Mary and mortality: living in the hinterland of hope

We fly to thy protection, O Holy Mother of God; do not despise our petitions in our necessities, but deliver us always from all dangers, O Glorious and Blessed Virgin. Amen.

The sermons this term have all reflected on moments in the life of Mary, the mother of God, popularly known as the Seven Sorrows. Tonight, we will think about the sixth of those sorrows – where Jesus’ lifeless body was taken down from the cross having been pierced with a spear.

It’s easy, perhaps, to recoil from discussion of these more difficult parts of the Bible and the Christian message – it’s all just a little gloomy. If one spends too much time with the contemporary Church of England, incidentally a habit much to be avoided, then what sometimes presents itself is a rather cheery and superficial form of Christianity that struggles rather when dealing with the darker sides of life. There’s a lot of talk of power and might, of baby Jesus or Jesus the conqueror, but rather less that speaks to us when we’re at the end of our tether, or when our world feels hopeless, or when the devastation of human life feels too much to bear.

And partly, of course, that’s because the Bible tells a slow but steady narrative of God’s people being led from exile into the Promised Land. As Christians, that Promised Land doesn’t take the form of a nation state, but it does reflect the Kingdom of God – the Kingdom that was ushered in, on earth as in heaven, with the events of Holy Week and Easter. To Christians, the Resurrection is the ultimate triumph of good over evil – of God over the powers and dominions of this world. ‘They shall look on Him who they have pierced’ becomes not a phrase of despair, but a phrase of hope and of victory. Jesus is raised by God, confirming that death doesn’t have the last word, and that love, not a flippant love, but a death-defying, painful, honest, terrible love, wins. If there had been no resurrection, our faith would be in vain, says St Paul. Resurrection is the ultimate sign of God’s glory.

And yet...

Let us place ourselves for a moment with Mary, in the shadow of the cross, on which her only and beloved son had been executed. No theologizing or resurrection hope can take away her feelings of pure dismay and despair.  She even buys spices to anoint the body of her crucified son - no thoughts of resurrection here, but obedience to the God who with her fiat she has brought to this point. Yet no Lord of Lords and King of Kings do we have here, but her boy, still a young man, killed before her eyes. All but one of his disciples have run away, and her passionate despair must only have become stronger when his penultimate act, whilst dying on the cross, was to ensure she was looked after by his beloved John.

Mary, Star of the Sea, Queen of Heaven, Cause of Our Joy – yet here, simply Mary of Nazareth, mother of the crucified petty criminal Jesus. Mary of the Magnificat, whose fervent prayer for justice and trust in God marks her out as Gate of Heaven and Ark of the Covenant – yet here, that same Mary is faced with her son’s corpse, and her life in tatters. Her son, the impetuous yet holy man, who has spread his message across the occupied territories, killed in confusing yet terrible circumstances. There is no happy ending in sight here for Mary – no trite answers. Her son is dead and her world is over. She must now prepare to leave Jerusalem, returning to Galilee and the shame and loneliness that will inevitably follow. Devastation, despair, fear, sadness – these run through the mind that proclaimed ‘be it unto me according to thy word’. Maybe God Himself has abandoned her. Maybe this was all for nothing. Maybe hope was a delusion. The sword has truly pierced her heart, just as the spear pierced the side of Jesus.

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Devastation, despair, fear, sadness – these are not emotions that will be entirely foreign to any of us here today. Even in the relatively comfortable life of Cambridge, there will be plenty of people in this city living lives defined by those very human emotions.  In my day job in the Emergency Department, I see lives soaked in these realities of misery – the father whose son can’t be brought back after 2 hours of CPR; the elderly lady singing quietly and gently to her husband as he slips away; the young couple who can speak no English but have just lost a baby; the young man with the new and devastating diagnosis that crash his dreams of marriage; the gunshot victim who won’t stop bleeding, and his mother who can’t stop crying; the doctor caring for them whose marriage has failed after 40 years; the nurse who can’t afford to feed her children; the cleaner whose money has been stolen by another member of staff.

