bethlehem and see this thing
that has happened, which the Lord has told us about.” So they hurried off and
found Mary and Joseph, and the baby,
who was lying in the manger.
Mary
carried the child Jesus in her womb
for 9 months. Jesus ate the food the
virgin eats; pass out waste products in the womb of this Immaculate Virgin.
His birth was so great that the whole world knew about
him. Jesus was given birth to in a
manger because there was no room for the couples Joseph and Mary at the inn at Bethlehem.
Three wise men from the east came to visit the King
of Glory, the Wonderful Consellor, the Prince of Peace, and the Almighty God.
They followed a star which led them to the manger where there God was been
given birth to.
Joseph was with Mary,
and he cared for her despite all troubles facing them. They are the Most
Blessed Couples in the world and other couples are to learn from this story. To
be united always, to be there for each other in terms of troubles.
THE
PRESENATINON
When
the time came for the purification rites required by the Law of Moses, Joseph
and Mary took him to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord (as
it is written in the Law of the Lord, “Every firstborn male is to be
consecrated to the Lord”
Now there was a man in Jerusalem called Simeon, who
was righteous and devout. He was waiting for the consolation of Israel, and the
Holy Spirit was on him. It had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he
would not die before he had seen the Lord’s Messiah. Moved by
the Spirit, he went into the temple courts.
When the parents brought in the child Jesus to do
for him what the custom of the Law required, the Gospel according to Luke
2:29-32 tells us that Simeon took him in his arms and praised God, saying:
“Sovereign Lord, as
you have promised, you may now dismiss your servant in peace. For
my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the sight of
all nations: a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and the
glory of your people Israel”.
The
child’s father and mother marveled at what was said about the child. the Bible
went further to tell us in Luke 2:34-35 that “Then Simeon blessed them and said to Mary,
his mother: ‘This child is destined to cause the falling and rising of many in Israel,
and to be a sign that will be spoken against, so that the thoughts of many
hearts will be revealed. And a sword will pierce your own soul too”.
When
Joseph and Mary had done everything required by the Law of the Lord, they
returned to Galilee to their own town of Nazareth. And the child grew and
became strong; he was filled with wisdom, and the grace of God was on him.
THE PROTECTION
The Blessed Virgin Mary protected this child Jesus
from all dangers. Which means that after harboring God in her womb for Nine Months
and finally brought forth (God) into this world, she still took that motherly
love for his son God protecting him from those who wanted to kill the child.
Surely if we are to say
anything, Jesus injured in his
childhood. Who cleaned the wound? The Blessed Virgin Mary.
God (Jesus)
obeyed his mother for The Blessed Virgin Mary
must have sent him to buy some things, to fetch water; to sweep the
compound e.t.c. Jesus obeyed Joseph
by working for him at the workshop.
Imagine God himself laid on the womb of this
Immaculate Virgin Mary, sucked her
breast milk and was nourished by her love, protected from disease attacks and Malaria.
From snakes bite, scorpion bite, and other bites from insects. He was protected
from troubles, from infant death and so on and so forth.
God was being protected by a woman all the days of
his life on this Earth; he was cared for and loved by his mother ‘The Blessed
Virgin Mary’
I. INTRODUCTION AND DEFINITIONS
1. MOTHER OF GOD
2. IMMACULATE CONCEPTION
(Formal Definition of Pope Pius IX, 1854)
(Formal Definition of Pope Pius XII, 1950)
5. MEDIATRIX
6. SPIRITUAL MOTHER
(Karl Adam, The Spirit of Catholicism, 1924)
III. MARY'S IMMACULATE CONCEPTION
(Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman, Meditations and Devotions, 1893)
(Vatican II, Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, ch. 8, "Our Lady", III, 60,62)
Mary cooperates in the application of the grace of Redemption to man. She participates in the distribution of grace by her maternal intercession which is far inferior in efficacy to that of the intercessory prayer of Jesus Christ, the High Priest, but surpasses far the intercessory prayer of all the other saints . . . [We are not] obliged to beg for all graces through Mary, nor [is] Mary's intercession intrinsically necessary for the application of the grace, but according to God's positive ordinance, the redemptive grace of Jesus Christ is conferred [with] the intercessory cooperation of Mary.
(Ludwig Ott, Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma)
I. INTRODUCTION AND DEFINITIONS
1. MOTHER OF GOD
Mary is the true physical mother of
Jesus Christ, Who is truly God; hence Mary is the Mother of God. The doctrine
was defined at the Council of Ephesus in 431 in order to counter Nestorius, who
thought that Mary gave birth to Jesus Christ's human nature only. The Catholic
Church responded by stating that persons, and not natures, are conceived and
born, and that Jesus Christ was a Divine Person, and God-Man. The purpose of
this doctrine was, and is, to safeguard the Divinity of Jesus Christ. As such,
it is Christ-centered, not Mary-centered. In no way does it imply that Mary is
greater than, or prior to, God.
2. IMMACULATE CONCEPTION
The most holy Virgin Mary was, in
the first moment of her conception, by a unique gift of grace and privilege of
almighty God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ the Redeemer of mankind,
preserved free from all stain of original sin.
(Formal Definition of Pope Pius IX, 1854)
3. ASSUMPTION
Mary, the immaculate perpetually
Virgin Mother of God, after the completion of her earthly life, was assumed
body and soul into the glory of heaven.
(Formal Definition of Pope Pius XII, 1950)
4. PERPETUAL VIRGINITY
Mary remained a virgin before,
during, and after the birth of Jesus Christ, who had
no siblings, as many Protestants hold, although all orthodox Protestants
maintain belief in the Virgin Birth of Jesus Christ.
5. MEDIATRIX
Mary freely cooperated
with God in consenting to the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, thus, indirectly, she
shares as a channel of grace to mankind. Mary also constantly intercedes on our
behalf, thus participating in graces entirely originating from, and conferred
by, God, by virtue of the merit of Jesus Christ. God willed for Mary to be a
channel of blessing in this fashion, in a subordinate and indirect way, without
taking away any of the prerogatives of the Creator.
6. SPIRITUAL MOTHER
Jesus Christ gave to
John -- and by implication, all Christians -- His Mother, to be our Spiritual
Mother (Jn 19:26-27; cf. Rev 12:1-2,5,17). Thus, we can ask for her prayers on
our behalf, which have great efficacy due to her exalted holiness (Jas 5:16)
and closeness to our Lord Jesus Christ.
7.
An infinite distance
separates [Mary] from the Infinite, from Father, Son and Holy Ghost. And she
has no grace, no virtue, no privilege, which she does not owe to the divine
Mediator. Both in her natural and in her supernatural being, she is wholly the
gift of God. There is nothing, therefore, so misguided and so preposterous as to
decry the Mother of God as some 'mother goddess,' and to talk of Catholicism
having a polytheistic character. There is but one God, the Triune God, and
every created thing lives in awe of His mystery.
(Karl Adam, The Spirit of Catholicism, 1924)
8.
There is only one person
in all humanity of whom God has one picture, and in whom there is a perfect
conformity between what He wanted her to be and what she is, and that is His
Own Mother. The model and the copy are perfect. As Eden was the Paradise of
Creation, Mary is the Paradise of the Incarnation. The closer one gets to the
fire, the greater the heat; the closer one is to God, the greater the purity.
But since no one was ever closer to God than the woman whose human portals He
threw open to walk this earth, then no one could have been more pure than she.
We do not start with Mary. We start with Christ. The less we think of Him, the
less we think of her; the more we think of Him, the more we think of her; the
more we adore His Divinity, the more we venerate her Motherhood. It may be
objected: 'Our Lord is enough for me. I have no need of her.' But He needed
her, whether we do or not. God, Who made the sun, also made the moon. The moon
does not take away from the brilliance of the sun. All its light is reflected
from the sun. The Blessed Mother reflects her Divine Son; without Him, she is
nothing. With Him, she is the Mother of Men.
(Archbishop Fulton
Sheen, The World's First Love, 1952)
II. MARY THE "MOTHER OF GOD"
("THEOTOKOS")
1. Mary is called
"Mother of the Lord" (Lk 1:43) and the "Mother of Jesus"
(Jn 2:1), thus she is the Mother of God, since Jesus Christ is true God, the
2nd Person of the Holy Trinity (see also Is 7:14; Mt 1:18; Lk 1:35; Gal 4:4).
2. Our own mothers did
not have any part in the production of our souls, which was the work of God
alone. Yet we would not say she was the "mother of my body," and not
"my mother." Likewise, Mary, under the overshadowing of the Holy
Spirit, communicated, as mothers do, to the Lord Jesus Christ a human nature of
the same substance as her own. From this unfathomable privilege flows her
surpassing dignity and excellence. If Mary were not a truly human mother, then
Jesus Christ is not a truly human Person, and both the Incarnation and Jesus
Christ's Human Nature would be in peril.
3. The Founders of
Protestantism held firmly to this title for Mary, on the same grounds (e.g.,
Luther, Calvin, Melanchthon, Zwingli, and Bullinger).
III. MARY'S IMMACULATE CONCEPTION
1. Luke 1:28 "And
the angel came in unto her, and said, Hail, {thou that art} highly favoured,
the Lord {is} with thee: blessed {art} thou among women."
The Gk. word rendered
"highly favoured" here (KJV) and in many translations, is
"kecharitomene." Catholic Bibles usually translate it "full of
grace," which is permissible, and not merely a biased position. E.g., the
Protestant Amplified Bible mentions in a note that "endued with
grace" is the "literal translation." W.E. Vine's Expository
Dictionary of N.T. Words, a standard Protestant reference, states that the
word means "to make graceful or gracious . . . grace implies more than
favour; grace is a free gift, favour may be deserved or gained."
If this be true, the
Catholic rendering makes more clear the Catholic position that Mary's
Immaculate Conception is entirely unmerited on her part, a sheer act of mercy
and grace performed solely by God. "Favour" may imply otherwise.
"Kecharitomene," in any event, is derived from the root
"charis," whose literal meaning is "grace" (it is
translated as "grace" 129 out of 150 times in the KJV). The angel is
here, in effect, giving Mary a new name ("full of grace"), as if he
were addressing Abraham as "full of faith," or Solomon "full of
wisdom" (characteristics which typified them). Throughout the Bible, names
were indicative of one's character and essence, all the more so if God renamed
a person.
2. Catholicism needs
only to show the harmony of a doctrine with the Bible. It is not our view that
every doctrine of Christianity must appear whole, explicit, and often, in the
pages of the Bible. We have also Sacred Tradition, Church Authority, and an
acceptance of the development of understanding of essentially unchanging
Christian truths. A belief implicitly biblical is not "anti-biblical"
or "unbiblical," as many Protestants would have us believe. In fact,
many Protestant doctrines are either not found in the Bible at all (e.g.,
"Bible alone" and the Canon of the Bible), are based on only a very
few direct passages (e.g., the Virgin Birth), or are indirectly deduced from
many implicit passages (e.g., the Trinity, the two natures of Jesus Christ).
Likewise with the Immaculate Conception and other Catholic Marian beliefs.
3. Luke 1:35 "And
the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the
power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing
which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God."
This verse explicitly
establishes a link between Mary as bearer of the New Covenant and the Ark of
the Old Covenant. The Gk. word for "overshadow"
("episkiasei") was used of the bright cloud at the Transfiguration of
Jesus Christ (Mt 17:5; Lk 9:34) and is reminiscent of the Shekinah of the OT,
which represented God's Presence (Ex 24:15-16; 40:34-8; 1 Ki 8:4-11). Mary became
like the Holy of Holies in the Temple, where God dwelt. God gave extremely
detailed instructions on constructing the ark, since it was to contain His Law
(Ex 25-30 and 35-40). Mary had to be that much more holy, since she was to
carry the Word of God in the flesh (Job 14:4). Further parallelism between Mary
and the Ark is indicated in comparing Lk 1:43 with 2 Sam 6:9, Lk 1:44 with 2
Sam 6:14-16, and Lk 1:39-45,56 with 2 Sam 6:10-12.
Mary had to be sinless
in order to be in such close proximity to God Himself. The whole Bible teaches
this (e.g., Ex 3:5; Deut 23:14). God's Presence imparts and requires holiness
(1 Cor 3:13-17; 1 Jn 3:3-9). The Jewish high priest entered the Holy of Holies
(where the Ark and God's Special Presence were) only once a year, under threat
of death if God's instructions were violated (Lev 16:2-4,13). The Ark itself
was so holy that only a few were allowed to touch it (Num 4:15; 2 Sam 6:2-7).
Thus, Mary, due to her ineffable physical and spiritual relationship with God
the Son, the Holy Spirit (as "Spouse"), and God the Father (as
"Daughter of Zion"), necessarily had to be granted the grace of
sinlessness from conception, just as we all will be cleansed utterly in order
to be present with God in heaven (Rev 21:27). Seen in this light, the
Immaculate Conception, though still technically a deduction from the Bible, is
a very biblical doctrine indeed.
4. Other biblical
parallels to the Immaculate Conception exist. Jeremiah (Jer 1:5) and John the
Baptist (Lk 1:15) were sanctified from the womb for the serious tasks to which
God was calling them. The Apostles were endowed with many extraordinary gifts
for their unique role in the history of Christianity (Acts 2; 2 Cor 3:5-6).
Adam and Eve, before the Fall, were immaculate and without sin. They were
brought forth from an immaculate earth, just as Jesus came forth from the
immaculate Mary. Mary is the "second Eve" just as Jesus was the
"second Adam" (Rom 5:14; 1 Cor 15:22,45). Mary, by her profound
obedience (Lk 1:38), "undoes" Eve's disobedience in the Garden. The
angels were created sinless and have remained so (except for the rebel demons).
Saints in heaven are completely holy (Rev 14:5). God saved Mary by preserving
her from the "pit" of sin, while He pulls the rest of us out of it. This
is why God is every bit as much her Savior as He is ours (LK 1:47).
The Immaculate Mary
prefigures the perfected Church (Eph 5:25-27). Catholics venerate in Mary no
more than the glory promised by God to every creature who stays the course. The
doctrine of Original Sin is more difficult to believe than Mary's Immaculate
Conception. It is no difficulty to believe that God can unite a soul to flesh
without sin. It is much harder to accept the notion that millions of souls are
conceived with it.
