Sunday,
March 21, 1999
Rev. James
A.Todhunter
"THE
MARY OF LENT"
JOHN 2:1-5, 19:25-27
Mary, the mother of Jesus, is a person whom we readily associate with the season of Advent. We see her as a sublime image of total receptivity and trust, welcoming the Spirit of God with humility. "My soul magnifies the Lord!" she exclaims. But yet it would be a mistake to see Mary as some model of female passivity, for in that same "Magnificat" she utters words of profound social justice, declaring that the mighty of this world will be laid low and the poor and the lowly will be raised up. These are words of almost blood-curdling retribution that would that welcome her into the ranks of the toughest Marxist.
Now though Joseph, Jesus’ earthly father, disappears from the Gospel narratives after Jesus reaches the age of twelve, Mary continues to play a role in Jesus’ life. And it is a very complicated relationship. Let me briefly mention this interesting encounter between mother and son at the wedding at Cana, when it would appear that Jesus gruffly puts his mother at arm’s length. Some have seen this as an example of any young man’s desire to break free of maternal bonds he may find suffocating. Possibly. Elsewhere in the Gospels, Jesus makes it clear that his role as Messiah is such that all his earthly familial relationships must be seen in light of a higher allegiance to God. When Mary and other members of the family seek him out, he boldly declares that his true family is composed of those who do the will of God. When we hear more than ever about the importance of family as a social and religious unit, it is important to remember that even such a precious thing as family falls under God’s judgment.
Mary plays a role in the Passion Narrative, that is, the story of the last days of Jesus, his crucifixion and his resurrection. She may well have been at the Last Supper. She may well have been among the women who found the tomb empty. We know that the early community following the resurrection was committed to care for her. Some later traditions hold that she lived on and journeyed with Paul to Ephesis where she died. This allowed the early church to suppress the cult of the goddess Diana in the city and eventually replace it with the cult of the Virgin Mary. And importantly, we do know that Mary stood weeping at the foot of the Cross. "Woman, behold your Son!" Whatever Jesus meant by these words, and I don’t think we can know for sure, it seems to me that they provide a mysterious link between the suffering of a son and a mother’s suffering.
This is really the Mary of Lent: the Mary of the Via Dolorosa and of the Cross and of the Pieta, mother cradling her dead Son in her arms. In meditating on this image of the Mary of Lent, a number of thoughts come to me. And they have to do with Mary and the mystery of suffering. One understanding of the role of Jesus Christ in our faith (one understanding among many, I would add) is that Christ died on the Cross for our sins. His death was an atoning sacrifice, and as he himself died to sin on the Cross, his death took our sin away with him. In being raised to eternal life, we are therefore raised with him. His atoning death makes our life in the resurrection possible. Tradition accords Mary a place of honor in the Jesus story. Catholic doctrine holds that her own conception was indeed "immaculate" and that she was raised bodily into heaven. Some theologians and much popular religion hold that Mary represents the feminine principle of the divine, balancing the father-god of antiquity. Mary is intercessor for some, that is, an inter-mediary with direct access to God. In such a role she is almost god-like herself.
This raises an interesting question. To what extent did Jesus die for Mary’s sins too? On the other hand, if Mary represents the divine feminine, does her suffering (the suffering of God) play a redemptive role for us?
