The Feast of our Lady of Sorrows, Monday, September 15, 2025

John 19, 25-27

Standing by the Cross of Jesus were his Mother and his Mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Cleopas, and Mary of Magdala. When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple there whom he loved, he said to his mother, “Woman, behold, your son.  Then he said to the disciple, “Behold, your Mother.” And from that hour the disciple took her into his home.

The sober wording of this passage of St. John’s Gospel underscores the horror of the action it describes.  Let us consider for a moment that men put the Savior of the world on a cross, there to hang in torment until he died of it.  Even if we did not love him, the image the word would produce in our minds would sadden us to some extent, depending on our store of compassion.  And for those who recognize him as an innocent man who went about doing good, it wound wring out some deeper feeling of grief,  and those who know of his immense love for each and every human being so that he willed to die for them, even more.  But for those who knew him personally and for many years, and experienced the passion of his love, the grief would be overwhelming.  This is still true, even today. Many saints recorded that they could not read the Gospel accounts of the Lord’s crucifixion without weeping copiously — for the more intense the love, the greater the sorrow when the one we love is caused to suffer.  

Most especially is this true of the Blessed Virgin Mary.  Throughout her life as a Mother, her pure love for her Son brought her tremendous pain.  For the three years of the Lord’s Public Life, for instance, she followed him at a distance, mostly unrecognized, just another of his female followers.  She did nothing to draw attention to herself, but trailed along in humility and listened carefully to every word, treasuring them in her heart, watching him cure all those who came to him, seeing him hungry and exhausted and misunderstood and slandered, and she could do nothing to help. The Lord even seemed to distance himself from her, as though to show in his own life what he taught his followers: “If any man come to me, and hate not his father and mother and wife and children and brethren and sisters, yea and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14, 26).  And she could not even look for solace from members of her family, for as St. John recalled, “for neither did his brethren believe in him” (John 7, 5).

And so at the Cross, standing below her Son, torn to shreds by scourges and barely able to draw breath as he hung there, her heart, united to his and broken as though beyond repair, she hears him say to her, “Behold your Son.”  Behold the love of your life, he says to her, see how the joy of your soul hangs here in tatters amid the mockery of all who stand around or pass by. With these words, the Lord does more than to show her himself: he offers her the work of suffering with him for the salvation of the world.  Wordlessly she accepts, her whole life lived according to her words to God through the Angel: “Let it be done to me as you have said.”  

There is nothing like the pain of innocent suffering, and there was nothing innocence so pure as that in the hearts of the Lord Jesus and his Mother.  On this day, we ponder the love that binds these two hearts together, and which are so full of love for us, for whom they suffered.