5. It is abundantly
strange that so many Protestants see Catholic Marian beliefs as idolatrous,
when in fact, the Immaculate Conception is nothing if not a case where God
saves absolutely independently of human effort or "works," without
even the possibility of them - pure grace and nothing but grace. Protestants
hold that this is what saves everyone who attains salvation. So how can
Catholics be chided for applying this notion of unmerited grace to Mary? The
only difference is that Catholics believe that God's applied grace obliterates
sin, whereas in Protestantism, it merely "covers it up." This notion,
however, is unbiblical, and was originated, by and large, by Martin Luther.
6.
He who held back the
waves of that Jordan, that the ark of the Old Testament might pass untouched
and honored through its bed, could hold back the wave of Adam, lest it overflow
the ark of the New Testament beneath its defiling floods. For He, who could
have limited Adam's sin unto himself, can ward off that sin from Mary. And what
He could, that He willed to do. For why should He not have willed it?
(Bishop William
Ullathorne, The Immaculate Conception, 1855)
IV. MARY'S ASSUMPTION
1. The Assumption is not
an arbitrary presumption; it follows from Mary's sinlessness. Since bodily decay
results from sin (Ps 16:10), the absence of sin would allow for instant bodily
resurrection at death. Mary, since she was sinless, was preserved from the
three-fold curse of sin (Gen 3:16-19), as well as from a return to dust. The
Assumption is not the Ascension. Mary is taken to heaven by the power of God,
not her own power, as with Jesus. The Church Fathers refer to such passages as
Ps 132:8 as indications of the Assumption. Biblical parallels very similar to
the Assumption exist:
Hebrews 11:5 "By faith Enoch was translated that he
should not see death; and was not found, because God had translated him: for
before his translation he had this testimony, that he pleased God." {Cf.
Gen 5:24}
2 Kings 2:1,11 ". . . the Lord would take up Elijah into
heaven by a whirlwind . . . And it came to pass, as they still went on, and
talked, that, behold, {there appeared} a chariot of fire, and horses of fire,
and parted them both asunder; and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into
heaven."
Enoch and Elijah, according
to Protestant commentaries, were taken bodily to heaven, exactly what the
doctrine of the Assumption maintains with regard to Mary. Furthermore, OT
saints were immediately resurrected after Jesus' Resurrection (Mt 27:52-3);
Christians at the Second Coming are resurrected and meet Jesus in the air
(along with the dead saints) -- some Protestants regard this as the
"Rapture" (1 Thess 4:15-17). Lastly, Paul describes an experience
whereby he was "caught up to the third heaven," possibly "in the
body." Such evidence does not establish the Assumption in and of itself,
but it does make such a notion plausible and not at all unbiblical, as is so
often charged by Protestants.
Again, Catholicism does
not believe in sola Scriptura, or "Scripture Alone" as the
ultimate source of Christian truth. This is the Protestant principle of
authority, curiously not found in the Bible, which points to a Tradition larger
than itself (1 Cor 11:2; 2 Thess 2:15; 2 Tim 2:2).
2. Mary is again here a
sign and type for every Christian. She anticipates our eventual bodily
resurrection with her Assumption, just as she prefigures our redemption from
sin by her Immaculate Conception.
3.
Can we suppose that
Abraham, or David, or Isaiah, or Ezekiel, should have been thus favoured
[referring to the mass resurrection of Mt 27:52-3], and not God's own Mother?
Was she not nearer to Him than the greatest of the Saints before her? Therefore
we confidently say that our Lord, having preserved her from sin and the
consequences of sin by His Passion, lost no time in pouring out the full merits
of that Passion upon her body as well as her soul.
(Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman, Meditations and Devotions, 1893)
V. MARY'S PERPETUAL VIRGINITY
1. Many Protestants
assume that whenever they read of Jesus' "brothers," this is
referring to His siblings, other sons and daughters of Mary. But it is not that
simple. "Adelphos," the Gk. word for "brother" in the NT,
has multiple meanings (like the English word), and they all appear frequently
in Scripture. In addition to sibling, it can also denote (1) those of the same
nationality (Acts 3:17; Rom 9:3); (2) any man, or neighbor (Mt 5:22; Lk 10:29);
(3) persons with like interests (Mt 5:47); (4) distant descendants of the same
parents (Acts 7:23,26; Heb 7:5); (5) persons united by a common calling (Rev
22:9); (6) mankind (Mt 25:40; Heb 2:17); (7) the disciples (Mt 28:10; Jn
20:17); (8) all believers (Mt 23:8; Acts 1:15; Rom 1:13; 1 Thess 1:4; Rev
19:10). Clearly, then, this issue is not at all settled by the mere word
"brother"/"adelphos" in the Bible, and a more in-depth
examination of the biblical data will be necessary.
2. "Brethren":
Biblical Exegesis
A. By comparing Gen
14:14 with 11:26-7, we find that Lot, called Abraham's "brother", is
actually his nephew.
B. Jacob is called the
"brother" of his Uncle Laban (Gen 29:10,15).
C. Cis and Eleazar are
described as "brethren", whereas they are literally cousins (1 Chron
23:21-2).
D. "Brethren"
as mere kinsmen: Deut 23:7; 2 Sam 1:26; 1 Ki 9:13; 2:32; 2 Ki 10:13-14; Jer
34:9; Amos 1:9.
E. Neither Hebrew or
Aramaic has a word for "cousin." The NT retains this Hebrew usage by
using "adelphos," even when non-siblings are being referred to.
F. In Lk 2:41-51, Joseph
and Mary take Jesus to the Temple at the age of twelve, with no sign of any
other siblings.
G. Jesus Himself uses
"brethren" in the larger sense (Mt 23:1,8; 12:49).
H. By comparing Mt
27:56; Mk 15:40; and Jn 19:25, we find that James and Joseph - mentioned in Mt
13:55 with Simon and Jude as Jesus' "brethren" - are also called sons
of Mary, wife of Clopas. This other Mary (Mt 27:61; 28:1) is called Mary's
"adelphe" in Jn 19:25 (two Marys in one family?! - thus even this
usage apparently means "cousins" or more distant relative). Mt 13:55
and Mk 6:3 mention Simon, Jude and "sisters" along with James and
Joseph, calling all "adelphoi". Since we know that James and Joseph
are not Jesus' blood brothers, it is likely that all these other
"brethren" are cousins, according to the linguistic conventions
discussed above.
I. Even standard
evangelical Protestant commentaries such as Jamieson, Fausset & Brown admit
that the question is not a simple one: "an exceedingly difficult question
. . . nor are opinions yet by any means agreed . . . vexed question,
encompassed with difficulties." {commentary for Mt 13:55}
J. Some Protestant
commentators maintain that Mt 1:24-5 ("Joseph knew her not till . .
.") implies that Mary had marital relations after the birth of Jesus. This
does not follow, since "till" does not necessarily imply a change of
behavior after the time to which it refers (cf. similar instances in 1 Sam
15:35; 2 Sam 6:23; Mt 12:20; Rom 8:22; 1 Tim 4:13; 6:14; Rev 2:25).
K. Likewise,
"firstborn" (Mt 1:25) need not imply later children. A mother's first
child is her "firstborn" regardless if any follow or not (Ex 13:2).
Also, in the Bible, "firstborn" often means "preeminent,"
and even applies to those who are not literally the first child (Jer 31:9), or,
metaphorically, to groups (Ex 4:22; Heb 12:23). Thus, "firstborn" in
Mt 1:25 actually is more of an indication that Jesus is Mary's only child, than
that there were others. This position is held by many evangelical Protestant
scholars on these criteria, rather than Catholic dogmatic grounds.
L. Jesus committed his
Mother to the care of John from the Cross (Jn 19:26-7). This is improbable if
He had full brothers of His own then alive. Again, many Protestant interpreters
agree.
M. Who would want to
have God for a brother anyway?! Talk about sibling rivalry and an inferiority
complex! The whole notion, if pondered, seems more and more improper and
unbecoming - out and out implausible, even apart from the biblical data.
3. Early Christian
Tradition was unanimous in holding to Mary's Perpetual Virginity. It was first
doubted, as far as we know, by one Helvidius, who tangled with St. Jerome in
380, but by few others until recent times. All the Protestant Founders firmly
held the belief, as did later notable Protestants such as John Wesley, and many
more to this day, on biblical grounds alone.
VI. MARY AS INTERCESSOR, MEDIATRIX, AND
SPIRITUAL MOTHER
1. John 19:26-27 "When
Jesus therefore saw his mother, and the disciple standing by, whom he loved, he
saith unto his mother, Woman, behold thy son! (27) Then saith he to the
disciple, Behold thy mother! And from that hour that disciple took her unto his
own {home}."
Many scholars, and not
just Catholic ones (e.g., Lightfoot) suggest that in a text to which John
attaches such importance more is involved than simply asking the disciple to
take care of Mary. Jesus addresses his Mother first. In Gen 3:20 we find that
"Adam called his wife's name Eve; because she was the mother of all
living." Likewise, John, who represented Christians, was to consider Mary
his "mother," since she, as the Second Eve, is a type of the Church,
and the Spiritual Mother of all Christians. To take it further, the Church is
also a "mother" of Christians (Gal 4:26), since it nurtures and
guides them into the fullness of the faith. Jesus' phrase evokes the OT
covenant formula of 2 Sam 7:14: "I will be his father, and he shall be my
son . . ."
2. Revelation
12:1, 5, 17 "And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman
clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of
twelve stars . . . And she brought forth a man child, who was to rule all
nations with a rod of iron: and her child was caught up unto God, and {to} his
throne . . . And the dragon was wroth with the woman, and went to make war with
the remnant of her seed, which keep the commandments of God, and have the
testimony of Jesus Christ." (Cf. Ps 2:9)
This woman is the mother
of the Messiah, Jesus Christ (12:5) and also of Christian disciples (12:17);
possibly an extension of the Mary/Eve symbolism of Jn 19:26-7 (the same John
may have written both). She is in conflict with a dragon who in 12:9 is
identified with the ancient serpent of Genesis (cf. Gen 3:15 which also has
Marian import). It would not be unusual for this passage to have a double
symbolic interpretation, referring both to Mary and the Church (of which Mary
is a type, anyway).
3. Mary as a
Type of the Church: Just before the scene in heaven described in Rev
12 (the immediate preceding verse: 11:19), the ark of the covenant appears in
the "temple of God." This is no coincidence, given the Mary/Ark
parallelism as examined previously (it should be noted that the original Bible
had no verses or chapters either). Mary symbolizes both the whole people of
Israel and the Church. As Israel produces the Messiah, so Mary bears Him and
gives birth to the Church in that same act. She is the first Christian, and the
Mother of believers, in the sense that Abraham is called the Father of
believers. Abraham inaugurated the Old Covenant by an act of faith. Mary does
the same at the dawn of the New Covenant.
Moreover, Mary appears
to fulfill the typology of the "Daughter of Zion", who is the
personification of Israel (see Lam 1:15*; 2:13; Is 62:5*; 62:11; Jer 4:31;
Micah 4:10; Zech 2:10; 9:9; Zeph 3:14; cf. Rev 21:2-3 / * = described as a
"virgin"). In Zeph 3:14 and Zech 9:9, the Gk. word "chaire"
("hail") appears in the Septuagint (the Gk. translation of the OT in
the 3rd century B.C.). This is the same word as that in Lk 1:28 ("Hail,
full of grace . . ."). "Chaire" is used in prophecies regarding
the messianic deliverance of the Jews.
4. Mary as
Mediatrix:
There is but one
mediator (1 Tim 2:5-6). But Mary's function as mother of men in no way obscures
or diminishes this unique mediation of Christ, but rather shows its power. But
the Blessed Virgin's salutary influence on men originates not in any inner
necessity but in the disposition of God. It flows forth from the superabundance
of the merits of Jesus Christ, rests on his mediation, depends entirely on it
and draws all its power from it. It does not hinder in any way the immediate
union of the faithful with Jesus Christ but on the contrary fosters it. The
Blessed Virgin is invoked in the Church under the titles of Advocate, Helper,
benefactress, and Mediatrix. This, however, is so understood that it neither
takes away anything from nor adds anything to the dignity and efficacy of Jesus
Christ the one Mediator . . . The unique mediation of the Redeemer does not
exclude but rather gives rise to a manifold cooperation which is but a sharing
in this one source.
(Vatican II, Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, ch. 8, "Our Lady", III, 60,62)
Mary cooperates in the application of the grace of Redemption to man. She participates in the distribution of grace by her maternal intercession which is far inferior in efficacy to that of the intercessory prayer of Jesus Christ, the High Priest, but surpasses far the intercessory prayer of all the other saints . . . [We are not] obliged to beg for all graces through Mary, nor [is] Mary's intercession intrinsically necessary for the application of the grace, but according to God's positive ordinance, the redemptive grace of Jesus Christ is conferred [with] the intercessory cooperation of Mary.
(Ludwig Ott, Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma)
God often involves
Christians in secondary roles in which He is preeminent. He is the Creator, yet
he calls us to be procreators as parents. Jesus is the Shepherd (Jn 10:11-16; 1
Pet 5:4), yet he delegates Peter as a shepherd (Jn 21:15-17) and others in
lesser capacities (Eph 4:11). Jesus is High Priest, yet Christians are called
to share in Jesus' priesthood (1 Pet 2:5-9; Rev 1:6; 20:6). Jesus is the
supreme Judge, but Christians will be judges in heaven (Mt 19:28; Lk 22:30; 1 Cor
6:2-3; Rev 20:4). He is the sovereign King, but we will reign with him (Matt
19:23; Rev 3:21; 5:10). Jesus forgives our sins, but we are vessels of that
forgiveness as well (Mt 18:18; Jn 20:23; Jas 5:14-15). Similarly, Mary can be a
"mini-mediator" of God's graces, just as we all are, to a lesser
extent, when we pray for each other. The role of "Mediatrix" is not a
blasphemous Christ-usurping function, as many Protestants fear, but, like all
other Marian doctrines, eminently Christ-centered and biblical.
5. Marian
Apparitions: These are what are called private revelations, as
distinct from the public revelation of the Bible and Christian Tradition. The
Catholic Church doesn't require anyone to accept the validity of any particular
apparition. In the most widely accepted apparitions, such as Lourdes and
Fatima, the utterances of Mary are always Christ-centered, and emphasize
prayer, repentance, and conversion, just as the teaching or evangelization of
any Christian on earth might stress. Furthermore, an apparition by a figure
other than Jesus is not unthinkable by any means. Angels appear to men
throughout Scripture, giving messages. Moses and Elijah returned to earth on
the Mount of Transfiguration (Mt 17:1-3).