What this reflection puts me in touch with is the question of what is the relationship between our suffering and the suffering of others? I believe one of the hardest things in the world is to be present with others in their pain. Simone Weil once said that the most truly helpful thing one human being can say to another is "I understand what you are going through." But this must be sincere. It cannot be faked. The phrase "I feel your pain" has unfortunately become so trivialized these days as to be practically meaningless. This is too bad. True understanding of what another is going through has to involve feeling some of their pain. And that is hard for a variety of reasons, including the simple truth that nobody chooses to feel pain - at least for very long. I remember a conversation I had with Joey Noble during the time of her bone-marrow transplant. I said to her "Your experience - physical, emotional, spiritual - is so beyond what I can personally imagine, I find myself able to relate to your suffering up to a certain point. But beyond that I cannot go. And I am an empathetic person. It must be so for others, and so that must be very lonely for you." Have we all not known the experience of suffering some awful loss and feeling that no one can possibly understand what we have gone through? This said, on the other hand, when we truly open ourselves up to the suffering of another, it is sometimes possible to feel their pain with such intensity that we ourselves are engulfed by it. It is almost as if their suffering has been transferred to us. People with great emotional empathy sometimes experience this. Up to a point, it is very helpful and healing to experience the pain of others. It is a reminder of the universal nature of pain - that pain is a great spiritual sea beneath us. Feeling the pain of another can put us in touch with pain of our own which we may be ignoring or minimizing. Thus feeling others’ pain together with feeling our own can make us more human, more decent. To be engulfed with the pain of another can be dangerous in that we lose our personal boundaries; we lose track of who we are and who that other person is. Perhaps in small doses this is helpful, just as a passionate love relationship in which the self is annihilated can feel wonderful, but can’t be the whole of a relationship. We each need to maintain secure emotional boundaries, even as we are able to let them down from time to time.
The jokes about Jewish mothers are based on the understanding that a mother’s love is one that can welcome a child’s suffering into her own heart to such a degree that there are no more boundaries. On the other hand, psychological literature has also routinely been hard on mothers who are emotionally distant and detached. Too hard, I think; the goal being to strike some perfect balance that seems well nigh impossible.
Freud once said that the most intense and complicated of all human relationships is that between mother and son. Therefore, we should not be surprised that the Gospels are intent on showing us that Jesus’ relationship with his mother was, from beginning to end, such an intense and complicated one. And what does it show us, in light of all I have been saying?
First, it was a relationship of deep emotional engagement and remained so. If anyone felt the pain of Jesus, it was Mary. She stayed involved, even as she honored Jesus’ desire to put emotional space between them. In this sense, she is a model of empathy and understanding. Second, it was a relationship in which the personal identity of each remained intact. We see this perhaps more clearly from Jesus’ standpoint. Mother and son each remained secure within.
Third, I believe that their relationship is one that models our relationship with God. And I don’t necessarily mean that in this Jesus represents God and Mary represents humanity. What I refer to is the mystery that God enters into our suffering. God says to us, "I understand what you are going through," and means it. God means it so much that God allows the boundaries to drop and actually enters into our suffering with us. God doesn’t relieve us of our pain, but seeks us out in the midst of it. We do this with one another at great risk, the risk to our own identity. God enters into our suffering, becomes one with us in our suffering, and still remains God. In reflecting on the Mary of Lent, we see that it may really be Mary’s ability to be with Jesus in his pain (not the other way round) that shows us how God loves us. When we say that God loves us as a mother, it is the Mary at the foot of the Cross who shows us this. God was fully present in her willingness to enter into and take on the suffering of Jesus. Then God was in Mary. Then even the Passion story is a reminder of the Incarnation.
It is important, I believe, to have before us a whole host of images for who God is: mother, father, brother, Christ, sister, spirit, community, and so forth. We need to hang loose with these images. To call God Father is not wrong, and can be very helpful. To demand that we call God Father exclusively is wrong. But that applies to any image we turn to. The Mary of Lent is, for me, a powerful image of God, even as a mother’s love - in its most noble sense - is a means for God’s love to enter the world.
But even as we gain comfort using a variety of symbols for God, it is important to remember that we do this because we are not whole - we are fractured, broken, stumbling. Our experiences are always in flux. God knows this and therefore speaks to us through differing images. But, this said, we must remember that God is not fractured. God is whole. God is One. Even in the Trinity, God is one substance, as the theologians say.
In Mary’s Magnificat, we glimpse the wholeness of God: God of love and God of justice. In the Advent story that frames it, we experience the wholeness of God as encompassing Mary’s relationship to God: this relationship of human attentiveness and receptivity, together with the courage to proclaim a prophetic message of social justice. And in the Passion we experience the wholeness of God in a mother’s selfless love for her son, as they beheld one another at their moment of supreme and shared suffering. AMEN.
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