All these, and more, are the realities of life – and these are the realities we live among. Some of us might be lucky to escape from the worst of them, but as Christians this is the world that we live in, and the world to which we must minister. ‘O Lord, what is man that thou dost regard him, or the son of man that thou dost think of him? Man is like a breath, his days are like a passing shadow’ says the psalmist. Yet we also know that ‘precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints’.

In theory, for Christians, even when it feels like there is no hope, when the world feels torn in two, when the powers of darkness and despair, of desolation and of the Devil, seem to be in the ascendency, still we know that God is working. For Mary, this was to be powerfully enacted in the Resurrection just three days later – a resurrection she neither foresaw nor preempted. ‘Love is strong as death’ – and God’s love for mankind is unending. God will always have the last word, and our despair is only an illusion.

Yet I’m not entirely convinced that telling people there is hope in Christ is always enough – or at least, whether it is always the right thing at the right time, particularly for those who are uninitiated in the faith. This is the tension that lies at the heart of the proper Christian concern and response for those in trouble and despair – telling people everything will be alright in the end because God will make it so might not be something they want to, or more importantly, are able to hear. Their, and indeed our, despair is not, in fact, an illusion at all – it is very real and very raw. Mary’s despair was not an illusion either. To deny the reality of this loss of hope is simply wrong. When your sixteen-year-old son is lying dead, shot, on a mortuary slab in front of you, promises of heaven and God’s righteous love can sound a little shallow. Rather, crying out to heaven with the psalmist, incomprehensible and inconsolable in grief – this is the human response to such terrible suffering. ‘Father, let this cup be taken from me’.

And this is where the person of Mary is so helpful to us when we pray with those in trouble, or try to make sense of those times when hope is gone, fear is all pervasive, and despite our best intentions and prayers and faith, darkness rains. Mary has been there for us – she has lived through those three days of human despair. In churches during Holy Week, the Holy Sacrament – the consecrated host – is absent from its usual place from Good Friday to the Easter feast to represent those three days that Jesus’ body lay in the tomb. Devastation really was complete – the living Lord was dead and buried – and Mary our Mother was there – Mary, first among believers, blessed amongst women, cradling the dead body of her son, in pieta.

Mary has been through those times of deep despair, has cried out to heaven and knows our grief. She has been through the most human of experiences, and been faced with the most human of challenges. Her pristine faith, exemplified by her fiat, her yes to God, was tested as she cradled the one who she loved the most in this world. She has been there when hope truly did seem lost, and where God Himself truly had died.

And now as our mother, Mary journeys with us on the road, not only pointing to the God that will ‘wipe away every tear’, but walking alongside us, loving us and interceding for us even when we feel most alone and hopeless. She has seen her son murdered, weeping in solidarity with mothers who see their children murdered on the streets of London in 2019. She has watched her son be abused, weeping in solidarity with mothers who see their own children abused. She has walked the painful road of love, and felt the pain of loss and hopelessness. Mary’s heart envelops our own hearts and flies with them to the altar of God, the altar on which her own son was crucified and through which her own heart was broken.

So it is with Mary that we can learn to answer the lamentation ‘for these things I weep; my eyes flow with tears...for the enemy has prevailed’. For our comforter is not far from us – instead, she takes us by the hand and walks with us towards her son, who will bear our griefs. Even when we cannot bear to hope or to see a way forward, Mary holds us and comforts us. ‘Behold your mother’ says Jesus – the last gift to humanity from our crucified Lord – and Mary beholds us as her children still. Ad Jesum per Mariam goes the saying – to Jesus through Mary. In times of despair, perhaps we might tarry a little longer with our mother, and through her and with her, begin to feel that all is not lost.

Hail, holy Queen, Mother of Mercy, our life, our sweetness and our hope. To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve; to thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.

Turn then, most gracious advocate, thine eyes of mercy toward us; and after this our exile, show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb, Jesus. O clement, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary.

Amen.