The two
"witnesses" of Revelation 11:3-13 are saints come to life (possibly
also Moses and Elijah, or Enoch and Elijah). The prophet Samuel appears to Saul
(1 Sam 28:7-20), and many OT saints arose in Jerusalem after the Resurrection
of Jesus (Mt 27:50-53). In the "Apocrypha" (accepted as Scripture by
all Christians until the Protestant Revolt), Jeremiah returns to earth (2
Maccabees 15:13-16).
Any excesses which have
occurred among Catholic laypeople in the area of Mariology are regrettable, but
these are constantly warned against in the official documents of the Catholic
Church (such as Vatican II). Abuses and corruptions must not cause a fair
inquirer to reject a position, as this is illogical (an instance of
"throwing the baby out with the bath water"). One must examine the
actual theological positions of a group and judge accordingly. The same holds
true for the sects of Protestantism, where various abuses are by no means less
prevalent.
HAPPY NEW MONTH TO YOU MY VIEWERS. MAY GOD BLESS YOU THIS MONTH WITH MANY AND PLENTY OF BLESSING AND FAVOURS AMEN.
THIS IS THE LAST MONTH OF THE YEAR, SO IT IS ALSO THE LAST MONTH OF YOUR SUFFERING AND SORROWS IN LIFE.
LOOK STRENGTH INTO THE SKY, WHAT DO YOU SEE?
THE HEAVENS RIGHT? THAT IS JUST YOUR STEP STOOL. YOU WILL MOVE HIGHER THAN YOUR MATES IN JESUS NAME. AMEN!!!
THERE exist a great number of beautiful meditations and contemplations on the sorrows of our Blessed Lady during the Passion of our Lord, many of which are founded on various revelations of saints and others, who may have had preternatural communications on these great subjects. It would be impossible, within the limits of the space at our disposal, to give anything like an epitome of these, which are in many cases exceedingly striking. It must be enough for us to remind ourselves of certain great outlines which must in any case be followed in our considerations on this part of the history of the Blessed Mother. When we have set down certain things which must always be remembered as the foundations of contemplation on this Divine subject, the manner in which details are filled in may be left very much to the character of the contemplative whom we may follow.
The intelligence of our Blessed Lady was raised, by the graces which she had received in such abundance from the very first, and which had been so continually added to during her long life, both by the free bounty of God and by what she could win by her own most faithful cooperation thereto, to the most perfect comprehension that could exist in a created being of all the great truths which lie at the foundation of all serious contemplation on the Passion of our Lord. That is to say, she had a most perfect intelligence of the greatness and majesty of God, as well as of the other attributes which were called into exercise in the mystery of the Sacred Passion, of His ineffable holiness, and the injuries which had been heaped upon it by the sins of all the world, of His inexorable justice, which required a condign satisfaction for those sins, of the absolute completeness of the atonement which had to be wrought by the sufferings of her Son, and of the infinite love of God in providing so marvellous a remedy, so copious a redemption, for the outrages against Himself.
Further also than this, it was the will of God, as St. Paul says, to ''restore all things" in our Lord, and thus the issues of His sufferings were not to be confined to the satisfaction due to sin alone. They were to repair the vacant spaces in Heaven, as well as to renovate earth. They were to heal this life as well as secure for us the next. They were to manifest God as He had never been known before, they were to raise men to a higher level than that which they had lost, they were to be the foundation of a new Kingdom more beautiful than any that could have existed in Paradise. They were to reach throughout all eternity, and to be felt throughout all the creation of God. The mind of our Blessed Lady was enlarged and expanded by the grace of God to that full comprehension of these great truths which was possible in any one short of God Himself. It is natural to think that that beyond and above everything else her thoughts dwelt on and were absorbed by these truths of the majesty of God, His holiness outraged by sin, the enormity of guilt thus contracted, the immensity of the satisfaction, and the cost at which it was to be exacted, as also of the incomprehensible goodness and love which provided such a remedy, and of the marvellous system, the invention of the Sacred Heart, in which that remedy was to be stored up for the benefit of untold generations. She could follow the wisdom and mercy of God step by step, in every detail of the Passion, as well as His ineffable justice and intense hatred of sin, which did not prevent Him from showing so marvellous a love to sinners.
Next to her thoughts concerning God would come her most wonderful knowledge of our Blessed Lord in His Sacred Humanity, the royal dignity of His Person, with all the treasures of knowledge, power, and grace stored up therein, the beauty and preciousness of His Soul and Body, the intensity of the sufferings of which they were capable, the keen ness of His sensibility to pain, whether mental, moral, or physical, the searching completeness of the torments of every kind to which He subjected Himself at the bidding of the Father, the absolute dereliction to which He submitted, the entire desolation and disfigurement which then fell upon His Sacred Humanity at His death. She could under stand the minute particularity of His sufferings as well as their intense painfulness, how each one was proportioned to the sins for which He was to atone, which in their malignity and ineffable foulness, and in their outrage to God and to the purity and dignity of His own Person, were present in each pang of expiation, and formed the bitterest part of the pain by which their guilt was punished. And she could understand also how by means of the Passion the graces and beauties and dignity of that Sacred Humanity were to be communicated to men with a bountifulness so abundant and an efficacy so mighty, as to make it seem as if men would have been worse off without the sin which had been so atoned for and so repaired.
We reasonably think that in the Passion Mary had that great privilege of which we have so often spoken at other times in her life, of entering into the feelings and affections of the Sacred Heart, and thus sharing His sorrows. Indeed, all this knowledge and intelligence only served to sharpen the sword by which her own heart was being pierced at each moment, on account of her incomparable tenderness and the unimaginable vehemence of her love for Him, which had swollen from the mighty force which it was when she conceived Him in her womb, to a height and depth and length and breadth of which no heart but her own was capable, by the continual exercises of immeasurable love, given and returned, during every moment of His life as her Son and of her life as His Mother. Even in our own poor experience we learn that the hearts that can suffer the most are those that can love the most, and we must be content to leave undescribed and unfathomed that love of Mary for her Son, and of her Son for her, which was now made by God the great instrument of the crucifixion of both. There is something in the passionateness and excitement of ordinary human grief which blunts the edge of the sword, and mercifully dulls the pain which its sharpness causes. Again, in great human grief's there is often an insensibility which supervenes, and so, for a time at least, saves the victim from all that might else be suffered. But in the sorrows of Mary for the Passion of our Lord there was neither excitement nor dullness. The sword pierced keenly, and there was no waste of pain, no dulling influence to lull the sensibility of suffering.
The foregoing thoughts may help us to see that our Lady met the great trial of the Passion with the eye of her soul singly fixed on God, Whose will was being worked out through all. The Passion was to her a great judicial act for the chastisement of sin, out of which was to flow a magnificence in the elevation and enrichment of those whose sins were chastised, a glory to God, an honour and triumph and joy to the Redeemer Who suffered, such as God only could imagine and carry out. Her thought was that which was afterwards expressed by the Apostles, when they spoke of the combination against our Lord of all the powers of the world, "Herod and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles and the people of Israel, to do what Thy hand and Thy counsel decreed to be done." 1 And we may think that the same consideration extended to her own most bitter sufferings, which were also decreed by the "hand and counsel" of the Father, as is implied in the words in which holy Simeon had spoken to her about the sword that was to pierce her own heart. In such a view of the circumstances of the Passion, there could be but little room for any indignant complaint or resentment against the human agents who were working out the will of God. Our Lord looked on them all with the most intense pity and love, and our Lady's thoughts and feelings concerning them must have reflected the compassion of the Sacred Heart. The bitterest pang of the whole Passion is said to have been the despair and suicide of Judas, because they would remove him irrevocably from the number of those who might still profit by the reconciliation which their wickedness had helped to bring about through the Blood shed on Calvary. Such would be the feelings with which our Lady would regard the chief priests, Pilate and Herod, the howling mob, the false witnesses, the savages who tortured our Lord beyond the requirements of the sentence passed on Him, such as the soldiers who scourged Him, and then crowned Him with thorns and mocked Him as a pretended King. The terrible pain of her heart left no room for anger, and the clear grasp with which she possessed the truth of the atoning character of the Sacrifice, made it easy for her to wrap round the most wanton of our Lord's enemies the folds of her motherly compassion.
Thus the various incidents in the Passion, which seem to us so strange in their confusion, as if the whole band of those concerned in the Death of our Lord had gone mad, or had been handed over to be possessed by devils, were in the eyes of Mary clothed in the same character of order and swift harmonious succession as the incidents of the last evening in the Cenacle, of which we spoke in the last chapter. Hell was indeed let loose, and worked out its malignant purpose to the full, by the hands of men who did not know what they were doing, as our Lord said. But all was exactly arranged by God. Not one single outburst of malice or outrage of savagery but was duly weighed and permitted by the justice of the Father. All fell on the Sacred Heart from His hand, and all fell on the heart of that most dolorous Mother as the choice of His most adorable and most beloved will, working out thereby His own immense and unparalleled glory, the honour of His Son, and the salvation of the human race. And thus we understand how it is no exaggeration, that which is said by some of the Fathers, that our Lady's heart was so perfectly united to the Divine will that, if it had been necessary for its full accomplishment, she would have helped herself in the raising her Son upon the Cross. For no one but our Lord clung with greater devotion than Mary to that adorable will, no one but He saw in it more perfect beauty, more wonderful wisdom, more infinite compassion and mercy. No one but He saw in the sins which were thus to be wiped away more deadly foulness and more loathsome degradation of the creature made in the image of God and destined for the possession of Him hereafter. No one but He could see the value of the graces which were purchased for mankind by the sufferings of those hours in a more full and piercing light.
To say this is not to say that the Compassion of our Lady was in any way less keen and poignant on this account. As our Lord suffered to a degree which no one else ever attained in the way of pain, of shame, of weariness, of desolation, and weakness, notwithstanding that His will was so perfectly united to the Divine will, and that He had the most perfect certainty of His ultimate triumph in His Resurrection from the dead, so also our Lady could suffer the intensest pain for Him and with Him, although she had this most perfect conformity to the sentence of the Divine justice and mercy which had decreed it all, her sufferings as well as those of her Son. Rather, the solemn judicial character of the pains of the Passion sharpened every pang and added weight to every blow. For everything came in the most intense and unbroken severity as the expression of the anger of the Father at the sins with which His Son was clothed in His sight, the sins which He had made His own for the purpose of their expiation, the sins of which in more than one place of Sacred Scripture He speaks of as His. The anger of God was something sharper than the scourge, bitterer than the vinegar and gall, more hard to bear than the nails and the crown of thorns. If all the pangs of the Passion had been put in one balance, and all the anger of God in the other, the first would have seemed a chalice of delight in comparison to the last. But the two crosses were not, and could not be, separated either in the mind and heart of our Lord or in the mind and heart of His Blessed Mother. It was not only that He had to suffer so much. It was that He had to suffer so much from the anger of His Father, and on account of sin. St. Paul says " the sting of death is sin," and it may be said most truly of all our Lord's Passion that sin was its sting, and the hand which drove it home was the hand of the justice of God.
Apart from this consideration, it is reasonable to think that our Lady, instead of being in any w r ay or degree rendered less sensitive to the sufferings of her Son or to her own in the Passion, was more probably fortified in a marvellous manner, not against the pain which she had to undergo, but against the natural power of all that pain to take away her life before she had suffered to the utmost, according to the decree of God. We have seen elsewhere that it might have pleased God to take her away before the Passion, lest she should have that most terrible of sufferings to bear, but that He had in His Providence arranged that her extreme suffering on Calvary should fulfil a part of His purpose in her regard, and in regard to her Son, and be the foundation of another disposition of the same Providence with regard to her position in the Kingdom founded on the Passion. St. Joseph was taken away, but our Lady was not taken away. It was in the counsels of God that she should be with our Lord in that last scene of agony and torment, that He might have that suffering, also, of her companionship in His sorrows, and that she also might have all the additional grief to bear which came from her witnessing His last agony. The Divinity of our Lord is thought to have sustained Him miraculously, in order, not that He might have comfort under His sufferings, but that He might suffer more than His Humanity could have borne without special assistance. There may have been something of the same kind about the sorrows of Mary on Calvary,and this is far more likely than that there should have been any preternatural assistance given to pre vent her from feeling to the utmost what a mother such as she was would feel on such an occasion.
