MOTHER OF SORROWS

 A REFLECTION FOR THE 15TH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

Our Blessed Lord happened to be visiting a city called Nain, along with a large number of his disciples and followers.  As he approached the gate of the city, they bumped into a funeral procession making its way out of the city towards the cemetery.  The dead man was unusually young, and his death was an untimely one.  He was the only son of his mother, who was a widow.  She had no means of support—there was no welfare state back then to take care of widows, and if they had no one to support them, they became basically penniless and homeless.  So the death of the young man was a double tragedy, and of course our Lord took pity on her.

 

“Young man, I say unto thee, Arise.  And he that was dead sat up and began to speak.  And he delivered him to his mother.”  The people were duly amazed and gave glory to God, proclaiming that a great prophet was risen up among them, and that God had visited his people.  Truly, this was a prophetic act, for not long after, another dead man will be taken down from a cross and delivered into the arms of his mother.  Today’s joyful scene will be repeated, only instead of holding a son who had already come back from the dead, the Blessed Virgin Mary would cradle her dead son in her arms, in that dreadful tableau so familiar to us as the Pietà.

 

The feast of the Most Sorrowful Mother falls on Tuesday of this week, and the correspondence of the two Gospels could not be more vivid, separated as they are by tomorrow’s feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross.  What an extraordinary juxtaposition of mysteries we witness this year, as we pass from the sorrow and death of the widow’s son to his resurrection, and then tomorrow to the Holy Cross, symbol of both the death of Jesus and the life he brings us, and finally to the Seven Sorrows of the Mother of God, as she cradles her only Son for the last time and commits his body to the grave, a holy sepulcher from which he too will rise from the dead.

 

By unhappy coincidence, we say goodbye this week to another mother’s son and alter Christus, Fr. Anthony Cekada, known to many of you here today.  His fate follows that of the widow’s son and the Virgin’s Son alike, and we know by our faith that he, like them, will pass from the sorrows of death to the glory of the resurrection.  Please pray that his last journey be swift and merciful.