At the Cross, her station keeping

Good Friday

“Stabat mater dolorosa juxta Crucem lacrimosa dum pendebat Filius”  “At the Cross her station keeping, stood the mournful Mother weeping, close to her Son to the last.” One of the best loved hymns that dates from the 13^th century, sung between the Stations of the Cross, situates our Lady at the scene of her Beloved Son’s crucifixion. The hymn reminds us that Mary is here with us this Good Friday as she was on that first.

St John paints this poignant picture of Our Lord, reigning supremely from His cross, His dignity undiminished, and now as King, issues His last decree from His regal throne. According to the Fourth Gospel, there are five people at the foot of the cross, of whom the most prominent are His mother and the beloved disciple, two figures whose names are never given. These two people are historical figures but it is clear that St John is interested in them for symbolic and theological reasons. Before He dies, our Lord commits His beloved disciple to His Mother’s care and His Mother to that disciple’s care in perpetuity. “Behold your son!” “Behold your Mother!” These words do not just merely reflect Jesus’ filial concern for the mother. These words have a profound theological value. At the cross, at the very moment of His death, Our Lord gives birth to the Church. His own Mother and the Beloved Disciple would be the first born. But there is more, at the cross, the Mother of Christ becomes our mother!

It is our Mother who invites us to join her in gazing upon the shimmering vision of a bejewelled tree, a tree not of death, but of life, indeed the true Tree of Life. To the untrained eye, here is a twisted and ugly structure. But Mary teaches us that when we look through the double lenses of love and faith, the cross is indeed wondrous, and beautiful. This is why at every Good Friday service, during the Adoration of the Holy Cross, the priest will intone this ancient chant, “Ecce lignum Crucis, in quo salus mundi pependit” “Behold the wood of the Cross, on which hung the salvation of the world,” to which all of you are invited to respond, “Venite, adoremus,” “Come let us adore.” What a strange invitation and a stranger response. To a non-Christian stranger, this borders on superstitious idolatry – the worship of a piece of wood, what more, an instrument of torture and execution. Secular bafflement with the wondrous cross surely springs above all from an inability to believe that suffering can co-exist with human dignity. Society believes that pain and powerlessness dehumanises us. But the gospel says something different. It tells us uncompromisingly that it is at the moment in which our Lord is weakest, humiliated and beaten, that His strength, glory and victory is most apparent. 

Yes, the cross has been the cause of incomprehension, even embarrassment, in any age, and not least in ours.  Our contemporaries often criticise us for what seems to be the unhealthy Christian attitude to suffering. Are we not moralistic killjoys at best, masochists (or worse) at worst? And by placing an instrument of torture at the centre of our religion and even glamorising pain and inviting us to “adore” and “worship” it, does not the Church merit such accusations? Of course, our answer is ‘No’: otherwise we would not be here today. But we need to hear the questions unflinchingly, because, underlying them all, I think, there are deeper questions about human suffering, questions to which only the Cross can provide an answer.

Many of us have doubtless been rendered speechless when others have asked us, how we can believe in God when there is so much suffering in the world. Perhaps, confronted with our own affliction or that of those we love, we have posed the same question ourselves, and been similarly reduced to silence.  All the neat and tidy answers are ultimately unsatisfying. But when our explanations come up short, when our assurances seem empty and hollow, we can only point in the direction of the Cross and find the answer. We dare not imagine Mary’s state of mind as she gazed on the ruined face of her Son on that terrible first Good Friday. The grief of any mother watching their child suffer is truly terrible.  Yet, she with perfect love must have suffered all the more.  The Church Fathers teach in fact, that Mary’s sufferings were so great that all the suffering of all the martyrs together do not compare to her suffering with Christ.

But our Lady should not suffer alone. She does not suffer alone. The hymn Stabat Mater invites us to share in her suffering. We are to contemplate with her the sufferings of Christ, recognising God’s great love for us in His willingness to bear the sins of the world, our sins. And not just to meditate upon Christ’s crucifixion, but we, like Mary and with Mary are called, to share in His suffering, to bear the cross with Him.  In this way, our earthly sorrows can be transformed into acts of love. God allows this union of Mary’s sorrows and ours with Christ’s redemptive suffering for the conversion of sinners.  Suffering is the result of sin, yet, on the cross Our Lord transforms suffering into the remedy for sin. So too is sorrow transformed.  Even the greatest calamity, either private or public, can become an opportunity for drawing nearer to God and obtaining grace for sinners.

But it is not only us who must unite our suffering to that of Mary’s and through Mary, with that of Christ. Actually, it is quite the reverse. Christ, in His Incarnation, unites with us not only in sharing our human nature but also in our most human of experiences, suffering and death. His sufferings are our sufferings, and also, extraordinarily, ours are His: part of the suffering that redeemed the world. And so we can be assured that if our own pain is taken up into the pain of Jesus, even when it seems to humiliate and defeat us, we can still be assured that we have the dignity as sons and daughters of God, cooperating with Christ for the salvation of the world He loves.  St Augustine describes our Lord as performing “the most wonderful exchange” with us. “Through us (by accepting our human nature), he died; through him (his gift of divine life), we shall live.” And then the great doctor adds, “The death of the Lord our God should not be a cause of shame for us; rather, it should be our greatest hope, our greatest glory. In taking upon himself the death that he found in us, he has most faithfully promised to give us life in Him, such as we cannot have of ourselves.”

Of course, our celebration cannot just merely end today. If you have chosen to come to Church to commemorate His passion today, good for you. But it would clearly be an injustice if you do not stay around for the real ending, and it did not end with His death. If the story of Jesus had ended on Good Friday, it would be profoundly perverse to claim that there was anything beautiful, anything wondrous about the Cross. But we know that today is not the end of the story. We know that it is God Himself who hangs there, who has stepped down into our world with all its sorrows, not in order to glorify our affliction, but in order to lift us with Him into the bliss of heaven.

Today, we share the pain of our Mother, remembering the words of Stabat Mater, “at the Cross her station keeping, stood the mournful Mother weeping, close to her Son to the last”  but tomorrow, we will welcome the new dawn after the long dark night of despair with another song, the Exultet: “Exult, let them exult, the hosts of heaven, exult, let Angel ministers of God exult … let all corners of the earth be glad, knowing an end to gloom and darkness.” And why should we change our tune? We know the answer, the true end of the story.  The victory is accomplished, the heavenly powers around God’s throne exult even as the Lord sleeps in death, because when He wakes, the members of His body will wake with Him into the springtime loveliness of the resurrection.