It is natural that we should add to this, as has been said, another thought to which it naturally leads, namely, that it was in the Providence of God that Mary should suffer in this way for the accomplishment of a great purpose of God. She was under a sentence, as her Son was under a sentence. She was to bear now the travail pangs which she had been spared when our Lord came forth at Bethlehem from her most pure and immaculate womb. The Passion was to be communicated to her, as the saints tell us, in a way and with a result which has no parallel in the similar communications which have from time to time been made to some of the chosen servants of God. Her sufferings could not share in the redeeming efficacy which belonged alone to those of our Lord. But, as she w r as to have so large a power in His Kingdom in the application of the merits of the Passion, as also so unrivalled and unique a share in the spiritual graces won thereby, it was a part of God's counsel that she, as the Mother of the Crucified, should share, as far as was possible for her, in the sorrow and in the merit of the Sacrifice of her Son. Her presence on Calvary was no accident, but a counsel of God. She appears there as she appears in the mystery of the sanctification of St. John Baptist at the Visitation, and in the mystery of the beginning of signs at the marriage-feast of Cana. In all these mysteries Mary is an intelligent and willing co-operator in the Divine work which is being accomplished, as she was the cause, by her fiat, of the accomplishment of the Incarnation itself. In the Visitation, her words brought about the interior sanctification of the soul of one of the highest of the saints, the soul of whom our Lord said that among those born of women there had not arisen a greater than he. At Cana, her words brought about the opening of the gates of God's mercy on mankind in the physical miracles of our Lord. On Calvary, she consents, at the cost of infinite pangs of her own, to the Sacrifice on which hangs the redemption of the world, and as she has so large a communication of the pains of that sacrifice, she has also to win thereby her large communication of its powers. It is then that she is crowned as the second Eve, the Mother of all that live. When we think, therefore, of Mary at the foot of the Cross, we must consider her as being there by the Providence of God to share in the sufferings of her Son, brought upon her by the infliction on Him of the chastisements due to the sins of the world. We must gather up all our highest conceptions and conclusions as to her intelligence of Him and her love for Him, all that she has learnt of His dignity and His ineffable loveliness, her estimate of Him as God and Man, all that her long study of the beauties of the Sacred Humanity, so freely opened to her, has accumulated in her heart. Her long and tender familiarity with Him has taught her to anticipate His thoughts, to read His glances, to interpret His gestures. She knows what pains Him and pleases Him, what He shrinks from, what He loves. She knows the delicacy of His purity, the sensitiveness of His charity, the shrinking shyness of His modesty, as well as His fathomless love for souls and His boundless devotion to His Father. And she has, as we think, preternatural sympathies with Him also, which enables her to read the designs, the desires, the hidden pangs and revulsions of the Sacred Heart. Herself the tenderest heart next to His, with capacities alike of joy and of pain to which our most refined feelings are dull and gross indeed, she is launched on these sixteen or eighteen hours, between the exit from the Cenacle and the expiration on the Cross, to bear in her heart what He bears in His, and in His Body as well. No pang is lost upon her, nor any display of character, nor any example of virtue. She notes when He speaks as God, as when He cast down the armed band by the simple word, "I am He," when He speaks as Judge, as when He foretold to the Sanhedrin His coming in the clouds of Heaven, when He speaks as King, as to Pilate and to the thief, when He witnesses to the truth, as before the tribunals whenever He spoke, His use of His power of conversion, as when He looked on Peter, His compassion for the women of Jerusalem, His patient charitable toil for the Roman Governor, His stern silence to Herod, His poignant grief over Judas, His pity for His executioners. Nothing is without its due response in her heart, all is treasured up and pondered there.
It may be convenient to divide our consideration of the Compassion of Mary into three parts, according to the stages of the history in which she took part in a different way. For several hours, how long we know not, it seems likely that she did not witness the actions of our Lord except spiritually. It is not easy to think of her as present in the Garden, or at the apprehension of our Lord, or to suppose that she followed Him into the palace of the High Priest, or through the streets to the Praetorium. The first part of the Passion, therefore, nearly up to the Scourging, was spent by our Lady in some retired spot near at hand, whence she could be called by St. John when the time came for what it was ordained that she should witness. After this follow several hours, during which she was either close to or not very far from our Lord, and when she witnessed almost all that passed, except perhaps when He was alone with Pilate. This space of time includes also the final Sentence, the Way of the Cross, and the Crucifixion. We may make the third part of the Compassion begin when the executions have done their work. The cries and mocking's gradually die away, the darkness draws on in which the Three Hours are shrouded. This is the time of the most solemn mysteries, the Seven Words, the vinegar and gall, the breathing forth of the Soul of our Lord into the hands of His Father. But with our Lord the Passion ends with His Death, with Mary the Compassion lasts on beyond His Death. She has to witness the piercing of His Heart, the Water and Blood, the Birth of the Church. The daylight returns to light up the solemn stillness in which He is taken from the Cross, and laid first in her arms, then in the sepulchre. Then as the shadows of evening thicken around her, she leaves Him there with the stone rolled up and the Roman guard approaching to watch around the Tomb.
Humanly speaking, everything as to the success of our Lord's Mission depended on the manner in which He was received by the ecclesiastical authorities. When the Apostles went to preach in heathen countries, the case was different, except so far as there might be found there a class of priests, who lived and fattened on the profits which they derived from the service of the temples. But the Jewish hierarchy was the institution of our Lord Himself, and He bade the people, in His last discourses, do whatever they were told to do by these rulers, who sat in the seat of Moses. Our Lord came to fulfil, not to destroy, the Law and the Prophets, and the Chief Priests were the living representatives of the one and the authorized interpreters of the other. Whatever might be the character of the men at that time occupying the chief positions in the hierarchy, the hierarchy itself was venerable, and to be treated with all due respect. But these men, as we have already seen in part, and shall see still more plainly, failed most signally and disastrously to understand and act up to their mission, and this was, in truth, the turning and decisive point in the external history of our Lord's preaching. They tried at least to be neutral, but neutral they could not be without losing their position, and then they seized the first pretext that presented itself to plunge into most unscrupulous and most disastrous hostility.
The time was now come for some call to be made on these rulers of Jerusalem to take some decisive attitude, and, as far as in them lay, give the people some guidance by their example as to the authority claimed by our Lord. What the witness was which they were meant to give cannot be doubted. But it is also clear that they were not prepared to give it. Their own worldly interests, their evil lives, their pride, their ambition, all stood in the way of their conversion, and without a true conversion to God they could do nothing for the Mission of His Son. This was to become manifest sooner or later, as our Lord said of them about this time, "He that is not with Me is against Me, and he that gathereth not with Me, scattereth." 2 The issue that was at stake was of enormous importance, and it was practically decided in the few weeks which passed after the Sermon on the Mount had been delivered.
Our Lord, as it seems, went up to Jerusalem for the Pasch, a year after that festival on which He had signalized the beginning of His authoritative teaching in Jerusalem by the solemn cleansing of the Temple. This action of His could hot be palatable to the Jewish authorities, but they contented them selves at that time with the question about His authority. A year had now passed, and all the country was ringing with His Name. We have no full account of the occurrences of this Pasch, which is not mentioned by any of the three first Evangelists. Moreover, St. John, to whom we owe w r hat we know about it, does not say distinctly that it was the feast of the Pasch rather than any other. He mentions it only for the remarkable occurrences which it relates. His narrative tells us of the miracle wrought by our Lord, entirely unsolicited, on the impotent man at the Probatic Pool, and the injunction laid on the person thus healed by our Lord to take up his bed and walk. This, as our Lord must have known, was an infringement of the law of the Sabbath, on which day the miracle was wrought. These circumstances are valuable to us, because they show us that our Lord worked the miracle with the direct aim of startling the Jews, and bringing on the long discussion with them which is related by the Evangelist in his fifth chapter. St. John tells us that this miracle wrought on the Sabbath day was the cause why the Jewish authorities persecuted our Lord, but he goes on immediately to mention another cause, namely, that He claimed to be the Son of God. The discussion which is given to us in that fifth chapter is of the utmost importance to the understanding of the history. In the course of it our Lord sums up the various evidences on which they ought to have believed in the Divine Mission— the witness of St. John, the voice of the Father, the witness of His miraculous works, the witness of the Sacred Scriptures, and even of Moses, in whom they trusted. "For if you did believe Moses, you would perhaps believe Me also, for he wrote of Me." 3 And He also puts his finger on the moral root of their incredulity, their love of human honour, and the like.
From this time, as has been said, the persecution of our Lord was a foregone conclusion with the authorities at Jerusalem. The incidents which follow on this time all converge in their witness to this fact. Those that are mentioned are such as the complaint made against the disciples for plucking and rubbing in their hands the ears of corn on the Sabbath which immediately followed—a fact which seems to prove what has been said above, that the feast just spoken of was the feast of the Pasch. Then follows the miracle on the man with the withered hand in the Synagogue, also on the Sabbath, after His return to Galilee, which is immediately succeeded by the conspiracy against our Lord, in which the Scribes and Pharisees joined themselves with the Herodians, that is, the political servants of the tetrarch in whose dominion Galilee lay. The plot had already gone so far as to aim at our Lord's destruction, and when the ecclesiastical and civil authorities were in formal league for this purpose, it was not likely that an occasion for its execution would not soon offer itself.
It is natural that contemplative souls should try to enter into the Sacred Heart of our Lord, and consider with what affections of loving grief and sorrowful disappointment He could regard the line of conduct which was now being recklessly adopted by His own priests, the very persons to whose lips it was that knowledge was committed who were the shepherds of the flock and the lights of the world.
To our Lord the whole future was present, and He could see beforehand all the issues of misery here and eternal ruin hereafter which were involved in the obstinacy of these priests and rulers, and their immense responsibility for the loss of thousands of souls and the practical closing of the way of salvation to many who would be influenced by their example. Alas! they represented to Him a long line of such miseries, lasting through each generation of the Church, as long as the world was to endure, and in that future those who were to be the enemies of their own souls and the destroyers of the souls of others, would be not ministers of the Temple or rulers of the Synagogue, but priests who had served at Christian altars, or even occupied seats of authority in the Catholic Church. No one could enter into these thoughts and sorrows of our Lord, no one could aid Him, so to say, by the most fervent and earnest intercession for these men, except His Blessed Mother. The disciples could not be warned of the danger into which these rulers of the people were running without some chance of scandal, and our Lord was always most careful in the way in which He spoke about these Priests.
Although the distant future was not open to her intelligence, Mary could perfectly understand the crisis that had now come, the issue that was now at stake, and all the possible consequences which might follow if these priests persisted in their hostility to the Gospel. She loved her nation, she loved the Temple and its holy services, she loved the rulers and chief priests for the sake of their holy office, and she was in a peculiar manner the child of the sanctuary. Her prayers would naturally rise for them with intense fervour, even if she had not known, by any instruction from our Lord, how great a cross was being prepared for Him in their dealings with Him. The souls who have inherited her special work of intercession in the Church are always very eager in their prayers for those who are in the dangerous posts of authority, whether in Church or State, and many a holy and laborious prelate has been helped on his way and shielded from a thou sand perils by their intercessions and penances. The founder, so to say, of the holy tradition of such intercessions must have been our Blessed Lady, They are an especial work which belongs to her.
There is something almost appalling in the thought of the Divine patience with which our Lord dealt with these His most bitter enemies throughout the whole of His earthly Ministry, the care which He took of their reputation and honour, the respect which He bade the people pay them, while at the same time He did not spare rebukes and reproaches and warnings when such were due to them from Him. The same wonderful patience is observable in the manner in which He continually allows Him self to be defeated and disappointed by the coldness, the jealousies, the narrowness, the exclusiveness, the pettiness's of those to whom great positions and fertile opportunities of good are committed in the Church, positions which prevent others from setting on foot works of zeal and charity with, at all events, the same prospect of success. Many such opportunities, if neglected when they occur, seldom return. The Church is naturally an aggressive and ever advancing kingdom, and her failures, such as they are, come more from the good that might be done and is not done, than from positive wickedness and evil.
Here there would be another large field for the earnest intercession of Mary. No doubt her prayers were offered with the greatest intensity and fervour for these priests and rulers, as they are offered now for those who fill in the Christian Church the position of responsibility then held by such as Annas and Caiphas. But we must remember that what has been said of the ecclesiastical rulers was also true, in its measure, of the people at large, and even of those among whom our Lord had now for some time been preaching, and teaching, and working miracles without number. We cannot lay on the rulers at Jerusalem the blame of all that coldness and dullness and insensibility of which our Lord complained, and which made Him, as we shall see, adopt very soon a more reserved manner of speaking to the people to whom the priceless treasures of wisdom contained in the Sermon on the Mount had been so freely offered. We cannot lay on these rulers the hardness of heart which brought down on the cities which had been so highly favoured by Him, as Corozain and Bethsaida, and on Capharnaum itself, those mournful denunciations of which the Evangelists are soon to give us an account. The warfare in which our Lord was engaged was most severe and deadly. The light had come into the world, and men loved dark ness rather than light, for their works were evil. The battle was raging in every single soul of all those who in any way came across our Lord. All depended on the line taken by each independent human will. Our Lord and the angels were on the one side, Satan and his hosts on the other, and the poor feeble souls in whom the decision lay were like men half awake in the midst of a raging fire, or on the deck of a foundering ship, roused against their will, overwhelmed by drowsiness, wishing for nothing so much as to be let alone as they were. It is not wonderful that God should have given so much weight under such anxious circumstances to the prayers of Mary, that, as one phase after another of this terrible struggle developed itself, each became a fresh call upon her charity and zeal in the work which was so peculiarly her own.
Soon after our Lord's return from Jerusalem, after the feast of which mention has been made, we find the Evangelists attributing to Him a certain change in His manner of dealing with the people, which is no doubt to be accounted for by the considerations contained in the last chapter. It is after the con federacy against Him on the part of the ecclesiastical rulers and the Herodians that we find St. Matthew speaking of His withdrawing Himself from the notice of His enemies, and applying to Him the beautiful prophecy of Isaias which foretold that He is not "to contend nor to cry out, neither shall any man hear His voice in the streets. The bruised reed He shall not break, and smoking flax He shall not extinguish, till He send forth judgment unto victory, and in His Name shall the Gentiles hope." 4 He continued His miraculous cures, and His teaching of the people, and He also cast out the devils, whom He enjoined not to make Him known.
We now, therefore, enter on a new period in the Public Life, the incidents and features of which, as they pass before us, will suggest how many ever new and urgent calls they would make on the ever-watchful heart of the Blessed Mother, whose part in the whole of our Lord's active Ministry was to aid mainly by her prayers. The thoughts which have already come before us as to the preceding portion of His Ministry must be present with us as we advance, and it will not be necessary to go at any length into the details of this anxious time, the simple enumeration of which will be enough to remind us of the corresponding effects which they must have had in guiding, in this or in that direction, the intercession of our Lady. When we come to understand that the intense and energetic prayer of Mary followed like a shadow on the activity or the suffering of her Son, we shall understand how this is taken for granted in the Gospels, and furnishes, in great measure, the reason why her name is so seldom mentioned, never, indeed, except for some special purpose apart from her general and continual occupation by His side.
