Easter is the most significant event of the year for Christians, and, properly understood, it cannot be constrained to the day we set aside to recognize the fact that Jesus rose from the dead twenty centuries ago.
Holy Week stretches from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday, aka Resurrection Day, and I think we can be guilty of disservice if we pull apart its components that flow from Maundy Thursday through Resurrection Day. After all, the Last Supper, Gethsemane, betrayal, trials, scourging, crucifixion, earthquake, afternoon darkness, burial, Black Saturday, and resurrection all together form a cohesive story, and whenever we separate one part of a story to view it in isolation, we run the risk of missing something important.
But having said that, sometimes it is good to consider a component's unique attributes. Take Claudia Procula, for example - she would be lost to time if we didn't occasionally pause during the Easter story and think of how odd it must have been for Pilate to receive her message, right?
With that in mind, here I am on Good Friday, hitting the publish button on some thoughts about what it must have been like for the mother of Jesus on that day her son got nailed to the cross not for his sins, of which there were none, but for ours, which are immeasurable.
* * * * *
Although I prefer not to start by repeating something I've already touched on in this series, there are plenty of well-intentioned folks who might be thinking it's wrong to write about Christ's mother on the anniversary of his sacrifice. Therefore, I feel I must stress something I've always thought to be obvious: For Christians to recognize and honor Mary does not in any way subtract from their recognition and honor of Jesus.
If you have children, you certainly know that when your second child arrived and you started loving him or her, that did not subtract from the love you have for your firstborn. Why would this truth about love not also apply to honor?
It's a safe bet that the bond felt by a mother for her child is unlike anything a man can conceive of, and when it comes to Mary, like I observed back in Part II, "there is more going on here than 'just' motherhood." Though it's undeniable she was Jesus' mother and he was God in the flesh, many people from Protestant and non-denominational backgrounds get squirrely when they hear her described as "the mother of God." What they do not realize is that that title was coined specifically to defend his divinity against early heresies that opposed it.
Arianism - which rejected the gospel by identifying Jesus not as the Creator, but as a created being - was in fact such a threat that by the turn of the fourth century a sizable percentage of the world's clergy, many of whom were focused on political power, accepted it. Arianism's rise was the prime reason Christianity's first ecumenical council was held, and had a young African deacon named Athanasius not held his ground in front of the 300+ bishops who traveled to Nicaea for that council, Arianism likely would have prevailed.
Athanasius was not the first person to refer to Mary as the Theotokos (which technically translates into English as "God-bearer," giving rise to the more common rendering "mother of God") but in defending Christ's divinity at Nicaea, he invoked it so persuasively that its authenticity as sword and shield of the faith was irrefutable.
Its authenticity came into even sharper focus when another heresy called Nestorianism reared its head a century later. Claiming that Jesus' divinity and humanity were separable throughout the incarnation, an influential archbishop named Nestorius denied the hypostatic union of Jesus being at once both fully God and fully man. The theological problems spilling from that error are many, and one of the things it gave rise to was the contorted concept of Jesus being two different entities sharing one body, with Mary having borne only the one described as his "human nature."
Nestorius advanced the error by taking direct aim at the time-honored title Theotokos and delivering sermons in which he said it should be replaced by Christotokos. Defenders of Christian orthodoxy rebuffed him by asserting that mothers give birth to people, not "natures," thus affirming the hypostatic union's centrality and warning that its very concept would be undermined by dispensing with the title Theotokos.
If that sounds like a bunch of academic gobbledygook, remember: Things sounding like academic gobbledygook have a long history of subverting truth and giving rise to dangerous movements, and the ideas of Nestorius were deemed to be so serious that another ecumenical council - the third in Christian history, this time held in Ephesus - was convoked to settle the matter.
* * * * *
Sorry if it feels like my inner historian hijacked a post that's supposed to be about Mary and Easter, but that inner historian finds it significant that all of Christianity accepted the Council of Ephesus' affirmation of Theotokos and condemnation of Nestorianism - just like all of Christianity had earlier accepted the Council of Nicaea's condemnation of Arianism. This all happened before any of the faith's churches stopped attending the councils or accepting their rulings.
What history shows to be novel and late-arriving is the minimizing of Mary, and like I outlined back in Part IV, exultation of her in the early centuries was not limited merely to the title Theotokos.
Artistic depictions of Christ's mother did not suddenly become a thing in the Middle Ages, as there is at least one painting of her in the catacombs and it has long been thought that the world's first painting of her was done by Luke himself, in a style that would later become known as Hodegetria.
