Friday, September 15, 2006
HUMAN LIFE INTERNATIONAL e-NEWSLETTER
From Fr. Thomas J. Euteneuer:
The Triumph of the Cross
Catholic teaching has always held a subordinate place of honor for Mary in relation to Jesus. She wants it that way. She is not the Savior or the one, unique Mediator. She is the one who traveled with Him that entire sorrowful way and assists all who want to "draw near to Mount Zion and the city of the living God" (Heb 12:22). That's why the Church always keeps two special feast days very closely-related to one another: the twin Feasts of the Triumph of the Cross (Sept 14th) and Our Lady of Sorrows (Sept 15th). The Church makes us see that Mary is one with the Lord in His suffering and leads us to find meaning in our own sorrows by uniting them with His Cross.
Mel Gibson portrayed this so perfectly in his movie The Passion of the Christ. There we see two persons who accompany Jesus the entire length of His Passion when others defect from the moment of trial: one was the Virgin Mary and the other was the devil. From the agony in the Garden to the sorrowful way of the Cross these two were portrayed as walking parallel paths, having opposing but intertwining interests in Jesus' fate and even a profound awareness of each other's presence. Mel's portrayal of the personal struggle of good and evil that surrounded Jesus in the persons of Mary and the devil was truly masterful.
Even if one views Mary's role from a purely human perspective one can certainly understand her presence there: a mother would accompany her son on his way to death. But how do we explain the shadowy presence of the devil along this path, especially when this is not revealed as such in the biblical accounts? That's easy: Mel is showing us that Mary fully participated in the agony of Christ's passion and gained the complete victory, with Him, over the devil.
Mary in this portrayal is the New Eve who crushes the head of the serpent, and she is there at the crucial moment of history to fulfill her role. This cold war between her and the archenemy of the human race is real and dramatic. The devil knows that she is walking the sorrowful way in union with her Son's offering, and so he mocks her with that grotesque caricature of the Mother and Child that was meant to deliberately increase her suffering. He sort of floats through the ranks of the Pharisees during the scourging, gloating, in order to make her skin crawl with evil. He rouses the rabble of opposition to her Son deliberately and causes all of His support to fall away in the time when He needed it most, all to lead Him to His death and her to her worst nightmare of emotional and spiritual anguish. Second only to the agony of the sufferer is the agony of the loved one that looks on but cannot stop the carnage. This was all part of the very deliberate plan to pierce her Immaculate Heart - a prediction that the devil perhaps forgot about.
But there is another important moment that could be easily missed; namely, that the harassment and in-your-face tactics of the devil stopped definitively when the Lord crossed the threshold of Calvary and mounted His Throne. The devil was not found there. It was not that the fiend just neglected to show up; he couldn't show up. The one final, bitter place of sorrow to which Mary followed Jesus faithfully, but where the devil was not permitted to go, was Golgotha, the place where the final crushing blow was dealt to his reign of darkness. Mary was there. Mary was one with the Cross to the bitter end. Mary was reigning with Jesus - in sorrow and in sacrifice - for the salvation of the world.
Sincerely Yours in Christ,
Rev. Thomas J. Euteneuer
President, Human Life International