The special features of the period on which we thus enter are very striking in themselves. It is now that we hear of the first formation of the Apostolical Body. It was made up, in the first place, of the disciples who had joined our Lord before the first Pasch—Peter and Andrew, James and John, Philip and Nathanael, better known by his patronymic, Bartholomew. Then come Matthew and Thomas, whose call was subsequent to that of the first six. The remaining four consist of three of our Lord's cousins or relations, Simon and Jude, James the son of Alpheus or Clopas, and the future traitor, Judas Iscariot. They now were all to be our Lord's constant companions, and had power to heal sicknesses and cast out devils. A great onward step indeed was this in the formation of the new kingdom, and in every one of those thus called our Lady must have had a very deep personal interest. Her prayers for them were the beginnings of the intercessions of the Church for all those called to the Apostolical Ministry, in every generation and in every department of the work. She must have seen, moreover, that our Lord had now taken a decided step onwards, which must make Him even more obnoxious than before to the rulers at Jerusalem. For the formal call of the Apostles must have produced the impression that He meant to give an organization of His own to the mass of His followers, independent of any existing authority or institution. When He was taken before Annas, it is said that He was questioned concerning His disciples and His doctrine. The beginning of the formation of the Church as a separate power and living body dates from this time. 5
After the call of the Apostles, our Lord delivered the great teaching which is preserved for us by St. Luke, and which is known as the Sermon on the Plain, the Evangelist having specially mentioned the spot on which it was delivered, for the purpose, as it seems, of distinguishing it from the Sermon on the Mount. It follows that Sermon generally, but it omits large portions, and is characterized by the more severe and reserved tone which belongs to the public teachings of this period. Here again was an occasion for fervid prayer that the good seed thus plentifully sown might not be wasted. After this our Lord returned for a short visit to Capharnaum, and, while there, healed the servant of the Gentile centurion by a word, according to the beautiful prayer of his master, which has been adopted by the Church in her liturgy as the best expression for her children of devotion just before receiving Holy Communion. It may have been noticed in St. Matthew's application of the prophecy of Isaias lately quoted, how he selects words which speak of the hope of the Gentiles in our Lord. Here was an instance in a Gentile of faith which had not been found by Him in Israel, and which gave Him occasion to utter the famous words about those who were to come from East and West, and sit down with the saints in the Kingdom of God. 6 All this might turn the prayers of our Blessed Lady for those countless multitudes of the Gentiles, who were standing, in humble expectation, outside the door which was so soon to be opened wide to all.
The next miracle in the history is the raising of the son of the widow of Nairn, the first recorded instance of resurrection from the dead at our Lord's word. 7 It is probably for this reason that St. Luke mentions it as he has immediately after to mention the mission of the disciples of St. John Baptist to our Lord, asking Him the formal question whether He was the Messias Who was to come, the answer to which question contained a reference to miracles of the class to which that at Nairn belonged. We do not know that our Lady could have been present at the miracle, but her heart must have been moved intensely by such cases as that of the lonely mother, whose condition so closely resembled her own. The visit of the disciples of St. John was clearly brought about by him in order that his disciples, who were soon to be left without his guidance, might see and hear for themselves just what they did. It had not been necessary, in the counsels of God, to authenticate the mission of St. John by any miraculous signs. His austerity and holiness, and the answer which his preaching found in the consciences of his hearers, where the great truths to which he appealed were indelibly written. It was therefore something new for his disciples to witness the miracles of our Lord, Who bade them carry back the account of these to St. John in words which referred them to the passage in Isaias in which they had been predicted as signs of the Messias. 8 Thus the blessed Precursor would be enabled to bear what was to be his last witness to our Lord. Our Lord took the opportunity to speak of him in language of the highest praise, saying that there had not risen " among them that are born of women" a greater than John Baptist, though "he that is the lesser in the Kingdom of Heaven is greater than he," 9 and the like. He added the words in which the men of that generation, who had found fault both with St. John and with Himself to the children in the market-place, whom nothing could please.
These words were soon followed by those already referred to in denunciation of the blindness and abuse of opportunities of which the cities to which He had preached, and where He had wrought so many miracles had been guilty. It was to be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon and Sodom in the Day of Judgment than for them. And these severe words, again, were soon followed by those others, full of tenderness and joy, in which He thanked His Father for that arrangement of His Providence by which the truths of the Kingdom had been hidden from the wise and prudent, and revealed unto little ones. "All things are delivered to Me by My Father, and no man knoweth the Son, but the Father, neither doth any one know the Father, but the Son, and he to whom it shall please the Son to reveal Him." 10 And then came forth that gracious invitation, "Come to Me, all you that labour, and are burthened, and I will refresh you. Take My yoke upon you, and learn of Me, because I am meek, and humble of heart, and you shall find rest to your souls. For My yoke is sweet, and My burthen light." And we learn from that comparison of the Gospels which is the special work of the Harmonist, that this gracious call was directly followed by Magdalene, who came, when she heard where He was, in the Pharisee's house, to throw herself at His feet in search of forgiveness, washing His feet with her tears, anointing them with her ointment, and wiping them with the hair of her head. 11
If Magdalene was so great a treasure as she is believed to have been to the Sacred Heart of our Lord, it is easy to see how dear she must have become to His Blessed Mother, who would watch over her as the first and the pattern of penitents devoting themselves entirely and without reserve to the service of her Master. It is now that we hear of the formation of a small band of pious women, most of them ladies who had received great boons at His hand, who made it their business to follow the course of our Lord and His Apostles, ministering to them of their substance. After the selection of the Twelve to be His inseparable companions, it became almost necessary that some such provision should be made. For our Lord might readily have found for Himself such food and hospitality as He required, but a band of twelve followers made a large number to impose on any one who might be inclined to entertain Him. It was also better that the Apostles should be kept, now that their more formal and continuous training had begun, as much together as possible, and, at the same time, apart from other people. It must remain uncertain whether our Blessed Lady went about with these holy women as their Mother and Superior. There would be many other useful offices which they would have to discharge, besides that of providing for the temporal wants of the Apostolic band, for there must have been always a large number of their own sex seeking instruction and guidance and introduction to our Lord. It might seem natural that our Blessed Lady should have been at their head. On the other hand, if she was set apart, so to speak, that she might be the perpetual companion of our Lord's thoughts and designs, and the continual intercessor for the wants of the souls who might come under the influence of His teaching, the life of activity and constant external employment might be more distracting for her than was meet. It happens that the next actual mention which is made of her seems to show that a short time after the point which we have now reached she was still in the company of our Lord's near relatives, who are called in the Gospels His brothers, and therefore, at Capharnaum.
The next incidents in the period before us are such as mark the ever-increasing malignity of the enemies of our Lord. It is now that we meet for the first time with the calumny set on foot by the Scribes and Pharisees about the league which they declared to exist between Him and Beelzebub, in virtue of which He cast out devils. It is now also that we find them beginning to beset Him with their demands for a sign from Heaven as a proof of His mission. These marks of hostility drew from our Lord very severe though calm words, in which He spoke of the extreme danger of the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, which could not be allowed to pass unpunished either in this world or in the next. He told them of the miserable state of the man out of whom the devil had been cast, only to return again with seven others more wicked than himself. He spoke of the sign of Jonas, and of the rebuke which the men of that generation would receive from the men of Nineveh and from the Queen of the South.12
The Evangelists tell us that it was while our Lord was speaking on this subject to the multitude, that the incident occurred which brings us to the one direct mention of our Lady's name in the course of their narratives at this time. It was, apparently, at a time when He was returning from one of His missionary circuits to Capharnaum for a short visit. As He was still preaching to the people, His Mother and His brethren came to the place, desirous of speaking with Him. The object of their visit is not given, for it was not important for the purpose of the Evangelists to relate it. The reason why this incident is mentioned is quite obvious. It is mentioned because it furnishes the opportunity of exhibiting our Lord's example in the case of persons engaged in the Apostolic Ministry, when some interruption occurs on account of the natural claims of family duty and affection. There could not have been many such occasions in the course of our Lord's teaching, and this it is that makes this one so precious to us. It was very natural that our Blessed Lady and His brethren should hasten to meet Him as soon as they heard of His approach, if He was now returning to them. And perhaps they had some special reason for wishing to speak with Him immediately, such as might be the desire to warn Him of the danger that He might incur from His ever-watchful enemies. He was comparatively safe from these when He was going about from town to town in Galilee, for they could never be certain of the course He would take, and wherever He was, He had a great multitude of followers with Him. He would not be so safe in a town like Capharnaum. But whatever was the object of our Lady and His brethren, which we are not told, He was engaged in teaching the multitude, and could not be interrupted, although she may not have known how He was engaged. Thus she gave Him the great opportunity of leaving behind an example which has been most fruitful of good in all ages of the Church. "And answering, He said, Who is My Mother and My brethren ? And looking round about on them who sat about Him, He said, Behold My mother and My brethren ! For whosoever shall do the will of God, of My Father that is in Heaven, he is My brother and My sister and My mother." 13
It need hardly be said that no one would rejoice more than our Blessed Lady at the thought that she had given an occasion to so pregnant an ex ample of indifference to human ties on the part of our Lord. As this incident has been laid hold by the enemies of the honour of our Lady, it may be worth while to remark that, to the eyes of the world and of the multitude, He was^in exactly the same relation to her and to those who were called His brethren as any one else to his mother and brethren after the flesh. It would not, therefore, be reason able to conclude that our Lord meant to deny to her any honour or deference which might be due to her on grounds which the people knew nothing of, such as her incomparable sanctity and closeness to Him, and the like. If He had acted in any other way, He might have given the same false impression as might have resulted, if He had left the school of the Temple, when He was twelve years of age, at her call, without setting forth clearly that He was independent of all earthly ties when the business of His Father was concerned. And He might not only have left a false impression as to His dependence on her, but He would have left behind Him in His own conduct a sanction for the mischievous doctrine that parents have a right to be attended to by their children even when engaged in the functions of the sacred ministry. Thus the meaning of the whole incident is to be gathered from the first words of St. Matthew, " While He was yet speaking to the crowd."
So far it is quite clear that our Lord could have meant nothing disparaging to His Mother, but only to assert the pre-eminent rights and duties of the sacred ministry of the Word of God. Another question is sometimes raised, because some writers have been inclined to impute some imperfection to our Blessed Lady on account of her simple presence on this occasion, as if it implied presumption, or interference, or impatience, and the like. The mere formation of such a surmise would be impossible to any one who had a right conception of our Lady's pre-eminent virtues, and especially of her humility. To those who have such a conception, it will be natural to interpret the circumstances in accordance therewith, and it is perfectly gratuitous to interpret them otherwise. Our Lady \vas occasion ally left in ignorance of certain facts about our Lord belonging to a class which was usually not hidden from her, as was the case in the mystery of the Twelfth Year, of which mention has just been made. She may not have known how our Lord was occupied, or she may have made know r n her desire to speak with Him, having some good reason for doing so, without intending Him to be interrupted in His discourse. A score of surmises may be formed as to these matters, quite as reasonable as any that have ever been formed so as to impute some imperfection to her, and far more so. But the Evangelists simply tell us the facts and no more. Their object was to put forward the saying of our Lord about those who do the will of His Father Who is in Heaven. If His Mother had not been there, the chief point of the saying would be lost, and thus the occasion for this most precious example and instruction could be furnished by no one but herself. Moreover, it is clear that this incident happened most opportunely. Our Lord was now beginning to be exposed to the effects of the persecution which had been organized against Him by the scribes and priests at Jerusalem, whose emissaries, or representatives, in Galilee had come to an understanding with the officials of the civil government, that He was to be got rid of in some as yet undetermined way. The influence of the priests had to some extent told on the people, though it was impossible to destroy His influence and prestige, even by the malignant calumnies which were put in circulation about Him. His miracles still attracted, and the charm of His Person was the same as ever. But it was becoming clear that to follow Him, and much more, to follow Him at all closely, might soon require much courage and great detachment from the world and ordinary earthly ties. It was soon after this that He told one who volunteered to be His follower, that the foxes had holes and the birds of the air nests, but the Son of Man had not where to lay His head. And to another He had refused permission to go and bury his father before joining Him. He could hardly have used the latter words with equal effect if He had just left off His preaching to the people to receive a visit of affection from His Mother.
The same kind of detachment which was enjoined on the occasion when the disciple w r as not allowed to go to his father's grave, was to be enjoined also in very strong language when our Lord, soon after this, gave to the Apostles the great instruction as to the Apostolic Life which St. Matthew records in his tenth chapter. We can thus see how it was that He thought it well to lay down the principle of detachment so strongly on this^ occasion, and also how this incident stood out from a number of others in the minds of the Evangelists. They could have told us, beyond a doubt, a thousand anecdotes of our Lord's tender love and deference towards His Mother, but these were not so necessary for the instruction of the Christian people. His love and reverence for her were matters of course. His severity in asserting the principle here asserted was all the more noteworthy.
There are two more considerations to be urged before we quit this incident. First, the direct tendency of our Lord's words is not simply to declare the comparative insignificance of merely earthly and natural ties, even to Himself. If He had meant no more than that, He would not have used the language which He did use. What He did say was that His disciples, and those who did the will of His Father in Heaven, were His brothers and His sisters and His mother. That implies the closest and most affectionate union between Himself and His disciples, that He had nothing more dear to Him than those who did His Father's will. This is a positive statement of infinite value to us, and it is a statement which must have rejoiced our Lady's Heart as truly as it expressed the feelings of our Lord's Heart. Mary did not wish to have His love to herself, she wished, as far as possible, that He should be able to love all as He loved her. And again, because she was His natural Mother, she was not the less His disciple. Because her womb had borne Him and her breasts had given Him suck, she was not precluded from gaining that higher title to His love and to union with Him which was to rest on her faithful obedience to the will of His Father. On the contrary, her great privileges and her great sanctity were all founded on her selection as His Mother. Those who believe that she was a mere involuntary instrument in bringing about the physical part of the Incarnation, may see in these words something of disparagement to her. For she was near and dear to Him, far more for her spiritual graces and incomparable virtues, than because she was His Mother after the flesh, if nothing else was to be considered. Those who understand her real greatness, and the dealings of God with her, and her faithfulness to His grace, will see in the words now used by our Lord the most powerful of all reasons for her pre-eminent dearness to Him.
THIS IS THE LAST MONTH OF THE YEAR, SO IT IS ALSO THE LAST MONTH OF YOUR SUFFERING AND SORROWS IN LIFE.
LOOK STRENGTH INTO THE SKY, WHAT DO YOU SEE?
THE HEAVENS RIGHT? THAT IS JUST YOUR STEP STOOL. YOU WILL MOVE HIGHER THAN YOUR MATES IN JESUS NAME. AMEN!!!
THE MOTHER OF THE KING -
MARY DURING THE LIFE OF OUR LORD BY HENRY JAMES COLERIDGE S.J. pt.25 MARY
DURING THE PASSION. CHAPTER III. THE COMPASSION OF MARY IN GENERAL.