Through the ages, paintings of Jesus' corpse being brought down from the cross show Mary there, sometimes cradling the corpse in her arms; and though grief seems like the most logical place to start pondering what Good Friday was like for her, perhaps we should start somewhere else. Perhaps we should start with a quality she possessed in spades, but which almost always gets overlooked: courage.
* * * * *
While intentionally looking through Pope John Paul II's book Crossing the Threshold of Hope a few weeks ago, I learned that he wrote the following on page 220: "'Be not afraid!' Christ said to the apostles and to the women after the Resurrection. According to the Gospels, these words were not addressed to Mary. Strong in her faith, she had no fear."
After seeing it spelled out like that, it was so obvious I felt like a dunce for making it halfway to 110 before noticing that not only is Mary loving, nurturing, and peaceful, but also preternaturally brave - so brave she belongs in front of Richard the Lionheart, Joan of Arc, and many others whom history remembers for that trait.
She was a teen, and probably closer to 12 than 20, when she was approached by Gabriel and told of the plan for her to become pregnant well before her wedding feast. Yet she agreed without hesitation and asked only one question.
She knew that her betrothed, being aware the child was not his, was likely to divorce her. She knew the stigma of her pregnancy in that circumstance would open her up to the possibility of death by stoning; and that even if stoning was not imposed, the stigma would still ruin her reputation and make it effectively impossible for her to marry. Yet she agreed without hesitation.
When Joseph was mandated to traverse some 70 miles of wild terrain for the Quirinian census, Mary went with him despite being nine months pregnant... then gave birth amongst livestock in what you and I would consider to be more cave than stable, without any doctor or midwife present to assist... and later, after the Magi departed, she and Joseph fled to Egypt - again traversing wildlands, this time by night with child in tow - to escape the slaughterers sent by Herod... and she did these things without hesitation.
She knew Jesus' public ministry was destined to bring her pain that would, according to Simeon, be akin to "a sword pierc(ing) through your own soul," yet she prodded him to start the ministry when she approached him about the wine at Cana, again acting without hesitation.
And come Good Friday, although it meant experiencing prolonged agony like nothing any human has ever faced, Mary accompanied her son from the avulsions of the flagrum to the asphyxiation of the cross, all the while keeping her eyes fixed on him during those tortures she knew she was powerless to prevent. This too she did without hesitation.
All of the above require a degree of courage no human can fathom, but to which every human should aspire.
And courage just so "happens" to be integral to another theological virtue we are called to exhibit: faith.
Coincidence? No.
* * * * *
We are constantly told to step out in faith, or to look upon those who do as examples we should model.
But nobody would ever step out in faith if they weren't buoyed by courage, would they?
Whenever the phrase "step out" is brought to bear, we are obviously talking about a faith that requires all-caps, risk-taking trust, not some run of the mill faith with lower case trust. We are talking about the difference between having faith you'll make it safely through a vast forest when you enter through undergrowth at midnight without a flashlight, versus having faith you'll make it safely through when you enter on a well-marked trail at noon.
Without courage being there to nourish it, the latter faith might persist when the chips are down, but it is certain to at least falter - and it runs a not-small chance of failing altogether.
As with the chicken and egg, so with courage and faith. We don't know which came first, but we know they are symbiotic and we know neither can attain its fullness without the other. So it stands to reason that Mary, history's ultimate human, possessed the fullness of both. She exhibited both virtues at every step of her progression through Scripture, each one feeding the other so that they crested in tandem.
This was always evident, but at no point was it so evident as it was on Good Friday, when she deliberately submitted her soul to anguish and, like Father John Waiss observed in his book Bible Mary, resolutely stood and fulfilled her son's command to watch and pray in the face of horror.
Mary's qualities are the ideal to which everyone should strive. Sorely mistaken are they who would say that meditating about her on Good Friday distracts us from the core of Christianity. To the contrary, it focuses us on that core by illuminating how to trust and revere her son.
Note #1: The prior posts in this series are as follows:
Part I: Introduction
Part II: The New Eve
Part III: Genesis to Revelation
Part III-b: The Ark of the New Covenant
Part IV: Historical Perspective
Part V: Perpetual Virginity
Part VI: Prayer
Part VI-b: Worship
Part VII: Involvement and Femininity
Part VIII: Our Lady of Guadalupe
Note #2: The photo at the beginning of this post was taken at the fourth Station of the Cross (Jesus Meets His Mother) in the meditation garden of St. Mary Catholic Church in Tampa, Florida.
