Hebrews 5: 7-9
In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to the one who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission. Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered; and having been made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him.
New Revised Standard Version, copyright 1989, by the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved. USCCB approved.
God’s Passion for Us
Today the Church commemorates Our Lady of Sorrows, the Mother of Jesus. The Seven Sorrows remembered in our devotions are only aspects of her lifelong faith. As St. Pope John Paul writes, Mary exemplifies “by her entire life [the] specific Gospel of suffering.” (Salvifici Doloris, 25). Charged with raising and protecting a son who is targeted from birth and destined from conception for assassination, Mary maintains her station, suffering her own Gethsemani from the flight into Egypt until the crucifixion. She keeps the faith while “pondering in her heart” the short, dissonant prophecies she received in her youth from Gabriel, some shepherds, and Simeon.
The Spiritual Exercises contemplate the Incarnation as a collaboration between the Trinity and Mary. Considering how humanity has lost eternal life and its likeness to God, the Trinity decides to restore the relationship by suffering the Son to descend into human ignorance, temptation, and death. Humanity has lost its likeness to God, so God will take on a likeness to humanity. Consider the urgency behind such a desperate plan. What is the closest human analogue we can make to Gabriel’s proposal to Mary, that she join God’s plan, to “Let us work the redemption of the human race”? Is this plea not the kind of prayer we make when we mourn and plead for the soul of a loved one? Mary is meeting a suffering God who wants to raise God’s children from death.
I have struggled to understand the good in “offering up” one’s suffering to Christ. Today I consider that to properly offer up one’s suffering is to understand suffering as the place where the broken human heart, including the human heart of Jesus Christ, comes closest to the great heart that is breaking open for each one of us. The cross is more than God taking on the suffering in human life. The cross is God’s self-expression in human terms of what humanity’s fall has done to God. Just as today’s Scripture teaches that Jesus learned obedience in suffering, it is in suffering that we may clearly hear God.
The goodness in suffering is too much to comprehend, but it is something we are given to know and ponder. Let us adopt the Lady’s resolution for living with mystery. “Do whatever he tells you.”
—Deacon Gerald Nora is a spiritual director with Bellarmine Jesuit Retreat House in Barrington, Illinois.
Prayer
I trusted, even when I said:
“I am sorely afflicted,”
and when I said in my alarm:
“No man can be trusted.”
How can I repay the Lord
for his goodness to me?
The cup of salvation I will raise;
I will call on the Lord’s name.
My vows to the Lord I will fulfill
before all his people
O precious in the eyes of the Lord
is the death of his faithful.
—Psalm 116:10-15, as prayed in the Liturgy of Hours
Pray with the Pope
Pray with the monthly prayer intentions of the pope.