THERE exist a great number of beautiful meditations and contemplations on the sorrows of our Blessed Lady during the Passion of our Lord, many of which are founded on various revelations of saints and others, who may have had preternatural communications on these great subjects. It would be impossible, within the limits of the space at our disposal, to give anything like an epitome of these, which are in many cases exceedingly striking. It must be enough for us to remind ourselves of certain great outlines which must in any case be followed in our considerations on this part of the history of the Blessed Mother. When we have set down certain things which must always be remembered as the foundations of contemplation on this Divine subject, the manner in which details are filled in may be left very much to the character of the contemplative whom we may follow.
The intelligence of our Blessed Lady was raised, by the graces which she had received in such abundance from the very first, and which had been so continually added to during her long life, both by the free bounty of God and by what she could win by her own most faithful cooperation thereto, to the most perfect comprehension that could exist in a created being of all the great truths which lie at the foundation of all serious contemplation on the Passion of our Lord. That is to say, she had a most perfect intelligence of the greatness and majesty of God, as well as of the other attributes which were called into exercise in the mystery of the Sacred Passion, of His ineffable holiness, and the injuries which had been heaped upon it by the sins of all the world, of His inexorable justice, which required a condign satisfaction for those sins, of the absolute completeness of the atonement which had to be wrought by the sufferings of her Son, and of the infinite love of God in providing so marvellous a remedy, so copious a redemption, for the outrages against Himself.
Further also than this, it was the will of God, as St. Paul says, to ''restore all things" in our Lord, and thus the issues of His sufferings were not to be confined to the satisfaction due to sin alone. They were to repair the vacant spaces in Heaven, as well as to renovate earth. They were to heal this life as well as secure for us the next. They were to manifest God as He had never been known before, they were to raise men to a higher level than that which they had lost, they were to be the foundation of a new Kingdom more beautiful than any that could have existed in Paradise. They were to reach throughout all eternity, and to be felt throughout all the creation of God. The mind of our Blessed Lady was enlarged and expanded by the grace of God to that full comprehension of these great truths which was possible in any one short of God Himself. It is natural to think that that beyond and above everything else her thoughts dwelt on and were absorbed by these truths of the majesty of God, His holiness outraged by sin, the enormity of guilt thus contracted, the immensity of the satisfaction, and the cost at which it was to be exacted, as also of the incomprehensible goodness and love which provided such a remedy, and of the marvellous system, the invention of the Sacred Heart, in which that remedy was to be stored up for the benefit of untold generations. She could follow the wisdom and mercy of God step by step, in every detail of the Passion, as well as His ineffable justice and intense hatred of sin, which did not prevent Him from showing so marvellous a love to sinners.
Next to her thoughts concerning God would come her most wonderful knowledge of our Blessed Lord in His Sacred Humanity, the royal dignity of His Person, with all the treasures of knowledge, power, and grace stored up therein, the beauty and preciousness of His Soul and Body, the intensity of the sufferings of which they were capable, the keen ness of His sensibility to pain, whether mental, moral, or physical, the searching completeness of the torments of every kind to which He subjected Himself at the bidding of the Father, the absolute dereliction to which He submitted, the entire desolation and disfigurement which then fell upon His Sacred Humanity at His death. She could under stand the minute particularity of His sufferings as well as their intense painfulness, how each one was proportioned to the sins for which He was to atone, which in their malignity and ineffable foulness, and in their outrage to God and to the purity and dignity of His own Person, were present in each pang of expiation, and formed the bitterest part of the pain by which their guilt was punished. And she could understand also how by means of the Passion the graces and beauties and dignity of that Sacred Humanity were to be communicated to men with a bountifulness so abundant and an efficacy so mighty, as to make it seem as if men would have been worse off without the sin which had been so atoned for and so repaired.
We reasonably think that in the Passion Mary had that great privilege of which we have so often spoken at other times in her life, of entering into the feelings and affections of the Sacred Heart, and thus sharing His sorrows. Indeed, all this knowledge and intelligence only served to sharpen the sword by which her own heart was being pierced at each moment, on account of her incomparable tenderness and the unimaginable vehemence of her love for Him, which had swollen from the mighty force which it was when she conceived Him in her womb, to a height and depth and length and breadth of which no heart but her own was capable, by the continual exercises of immeasurable love, given and returned, during every moment of His life as her Son and of her life as His Mother. Even in our own poor experience we learn that the hearts that can suffer the most are those that can love the most, and we must be content to leave undescribed and unfathomed that love of Mary for her Son, and of her Son for her, which was now made by God the great instrument of the crucifixion of both. There is something in the passionateness and excitement of ordinary human grief which blunts the edge of the sword, and mercifully dulls the pain which its sharpness causes. Again, in great human grief's there is often an insensibility which supervenes, and so, for a time at least, saves the victim from all that might else be suffered. But in the sorrows of Mary for the Passion of our Lord there was neither excitement nor dullness. The sword pierced keenly, and there was no waste of pain, no dulling influence to lull the sensibility of suffering.
The foregoing thoughts may help us to see that our Lady met the great trial of the Passion with the eye of her soul singly fixed on God, Whose will was being worked out through all. The Passion was to her a great judicial act for the chastisement of sin, out of which was to flow a magnificence in the elevation and enrichment of those whose sins were chastised, a glory to God, an honour and triumph and joy to the Redeemer Who suffered, such as God only could imagine and carry out. Her thought was that which was afterwards expressed by the Apostles, when they spoke of the combination against our Lord of all the powers of the world, "Herod and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles and the people of Israel, to do what Thy hand and Thy counsel decreed to be done." 1 And we may think that the same consideration extended to her own most bitter sufferings, which were also decreed by the "hand and counsel" of the Father, as is implied in the words in which holy Simeon had spoken to her about the sword that was to pierce her own heart. In such a view of the circumstances of the Passion, there could be but little room for any indignant complaint or resentment against the human agents who were working out the will of God. Our Lord looked on them all with the most intense pity and love, and our Lady's thoughts and feelings concerning them must have reflected the compassion of the Sacred Heart. The bitterest pang of the whole Passion is said to have been the despair and suicide of Judas, because they would remove him irrevocably from the number of those who might still profit by the reconciliation which their wickedness had helped to bring about through the Blood shed on Calvary. Such would be the feelings with which our Lady would regard the chief priests, Pilate and Herod, the howling mob, the false witnesses, the savages who tortured our Lord beyond the requirements of the sentence passed on Him, such as the soldiers who scourged Him, and then crowned Him with thorns and mocked Him as a pretended King. The terrible pain of her heart left no room for anger, and the clear grasp with which she possessed the truth of the atoning character of the Sacrifice, made it easy for her to wrap round the most wanton of our Lord's enemies the folds of her motherly compassion.
Thus the various incidents in the Passion, which seem to us so strange in their confusion, as if the whole band of those concerned in the Death of our Lord had gone mad, or had been handed over to be possessed by devils, were in the eyes of Mary clothed in the same character of order and swift harmonious succession as the incidents of the last evening in the Cenacle, of which we spoke in the last chapter. Hell was indeed let loose, and worked out its malignant purpose to the full, by the hands of men who did not know what they were doing, as our Lord said. But all was exactly arranged by God. Not one single outburst of malice or outrage of savagery but was duly weighed and permitted by the justice of the Father. All fell on the Sacred Heart from His hand, and all fell on the heart of that most dolorous Mother as the choice of His most adorable and most beloved will, working out thereby His own immense and unparalleled glory, the honour of His Son, and the salvation of the human race. And thus we understand how it is no exaggeration, that which is said by some of the Fathers, that our Lady's heart was so perfectly united to the Divine will that, if it had been necessary for its full accomplishment, she would have helped herself in the raising her Son upon the Cross. For no one but our Lord clung with greater devotion than Mary to that adorable will, no one but He saw in it more perfect beauty, more wonderful wisdom, more infinite compassion and mercy. No one but He saw in the sins which were thus to be wiped away more deadly foulness and more loathsome degradation of the creature made in the image of God and destined for the possession of Him hereafter. No one but He could see the value of the graces which were purchased for mankind by the sufferings of those hours in a more full and piercing light.
To say this is not to say that the Compassion of our Lady was in any way less keen and poignant on this account. As our Lord suffered to a degree which no one else ever attained in the way of pain, of shame, of weariness, of desolation, and weakness, notwithstanding that His will was so perfectly united to the Divine will, and that He had the most perfect certainty of His ultimate triumph in His Resurrection from the dead, so also our Lady could suffer the intensest pain for Him and with Him, although she had this most perfect conformity to the sentence of the Divine justice and mercy which had decreed it all, her sufferings as well as those of her Son. Rather, the solemn judicial character of the pains of the Passion sharpened every pang and added weight to every blow. For everything came in the most intense and unbroken severity as the expression of the anger of the Father at the sins with which His Son was clothed in His sight, the sins which He had made His own for the purpose of their expiation, the sins of which in more than one place of Sacred Scripture He speaks of as His. The anger of God was something sharper than the scourge, bitterer than the vinegar and gall, more hard to bear than the nails and the crown of thorns. If all the pangs of the Passion had been put in one balance, and all the anger of God in the other, the first would have seemed a chalice of delight in comparison to the last. But the two crosses were not, and could not be, separated either in the mind and heart of our Lord or in the mind and heart of His Blessed Mother. It was not only that He had to suffer so much. It was that He had to suffer so much from the anger of His Father, and on account of sin. St. Paul says " the sting of death is sin," and it may be said most truly of all our Lord's Passion that sin was its sting, and the hand which drove it home was the hand of the justice of God.
Apart from this consideration, it is reasonable to think that our Lady, instead of being in any w r ay or degree rendered less sensitive to the sufferings of her Son or to her own in the Passion, was more probably fortified in a marvellous manner, not against the pain which she had to undergo, but against the natural power of all that pain to take away her life before she had suffered to the utmost, according to the decree of God. We have seen elsewhere that it might have pleased God to take her away before the Passion, lest she should have that most terrible of sufferings to bear, but that He had in His Providence arranged that her extreme suffering on Calvary should fulfil a part of His purpose in her regard, and in regard to her Son, and be the foundation of another disposition of the same Providence with regard to her position in the Kingdom founded on the Passion. St. Joseph was taken away, but our Lady was not taken away. It was in the counsels of God that she should be with our Lord in that last scene of agony and torment, that He might have that suffering, also, of her companionship in His sorrows, and that she also might have all the additional grief to bear which came from her witnessing His last agony. The Divinity of our Lord is thought to have sustained Him miraculously, in order, not that He might have comfort under His sufferings, but that He might suffer more than His Humanity could have borne without special assistance. There may have been something of the same kind about the sorrows of Mary on Calvary,and this is far more likely than that there should have been any preternatural assistance given to pre vent her from feeling to the utmost what a mother such as she was would feel on such an occasion.
It is natural that we should add to this, as has been said, another thought to which it naturally leads, namely, that it was in the Providence of God that Mary should suffer in this way for the accomplishment of a great purpose of God. She was under a sentence, as her Son was under a sentence. She was to bear now the travail pangs which she had been spared when our Lord came forth at Bethlehem from her most pure and immaculate womb. The Passion was to be communicated to her, as the saints tell us, in a way and with a result which has no parallel in the similar communications which have from time to time been made to some of the chosen servants of God. Her sufferings could not share in the redeeming efficacy which belonged alone to those of our Lord. But, as she w r as to have so large a power in His Kingdom in the application of the merits of the Passion, as also so unrivalled and unique a share in the spiritual graces won thereby, it was a part of God's counsel that she, as the Mother of the Crucified, should share, as far as was possible for her, in the sorrow and in the merit of the Sacrifice of her Son. Her presence on Calvary was no accident, but a counsel of God. She appears there as she appears in the mystery of the sanctification of St. John Baptist at the Visitation, and in the mystery of the beginning of signs at the marriage-feast of Cana. In all these mysteries Mary is an intelligent and willing co-operator in the Divine work which is being accomplished, as she was the cause, by her fiat, of the accomplishment of the Incarnation itself. In the Visitation, her words brought about the interior sanctification of the soul of one of the highest of the saints, the soul of whom our Lord said that among those born of women there had not arisen a greater than he. At Cana, her words brought about the opening of the gates of God's mercy on mankind in the physical miracles of our Lord. On Calvary, she consents, at the cost of infinite pangs of her own, to the Sacrifice on which hangs the redemption of the world, and as she has so large a communication of the pains of that sacrifice, she has also to win thereby her large communication of its powers. It is then that she is crowned as the second Eve, the Mother of all that live. When we think, therefore, of Mary at the foot of the Cross, we must consider her as being there by the Providence of God to share in the sufferings of her Son, brought upon her by the infliction on Him of the chastisements due to the sins of the world. We must gather up all our highest conceptions and conclusions as to her intelligence of Him and her love for Him, all that she has learnt of His dignity and His ineffable loveliness, her estimate of Him as God and Man, all that her long study of the beauties of the Sacred Humanity, so freely opened to her, has accumulated in her heart. Her long and tender familiarity with Him has taught her to anticipate His thoughts, to read His glances, to interpret His gestures. She knows what pains Him and pleases Him, what He shrinks from, what He loves. She knows the delicacy of His purity, the sensitiveness of His charity, the shrinking shyness of His modesty, as well as His fathomless love for souls and His boundless devotion to His Father. And she has, as we think, preternatural sympathies with Him also, which enables her to read the designs, the desires, the hidden pangs and revulsions of the Sacred Heart. Herself the tenderest heart next to His, with capacities alike of joy and of pain to which our most refined feelings are dull and gross indeed, she is launched on these sixteen or eighteen hours, between the exit from the Cenacle and the expiration on the Cross, to bear in her heart what He bears in His, and in His Body as well. No pang is lost upon her, nor any display of character, nor any example of virtue. She notes when He speaks as God, as when He cast down the armed band by the simple word, "I am He," when He speaks as Judge, as when He foretold to the Sanhedrin His coming in the clouds of Heaven, when He speaks as King, as to Pilate and to the thief, when He witnesses to the truth, as before the tribunals whenever He spoke, His use of His power of conversion, as when He looked on Peter, His compassion for the women of Jerusalem, His patient charitable toil for the Roman Governor, His stern silence to Herod, His poignant grief over Judas, His pity for His executioners. Nothing is without its due response in her heart, all is treasured up and pondered there.
