Mary the Co-Sufferer

Close to his death, he made his last will and testament and bequeathed his mother to be our mother also, our spiritual mother. "Woman, behold your son … Behold your mother," he said first to his mother and then to John (John 19:26-27). "Woman, behold your son," he said to her. He was obviously referring to her as the "woman" first spoken of in Genesis 3:15: "I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; she will crush your head " Indeed, it was on this hill called Calvary that this verse in Genesis was fulfilled. The word Calvary is from the Latin word Calvaria, meaning skull. The hill was also called Golgatha, the Hebrew word from the Greek Kranion, a skull. The Cross of the Redeemer was firmly crushed into the ground. And so, the "skull" was "crushed" by the man on the Cross, the Redeemer ("her seed"), and beneath that rugged Cross was the Co-redemptrix (not co-equal); one suffering woman, suffering with God who in turn was suffering for mankind and from them. Redemption begun at the Annunciation was completed on Calvary. It was 3:00 p.m. on a Friday.

But do we really understand and appreciate what it means to be "at the foot of the Cross" for three hours? Hers was the most spiritual, the most intense and incomparable suffering ever known; one solitary creature suffering with God, who in turn was suffering for all mankind and from them. She was a martyr whom God preserved from dying! That was the meaning of being the second Eve. That was the price of being Co-redemptrix, for from the very beginning of Creation she was thus chosen. But it was as though God had predetermined that one had to be a "Mary" to have the privilege of standing beneath the Cross. John speaks of that congregation: "Standing by the cross were his mother (Mary), and his mother's sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene" (Jn 19:25).

Redemption had to come from suffering, and so, he needed a body to suffer. His mother gave him that body. No human father was involved in that conception. "You who wanted no sacrifice or oblation, prepared a body for me" (Heb 10:5). On that joyous day when he was born she wrapped his tiny body in swaddling clothes and placed him in his crib (Lk 2:12). But on that Friday at the foot of the Cross, 33 years later, she received a body, tattered and torn and swaddled with blood as he took upon himself the sins of the world. It was not a pretty sight but neither is sin in the eyes of God! It was the blood of the new and everlasting covenant which was shed for all so that sins may be forgiven.

Her suffering too was minimized. Words cannot fully describe and adequately measure Mary's anguish on that day. Perhaps it can be appreciated somewhat better if every mother were to contemplate her own son on the cross in place of the son of Mary. Yet, if there were a thousand such mothers standing at the feet of a thousand crosses bearing their thousand crucified sons, the sum total of their anguish could not in any way equate the pain and suffering of that Mother of Sorrows on that hill on that Friday that some men call "Good." She too was being crucified!

So said, in 1373, Lady Julian of Norwich, in her book Revelations of Divine Love, which records her privileged visions from God, says of Mary: "I saw part of the love and suffering of Our Lady Saint Mary, for she and Christ were so joined in love that the greatness of their love caused the greatness of her grief … for the higher, the greater, and the sweeter the love is, so the greater the grief it is for those who love, to see their loved one suffer."

What is also not appreciated by many is that spiritual and mental suffering can also be as agonizing as physical pain, and at times even more so. For example, the emotional pain of a patient suffering from depression and the spiritual dryness of the "desert", the so-called "dark night of the soul," which a few prayerful people experience, can parallel or exceed physical pain, albeit measured on different scales and parameters of human suffering. There are also many cases, for example, of elderly spouses of happy and longstanding marriages, dying within hours or days of each other from the sheer anguish of the death of their loved one and from the unbearable and emotional pain of the separation. So it would have been with the Mother of Love on that Friday had she not been preserved from death by God. Indeed, the Church recognizes her as a martyr, the Queen of the martyrs, but one who was not allowed to die!

Neither did Matthew, Mark, Luke or John record the great anguish of the mother during the Friday evening, Saturday and early Sunday morning following the Crucifixion. In her book the Poem of the Man-God Maria Valtorta, the great mystic, relates what she was shown when Jesus was taken down from the Cross:

Valtorta then describes the vision she saw of what happened on early Sunday morning. Joseph had already died and now that Jesus, her son, was murdered, she was the only one left of the Holy Family. For her it must have been the desolation of desolations. Valtorta described Mary's longing for the company of St. Joseph to console her during those long three days when all around her, even the disciples, did not believe that he would resurrect. "Let me lean on a Joseph! … O, happy Joseph, who has not seen this day," she moaned. Valtorta then recorded her visions of the first meeting of Jesus and his mother after the Resurrection:

Valtorta continued:

Now, in an apparition to the saintly Berthe Petit, a visionary who was highly respected in ecclesiastic and lay societies in Belgium in the 1920s, Jesus is said to have exalted the merits of the sorrow of his mother, saying:

It was a man and a woman, who sinned in the Garden of Eden and so, it had to be a man and a woman to atone and make amendment for that transgression. God made that quite clear in Genesis 3:15 when he said to Satan: "I will put enmity between you and the woman; between your seed and her seed. She will crush your head …" And so, it was to be the woman and her seed, and anyone who leaves the woman out of that equation is only preaching half the Scriptures, half of Genesis 3:15, half the truth and a half-truth is no truth at all!

This ends a much-abbreviated tale of the greatest love story ever told. Today it is said that the mother of Jesus is appearing all over the world beseeching us to return to God and not to let him die in vain. She comes, not to promote herself, but to lead us to him, especially in these perilous times in which so many of us seem to have lost our way. But as Jesus himself said: "I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me" (Jn 14:6). He also said: "I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and whoever lives and believes in me shall not die forever" (Jn 11:25-26).

Dr. Courtenay Bartholomew, M.D., is a scientist from Trinidad who is considered a leading international AIDS researcher. He has authored a series of mariological studies from a scientific perspective entitled: A Scientist Researches Mary. The above article is an excerpt from his book The Passion of the Christ and His Mother, Queenship, 2004.