The Cross, the Heart of Religion
One of the titles given to Our Lady is ‘Rosa Mystica’, the mystical rose. As we normally view the rose as occupying a central place in the beauty of all plants and flowers, it is an appropriate title for the Queen of all the Angels and Saints. But as we know when we take hold of a rose we have to be careful about the thorns, sometimes hidden as well. We can see in this image a symbol of the sufferings of Mary, pointing to the sword prophesied by Simon, that would pierce through her Immaculate Heart, fulfilled at the time of the crucifixion of her Divine Son. Immaculate though she was, the Cross was an integral part of her life. She occupies a special place in the garden of Paradise, a place of heavenly beauty. But even in the garden where our first parents were placed, before the Fall, there was a trial. They were forbidden to eat of the fruit of the tree in the midst of the garden. There, in a place of exceptional beauty where we might have thought everything was in order and harmless, there was a struggle in the form of a temptation to disobedience to the commandment of God. They failed in this trial and consequently suffered a death, a spiritual death. They knew God, they knew His Almighty Power. They experienced His great Love for them. But they turned aside from Him, fooled into thinking they too could be just like Him if they ate of this fruit. We could say that their trial was a pointer to the mystery and the hiddenness of the Cross.
We read in the lives of the saints of the great trials they endured, though the extent of them were hidden from others in their own lifetime. Even her community sisters did not know of the greatness of the soul of St Therese until after her death. St Teresa of Calcutta went through a spiritual journey of darkness for 40 years unknown even to her closest friends, while allowing the brightness, the beauty of the Divine Light to shine through her every action. We have very little explicitly from the Scriptures on the interior life of Our Lady – only that she pondered the mysteries of God unfolding in her life, in her heart. Her closeness to God is evidenced in her simple statement at the Wedding Feast at Cana to her Son: ‘They have no wine’. No request is made. ‘O woman what have you to do with me?’, was the rather enigmatic response from Jesus, though not a rebuke. The result – Jesus performs a miracle, the first of His signs manifesting His Glory before His Hour had come. The saints always know how to ask and what to ask for in such a way that God does not, cannot refuse. Love makes lovers equal, as St Francis de Sales wrote.
These are lessons that St Peter has to learn, that we all have to learn. As we heard last week, he boldly confessed who Jesus is: “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God”. He knows God. He knows who Jesus is. But just like our first parents he fell into a trap of not understanding the ways of God. And right at the centre of this mystery is the Cross. The Wisdom of the Cross is not on the surface of what we observe around us. It is not on the human level. St Paul told the Corinthians: “We preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.” A stumbling block – skandalon is the word used, literally a scandal. This is precisely the same word Jesus uses against Peter when he had tried to talk him out of the way of the Cross. You are a hindrance, a scandal to me, a stumbling block. You are against me, an adversary, a satan! After Peter’s confession, Jesus set out towards Jerusalem and began teaching His disciples of the sufferings He would under go there. Had they not heard in their Synagogues about the suffering servant of God, Messianic texts, especially from Isaiah 53? But they did not comprehend the depth of the meaning of this, no more than did the Ethiopian until Philip explained it to him. He explained the Good News to him. In our humanness we want to see this mystery as bad news, something to be avoided at all costs. That is how Peter saw it. Coming to the depths of the mystery of the Cross was a long journey for him, for the disciples and indeed for all of us. But the Cross is the heart of religion, wrote St John Henry Newman.
As we grow in our faith in Jesus, we see His Life as one of infinite Beauty, of infinite Mercy, of infinite Love. We learn that there is no resurrection without the Passion. He laid down His life for His friends, for all of us, all of humanity because of His Great Love. He too found this an enormous challenge, a great trial – “not My Will but Thine be done’ was his prayer to His Father in another garden, the garden of Gethsemane. It should have been the prayer too of our first parents, but they did not see this. Pride blinded them. They failed to enter into the real depths of life, true Life leading to Everlasting Life. The saints come to understand that once they embraced the cross in their lives, suffering turned to joy. This is a great mystery. It does not mean it becomes easier. But it does mean that we grow in an interior union with Our Lord. We become like Him. It is this sense that St Francis De Sales meant when we wrote we become ‘equal’ to Him, while remaining fully human – human that is in the fullest sense that we are all called to. This too is a great mystery for us, a great mercy for us. The great Flemish mystic, Hadewijch, wrote: “If anyone allowed Love to conquer him, he would then conquer Love completely.” This is what took place at Cana: love conquering Love. This is the Good News! Yes the Cross is a sorrowful mystery. That we enter fully into this mystery is what Our Lord thirsted for from the Cross. In the following Our Lord speaks to the soul:
In Dark Divine,
My Thirst, your light.
I know your pain
For it is Mine.
Dissolve self-will
In Sacred Potation.
Drink deep within
My Blood poured out,
My Thirst to quench,
My Will to gain,
And be My Light.