It may be convenient to divide our consideration of the Compassion of Mary into three parts, according to the stages of the history in which she took part in a different way. For several hours, how long we know not, it seems likely that she did not witness the actions of our Lord except spiritually. It is not easy to think of her as present in the Garden, or at the apprehension of our Lord, or to suppose that she followed Him into the palace of the High Priest, or through the streets to the Praetorium. The first part of the Passion, therefore, nearly up to the Scourging, was spent by our Lady in some retired spot near at hand, whence she could be called by St. John when the time came for what it was ordained that she should witness. After this follow several hours, during which she was either close to or not very far from our Lord, and when she witnessed almost all that passed, except perhaps when He was alone with Pilate. This space of time includes also the final Sentence, the Way of the Cross, and the Crucifixion. We may make the third part of the Compassion begin when the executions have done their work. The cries and mocking's gradually die away, the darkness draws on in which the Three Hours are shrouded. This is the time of the most solemn mysteries, the Seven Words, the vinegar and gall, the breathing forth of the Soul of our Lord into the hands of His Father. But with our Lord the Passion ends with His Death, with Mary the Compassion lasts on beyond His Death. She has to witness the piercing of His Heart, the Water and Blood, the Birth of the Church. The daylight returns to light up the solemn stillness in which He is taken from the Cross, and laid first in her arms, then in the sepulchre. Then as the shadows of evening thicken around her, she leaves Him there with the stone rolled up and the Roman guard approaching to watch around the Tomb.
THE MOTHER OF THE KING -
MARY DURING THE LIFE OF OUR LORD BY HENRY JAMES COLERIDGE S.J. pt.22 MARY
DURING THE SECOND YEAR'S MINISTRY.
IT is well known that we
cannot fix with precise certainty the dates of many of the chief incidents in
the Public Life. The history has to be made up from four different narratives,
in each of which there are large periods of silence, and which do not contain,
in all cases, indications of time sufficiently clear to make a perfect
chronological arrangement possible, or, at least, certain. But it is quite
possible to arrange the events which are thus set before us by the Evangelists
in an order as to the accuracy of which there can be but little serious doubt,
for the chief distinctive features of the successive periods into which the
history divides itself are sufficiently plain to patient investigation. That
is, we can be certain about the order of all the principal events, although we
cannot say, with equal certainty, in what month of each of the three years
those events are to be placed. The doubts that remain are, therefore, more
concerning the intervals between this and that occurrence than concerning their
relative chronological position. And the chief features of each successive
period are clearly marked. After the Sermon on the Mount, which may be
considered as the close of one period of preaching and the beginning of
another, and after the significant miracles of which mention has just been
made, we find another phase of our Lord's course put before us, in which a note
is for the first time struck which sounds on with increasing power throughout
the rest of the Public Life. That note is the note of opposition and
persecution. Our Lord now appears before us as the object of both, and we have
thus to study His conduct under a new light. Up to the time of which we have
been speaking, there had been little of this. We remember that He had not been
welcomed, to say the least, by the authorities at Jerusalem, who had already
shown them selves unwilling to take part in the movement of penance and
reformation of which St. John had given the signal. There was here a presage of
hostility, not hostility itself. It was to avoid the notice of the rulers at
Jerusalem that our Lord had retired, after but a short stay in Judaea, to the
more distant Galilee, and had made that populous province the scene of His
Ministry. Many months had now passed since the beginning of that course of
preaching by our Lord. His fame as a Wonder worker and a Teacher had spread
throughout the whole country, far and near, and people flocked to Galilee for
the purpose of hearing Him, even from the most distant parts. It is certain,
therefore, that He was most prominently before the public eye, and that His
preaching and Person must have furnished matter for a large amount of inquiry
and discussion. We do not find in the narratives of the Evangelists at this
time, anything that can give us certain and positive information as to the
attitude of the rulers at Jerusalem towards Him. On the occasion of the healing
of the paralytic, we find mention of the presence of Pharisees at Jerusalem,
but although there is murmuring among them at the novel claim to the power of
forgiving sins, there is as yet no decided hostility among the scribes, at
least in Galilee. The question put to Him and to His disciples about eating
with publicans, fasting, and the like, were not unnatural, and do not of
necessity imply ill will. 1
Humanly speaking, everything as to the success of our Lord's Mission depended on the manner in which He was received by the ecclesiastical authorities. When the Apostles went to preach in heathen countries, the case was different, except so far as there might be found there a class of priests, who lived and fattened on the profits which they derived from the service of the temples. But the Jewish hierarchy was the institution of our Lord Himself, and He bade the people, in His last discourses, do whatever they were told to do by these rulers, who sat in the seat of Moses. Our Lord came to fulfil, not to destroy, the Law and the Prophets, and the Chief Priests were the living representatives of the one and the authorized interpreters of the other. Whatever might be the character of the men at that time occupying the chief positions in the hierarchy, the hierarchy itself was venerable, and to be treated with all due respect. But these men, as we have already seen in part, and shall see still more plainly, failed most signally and disastrously to understand and act up to their mission, and this was, in truth, the turning and decisive point in the external history of our Lord's preaching. They tried at least to be neutral, but neutral they could not be without losing their position, and then they seized the first pretext that presented itself to plunge into most unscrupulous and most disastrous hostility.
The time was now come for some call to be made on these rulers of Jerusalem to take some decisive attitude, and, as far as in them lay, give the people some guidance by their example as to the authority claimed by our Lord. What the witness was which they were meant to give cannot be doubted. But it is also clear that they were not prepared to give it. Their own worldly interests, their evil lives, their pride, their ambition, all stood in the way of their conversion, and without a true conversion to God they could do nothing for the Mission of His Son. This was to become manifest sooner or later, as our Lord said of them about this time, "He that is not with Me is against Me, and he that gathereth not with Me, scattereth." 2 The issue that was at stake was of enormous importance, and it was practically decided in the few weeks which passed after the Sermon on the Mount had been delivered.
Our Lord, as it seems, went up to Jerusalem for the Pasch, a year after that festival on which He had signalized the beginning of His authoritative teaching in Jerusalem by the solemn cleansing of the Temple. This action of His could hot be palatable to the Jewish authorities, but they contented them selves at that time with the question about His authority. A year had now passed, and all the country was ringing with His Name. We have no full account of the occurrences of this Pasch, which is not mentioned by any of the three first Evangelists. Moreover, St. John, to whom we owe w r hat we know about it, does not say distinctly that it was the feast of the Pasch rather than any other. He mentions it only for the remarkable occurrences which it relates. His narrative tells us of the miracle wrought by our Lord, entirely unsolicited, on the impotent man at the Probatic Pool, and the injunction laid on the person thus healed by our Lord to take up his bed and walk. This, as our Lord must have known, was an infringement of the law of the Sabbath, on which day the miracle was wrought. These circumstances are valuable to us, because they show us that our Lord worked the miracle with the direct aim of startling the Jews, and bringing on the long discussion with them which is related by the Evangelist in his fifth chapter. St. John tells us that this miracle wrought on the Sabbath day was the cause why the Jewish authorities persecuted our Lord, but he goes on immediately to mention another cause, namely, that He claimed to be the Son of God. The discussion which is given to us in that fifth chapter is of the utmost importance to the understanding of the history. In the course of it our Lord sums up the various evidences on which they ought to have believed in the Divine Mission— the witness of St. John, the voice of the Father, the witness of His miraculous works, the witness of the Sacred Scriptures, and even of Moses, in whom they trusted. "For if you did believe Moses, you would perhaps believe Me also, for he wrote of Me." 3 And He also puts his finger on the moral root of their incredulity, their love of human honour, and the like.
From this time, as has been said, the persecution of our Lord was a foregone conclusion with the authorities at Jerusalem. The incidents which follow on this time all converge in their witness to this fact. Those that are mentioned are such as the complaint made against the disciples for plucking and rubbing in their hands the ears of corn on the Sabbath which immediately followed—a fact which seems to prove what has been said above, that the feast just spoken of was the feast of the Pasch. Then follows the miracle on the man with the withered hand in the Synagogue, also on the Sabbath, after His return to Galilee, which is immediately succeeded by the conspiracy against our Lord, in which the Scribes and Pharisees joined themselves with the Herodians, that is, the political servants of the tetrarch in whose dominion Galilee lay. The plot had already gone so far as to aim at our Lord's destruction, and when the ecclesiastical and civil authorities were in formal league for this purpose, it was not likely that an occasion for its execution would not soon offer itself.
It is natural that contemplative souls should try to enter into the Sacred Heart of our Lord, and consider with what affections of loving grief and sorrowful disappointment He could regard the line of conduct which was now being recklessly adopted by His own priests, the very persons to whose lips it was that knowledge was committed who were the shepherds of the flock and the lights of the world.
To our Lord the whole future was present, and He could see beforehand all the issues of misery here and eternal ruin hereafter which were involved in the obstinacy of these priests and rulers, and their immense responsibility for the loss of thousands of souls and the practical closing of the way of salvation to many who would be influenced by their example. Alas! they represented to Him a long line of such miseries, lasting through each generation of the Church, as long as the world was to endure, and in that future those who were to be the enemies of their own souls and the destroyers of the souls of others, would be not ministers of the Temple or rulers of the Synagogue, but priests who had served at Christian altars, or even occupied seats of authority in the Catholic Church. No one could enter into these thoughts and sorrows of our Lord, no one could aid Him, so to say, by the most fervent and earnest intercession for these men, except His Blessed Mother. The disciples could not be warned of the danger into which these rulers of the people were running without some chance of scandal, and our Lord was always most careful in the way in which He spoke about these Priests.
Although the distant future was not open to her intelligence, Mary could perfectly understand the crisis that had now come, the issue that was now at stake, and all the possible consequences which might follow if these priests persisted in their hostility to the Gospel. She loved her nation, she loved the Temple and its holy services, she loved the rulers and chief priests for the sake of their holy office, and she was in a peculiar manner the child of the sanctuary. Her prayers would naturally rise for them with intense fervour, even if she had not known, by any instruction from our Lord, how great a cross was being prepared for Him in their dealings with Him. The souls who have inherited her special work of intercession in the Church are always very eager in their prayers for those who are in the dangerous posts of authority, whether in Church or State, and many a holy and laborious prelate has been helped on his way and shielded from a thou sand perils by their intercessions and penances. The founder, so to say, of the holy tradition of such intercessions must have been our Blessed Lady, They are an especial work which belongs to her.
There is something almost appalling in the thought of the Divine patience with which our Lord dealt with these His most bitter enemies throughout the whole of His earthly Ministry, the care which He took of their reputation and honour, the respect which He bade the people pay them, while at the same time He did not spare rebukes and reproaches and warnings when such were due to them from Him. The same wonderful patience is observable in the manner in which He continually allows Him self to be defeated and disappointed by the coldness, the jealousies, the narrowness, the exclusiveness, the pettiness's of those to whom great positions and fertile opportunities of good are committed in the Church, positions which prevent others from setting on foot works of zeal and charity with, at all events, the same prospect of success. Many such opportunities, if neglected when they occur, seldom return. The Church is naturally an aggressive and ever advancing kingdom, and her failures, such as they are, come more from the good that might be done and is not done, than from positive wickedness and evil.
Here there would be another large field for the earnest intercession of Mary. No doubt her prayers were offered with the greatest intensity and fervour for these priests and rulers, as they are offered now for those who fill in the Christian Church the position of responsibility then held by such as Annas and Caiphas. But we must remember that what has been said of the ecclesiastical rulers was also true, in its measure, of the people at large, and even of those among whom our Lord had now for some time been preaching, and teaching, and working miracles without number. We cannot lay on the rulers at Jerusalem the blame of all that coldness and dullness and insensibility of which our Lord complained, and which made Him, as we shall see, adopt very soon a more reserved manner of speaking to the people to whom the priceless treasures of wisdom contained in the Sermon on the Mount had been so freely offered. We cannot lay on these rulers the hardness of heart which brought down on the cities which had been so highly favoured by Him, as Corozain and Bethsaida, and on Capharnaum itself, those mournful denunciations of which the Evangelists are soon to give us an account. The warfare in which our Lord was engaged was most severe and deadly. The light had come into the world, and men loved dark ness rather than light, for their works were evil. The battle was raging in every single soul of all those who in any way came across our Lord. All depended on the line taken by each independent human will. Our Lord and the angels were on the one side, Satan and his hosts on the other, and the poor feeble souls in whom the decision lay were like men half awake in the midst of a raging fire, or on the deck of a foundering ship, roused against their will, overwhelmed by drowsiness, wishing for nothing so much as to be let alone as they were. It is not wonderful that God should have given so much weight under such anxious circumstances to the prayers of Mary, that, as one phase after another of this terrible struggle developed itself, each became a fresh call upon her charity and zeal in the work which was so peculiarly her own.
Soon after our Lord's return from Jerusalem, after the feast of which mention has been made, we find the Evangelists attributing to Him a certain change in His manner of dealing with the people, which is no doubt to be accounted for by the considerations contained in the last chapter. It is after the con federacy against Him on the part of the ecclesiastical rulers and the Herodians that we find St. Matthew speaking of His withdrawing Himself from the notice of His enemies, and applying to Him the beautiful prophecy of Isaias which foretold that He is not "to contend nor to cry out, neither shall any man hear His voice in the streets. The bruised reed He shall not break, and smoking flax He shall not extinguish, till He send forth judgment unto victory, and in His Name shall the Gentiles hope." 4 He continued His miraculous cures, and His teaching of the people, and He also cast out the devils, whom He enjoined not to make Him known.
We now, therefore, enter on a new period in the Public Life, the incidents and features of which, as they pass before us, will suggest how many ever new and urgent calls they would make on the ever-watchful heart of the Blessed Mother, whose part in the whole of our Lord's active Ministry was to aid mainly by her prayers. The thoughts which have already come before us as to the preceding portion of His Ministry must be present with us as we advance, and it will not be necessary to go at any length into the details of this anxious time, the simple enumeration of which will be enough to remind us of the corresponding effects which they must have had in guiding, in this or in that direction, the intercession of our Lady. When we come to understand that the intense and energetic prayer of Mary followed like a shadow on the activity or the suffering of her Son, we shall understand how this is taken for granted in the Gospels, and furnishes, in great measure, the reason why her name is so seldom mentioned, never, indeed, except for some special purpose apart from her general and continual occupation by His side.
The special features of the period on which we thus enter are very striking in themselves. It is now that we hear of the first formation of the Apostolical Body. It was made up, in the first place, of the disciples who had joined our Lord before the first Pasch—Peter and Andrew, James and John, Philip and Nathanael, better known by his patronymic, Bartholomew. Then come Matthew and Thomas, whose call was subsequent to that of the first six. The remaining four consist of three of our Lord's cousins or relations, Simon and Jude, James the son of Alpheus or Clopas, and the future traitor, Judas Iscariot. They now were all to be our Lord's constant companions, and had power to heal sicknesses and cast out devils. A great onward step indeed was this in the formation of the new kingdom, and in every one of those thus called our Lady must have had a very deep personal interest. Her prayers for them were the beginnings of the intercessions of the Church for all those called to the Apostolical Ministry, in every generation and in every department of the work. She must have seen, moreover, that our Lord had now taken a decided step onwards, which must make Him even more obnoxious than before to the rulers at Jerusalem. For the formal call of the Apostles must have produced the impression that He meant to give an organization of His own to the mass of His followers, independent of any existing authority or institution. When He was taken before Annas, it is said that He was questioned concerning His disciples and His doctrine. The beginning of the formation of the Church as a separate power and living body dates from this time. 5
After the call of the Apostles, our Lord delivered the great teaching which is preserved for us by St. Luke, and which is known as the Sermon on the Plain, the Evangelist having specially mentioned the spot on which it was delivered, for the purpose, as it seems, of distinguishing it from the Sermon on the Mount. It follows that Sermon generally, but it omits large portions, and is characterized by the more severe and reserved tone which belongs to the public teachings of this period. Here again was an occasion for fervid prayer that the good seed thus plentifully sown might not be wasted. After this our Lord returned for a short visit to Capharnaum, and, while there, healed the servant of the Gentile centurion by a word, according to the beautiful prayer of his master, which has been adopted by the Church in her liturgy as the best expression for her children of devotion just before receiving Holy Communion. It may have been noticed in St. Matthew's application of the prophecy of Isaias lately quoted, how he selects words which speak of the hope of the Gentiles in our Lord. Here was an instance in a Gentile of faith which had not been found by Him in Israel, and which gave Him occasion to utter the famous words about those who were to come from East and West, and sit down with the saints in the Kingdom of God. 6 All this might turn the prayers of our Blessed Lady for those countless multitudes of the Gentiles, who were standing, in humble expectation, outside the door which was so soon to be opened wide to all.
The next miracle in the history is the raising of the son of the widow of Nairn, the first recorded instance of resurrection from the dead at our Lord's word. 7 It is probably for this reason that St. Luke mentions it as he has immediately after to mention the mission of the disciples of St. John Baptist to our Lord, asking Him the formal question whether He was the Messias Who was to come, the answer to which question contained a reference to miracles of the class to which that at Nairn belonged. We do not know that our Lady could have been present at the miracle, but her heart must have been moved intensely by such cases as that of the lonely mother, whose condition so closely resembled her own. The visit of the disciples of St. John was clearly brought about by him in order that his disciples, who were soon to be left without his guidance, might see and hear for themselves just what they did. It had not been necessary, in the counsels of God, to authenticate the mission of St. John by any miraculous signs. His austerity and holiness, and the answer which his preaching found in the consciences of his hearers, where the great truths to which he appealed were indelibly written. It was therefore something new for his disciples to witness the miracles of our Lord, Who bade them carry back the account of these to St. John in words which referred them to the passage in Isaias in which they had been predicted as signs of the Messias. 8 Thus the blessed Precursor would be enabled to bear what was to be his last witness to our Lord. Our Lord took the opportunity to speak of him in language of the highest praise, saying that there had not risen " among them that are born of women" a greater than John Baptist, though "he that is the lesser in the Kingdom of Heaven is greater than he," 9 and the like. He added the words in which the men of that generation, who had found fault both with St. John and with Himself to the children in the market-place, whom nothing could please.
These words were soon followed by those already referred to in denunciation of the blindness and abuse of opportunities of which the cities to which He had preached, and where He had wrought so many miracles had been guilty. It was to be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon and Sodom in the Day of Judgment than for them. And these severe words, again, were soon followed by those others, full of tenderness and joy, in which He thanked His Father for that arrangement of His Providence by which the truths of the Kingdom had been hidden from the wise and prudent, and revealed unto little ones. "All things are delivered to Me by My Father, and no man knoweth the Son, but the Father, neither doth any one know the Father, but the Son, and he to whom it shall please the Son to reveal Him." 10 And then came forth that gracious invitation, "Come to Me, all you that labour, and are burthened, and I will refresh you. Take My yoke upon you, and learn of Me, because I am meek, and humble of heart, and you shall find rest to your souls. For My yoke is sweet, and My burthen light." And we learn from that comparison of the Gospels which is the special work of the Harmonist, that this gracious call was directly followed by Magdalene, who came, when she heard where He was, in the Pharisee's house, to throw herself at His feet in search of forgiveness, washing His feet with her tears, anointing them with her ointment, and wiping them with the hair of her head. 11
If Magdalene was so great a treasure as she is believed to have been to the Sacred Heart of our Lord, it is easy to see how dear she must have become to His Blessed Mother, who would watch over her as the first and the pattern of penitents devoting themselves entirely and without reserve to the service of her Master. It is now that we hear of the formation of a small band of pious women, most of them ladies who had received great boons at His hand, who made it their business to follow the course of our Lord and His Apostles, ministering to them of their substance. After the selection of the Twelve to be His inseparable companions, it became almost necessary that some such provision should be made. For our Lord might readily have found for Himself such food and hospitality as He required, but a band of twelve followers made a large number to impose on any one who might be inclined to entertain Him. It was also better that the Apostles should be kept, now that their more formal and continuous training had begun, as much together as possible, and, at the same time, apart from other people. It must remain uncertain whether our Blessed Lady went about with these holy women as their Mother and Superior. There would be many other useful offices which they would have to discharge, besides that of providing for the temporal wants of the Apostolic band, for there must have been always a large number of their own sex seeking instruction and guidance and introduction to our Lord. It might seem natural that our Blessed Lady should have been at their head. On the other hand, if she was set apart, so to speak, that she might be the perpetual companion of our Lord's thoughts and designs, and the continual intercessor for the wants of the souls who might come under the influence of His teaching, the life of activity and constant external employment might be more distracting for her than was meet. It happens that the next actual mention which is made of her seems to show that a short time after the point which we have now reached she was still in the company of our Lord's near relatives, who are called in the Gospels His brothers, and therefore, at Capharnaum.
The next incidents in the period before us are such as mark the ever-increasing malignity of the enemies of our Lord. It is now that we meet for the first time with the calumny set on foot by the Scribes and Pharisees about the league which they declared to exist between Him and Beelzebub, in virtue of which He cast out devils. It is now also that we find them beginning to beset Him with their demands for a sign from Heaven as a proof of His mission. These marks of hostility drew from our Lord very severe though calm words, in which He spoke of the extreme danger of the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, which could not be allowed to pass unpunished either in this world or in the next. He told them of the miserable state of the man out of whom the devil had been cast, only to return again with seven others more wicked than himself. He spoke of the sign of Jonas, and of the rebuke which the men of that generation would receive from the men of Nineveh and from the Queen of the South.12
The Evangelists tell us that it was while our Lord was speaking on this subject to the multitude, that the incident occurred which brings us to the one direct mention of our Lady's name in the course of their narratives at this time. It was, apparently, at a time when He was returning from one of His missionary circuits to Capharnaum for a short visit. As He was still preaching to the people, His Mother and His brethren came to the place, desirous of speaking with Him. The object of their visit is not given, for it was not important for the purpose of the Evangelists to relate it. The reason why this incident is mentioned is quite obvious. It is mentioned because it furnishes the opportunity of exhibiting our Lord's example in the case of persons engaged in the Apostolic Ministry, when some interruption occurs on account of the natural claims of family duty and affection. There could not have been many such occasions in the course of our Lord's teaching, and this it is that makes this one so precious to us. It was very natural that our Blessed Lady and His brethren should hasten to meet Him as soon as they heard of His approach, if He was now returning to them. And perhaps they had some special reason for wishing to speak with Him immediately, such as might be the desire to warn Him of the danger that He might incur from His ever-watchful enemies. He was comparatively safe from these when He was going about from town to town in Galilee, for they could never be certain of the course He would take, and wherever He was, He had a great multitude of followers with Him. He would not be so safe in a town like Capharnaum. But whatever was the object of our Lady and His brethren, which we are not told, He was engaged in teaching the multitude, and could not be interrupted, although she may not have known how He was engaged. Thus she gave Him the great opportunity of leaving behind an example which has been most fruitful of good in all ages of the Church. "And answering, He said, Who is My Mother and My brethren ? And looking round about on them who sat about Him, He said, Behold My mother and My brethren ! For whosoever shall do the will of God, of My Father that is in Heaven, he is My brother and My sister and My mother." 13
It need hardly be said that no one would rejoice more than our Blessed Lady at the thought that she had given an occasion to so pregnant an ex ample of indifference to human ties on the part of our Lord. As this incident has been laid hold by the enemies of the honour of our Lady, it may be worth while to remark that, to the eyes of the world and of the multitude, He was^in exactly the same relation to her and to those who were called His brethren as any one else to his mother and brethren after the flesh. It would not, therefore, be reason able to conclude that our Lord meant to deny to her any honour or deference which might be due to her on grounds which the people knew nothing of, such as her incomparable sanctity and closeness to Him, and the like. If He had acted in any other way, He might have given the same false impression as might have resulted, if He had left the school of the Temple, when He was twelve years of age, at her call, without setting forth clearly that He was independent of all earthly ties when the business of His Father was concerned. And He might not only have left a false impression as to His dependence on her, but He would have left behind Him in His own conduct a sanction for the mischievous doctrine that parents have a right to be attended to by their children even when engaged in the functions of the sacred ministry. Thus the meaning of the whole incident is to be gathered from the first words of St. Matthew, " While He was yet speaking to the crowd."
So far it is quite clear that our Lord could have meant nothing disparaging to His Mother, but only to assert the pre-eminent rights and duties of the sacred ministry of the Word of God. Another question is sometimes raised, because some writers have been inclined to impute some imperfection to our Blessed Lady on account of her simple presence on this occasion, as if it implied presumption, or interference, or impatience, and the like. The mere formation of such a surmise would be impossible to any one who had a right conception of our Lady's pre-eminent virtues, and especially of her humility. To those who have such a conception, it will be natural to interpret the circumstances in accordance therewith, and it is perfectly gratuitous to interpret them otherwise. Our Lady \vas occasion ally left in ignorance of certain facts about our Lord belonging to a class which was usually not hidden from her, as was the case in the mystery of the Twelfth Year, of which mention has just been made. She may not have known how our Lord was occupied, or she may have made know r n her desire to speak with Him, having some good reason for doing so, without intending Him to be interrupted in His discourse. A score of surmises may be formed as to these matters, quite as reasonable as any that have ever been formed so as to impute some imperfection to her, and far more so. But the Evangelists simply tell us the facts and no more. Their object was to put forward the saying of our Lord about those who do the will of His Father Who is in Heaven. If His Mother had not been there, the chief point of the saying would be lost, and thus the occasion for this most precious example and instruction could be furnished by no one but herself. Moreover, it is clear that this incident happened most opportunely. Our Lord was now beginning to be exposed to the effects of the persecution which had been organized against Him by the scribes and priests at Jerusalem, whose emissaries, or representatives, in Galilee had come to an understanding with the officials of the civil government, that He was to be got rid of in some as yet undetermined way. The influence of the priests had to some extent told on the people, though it was impossible to destroy His influence and prestige, even by the malignant calumnies which were put in circulation about Him. His miracles still attracted, and the charm of His Person was the same as ever. But it was becoming clear that to follow Him, and much more, to follow Him at all closely, might soon require much courage and great detachment from the world and ordinary earthly ties. It was soon after this that He told one who volunteered to be His follower, that the foxes had holes and the birds of the air nests, but the Son of Man had not where to lay His head. And to another He had refused permission to go and bury his father before joining Him. He could hardly have used the latter words with equal effect if He had just left off His preaching to the people to receive a visit of affection from His Mother.
The same kind of detachment which was enjoined on the occasion when the disciple w r as not allowed to go to his father's grave, was to be enjoined also in very strong language when our Lord, soon after this, gave to the Apostles the great instruction as to the Apostolic Life which St. Matthew records in his tenth chapter. We can thus see how it was that He thought it well to lay down the principle of detachment so strongly on this^ occasion, and also how this incident stood out from a number of others in the minds of the Evangelists. They could have told us, beyond a doubt, a thousand anecdotes of our Lord's tender love and deference towards His Mother, but these were not so necessary for the instruction of the Christian people. His love and reverence for her were matters of course. His severity in asserting the principle here asserted was all the more noteworthy.
There are two more considerations to be urged before we quit this incident. First, the direct tendency of our Lord's words is not simply to declare the comparative insignificance of merely earthly and natural ties, even to Himself. If He had meant no more than that, He would not have used the language which He did use. What He did say was that His disciples, and those who did the will of His Father in Heaven, were His brothers and His sisters and His mother. That implies the closest and most affectionate union between Himself and His disciples, that He had nothing more dear to Him than those who did His Father's will. This is a positive statement of infinite value to us, and it is a statement which must have rejoiced our Lady's Heart as truly as it expressed the feelings of our Lord's Heart. Mary did not wish to have His love to herself, she wished, as far as possible, that He should be able to love all as He loved her. And again, because she was His natural Mother, she was not the less His disciple. Because her womb had borne Him and her breasts had given Him suck, she was not precluded from gaining that higher title to His love and to union with Him which was to rest on her faithful obedience to the will of His Father. On the contrary, her great privileges and her great sanctity were all founded on her selection as His Mother. Those who believe that she was a mere involuntary instrument in bringing about the physical part of the Incarnation, may see in these words something of disparagement to her. For she was near and dear to Him, far more for her spiritual graces and incomparable virtues, than because she was His Mother after the flesh, if nothing else was to be considered. Those who understand her real greatness, and the dealings of God with her, and her faithfulness to His grace, will see in the words now used by our Lord the most powerful of all reasons for her pre-eminent dearness to Him.
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