CV NEWS FEED // The Blessed Mother’s experience of Holy Saturday, like much of her life, is reverently veiled in silence by Scripture. The very silence around her grief and pain while her Son was in the tomb invites people, especially mothers, into a deep silence and stillness, an acceptance of suffering that is not without hope.
Throughout Mary’s life, we know that her silence was a rich, fruitful one, filled with contemplation. After the Nativity, when she heard the wonder of the shepherds, she “kept all these things, pondering them in her heart” (Luke 2:19).
Through each of her seven sorrows, starting with the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple and ending with burial of her Son, the Blessed Mother was deeply pained by Jesus’ suffering, yet she did not seek to escape her pain or the pain of her Son through anxiety, despair, or distraction. Her motherhood is a model for all mothers today: Through her suffering, she maintained her faith in God that He would bring about His will, even through great evil.
The third sorrow of Mary, when she lost the 12-year-old Christ in the temple for three days (Luke 2:41-51), gives another indication of how she reacted to the difficulties of motherhood. The Catholic Church teaches that these three days away from His parents prefigured the three days Christ spent in the tomb.
When Mary and Joseph find Jesus, she tells Him, “Son, why have you treated us so? Behold, your father and I have been looking for you anxiously” (Luke 2:48). She experienced the same fears and worries that every other mother experiences when their child is lost.
Next, Luke tells us: “And he said to them, ‘How is it that you sought me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?’ And they did not understand the saying which he spoke to them. And he went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was obedient to them; and his mother kept all these things in her heart” (Luke 2:49-51).
Instead of seeking an immediate answer in order to assuage her fear, or running away from her own emotions because they were painful, Mary contemplated what her Son had told her, keeping the mysterious events in her heart.
Mary again faced separation from Christ when He was laid in the tomb. She must have been experiencing the sorrow of her Son’s torture and death terribly. In the words of the 13th-century hymn “Stabat Mater Dolorosa,” she fully entered into the pain of His passion: “Through her heart, his sorrow sharing, all his bitter anguish bearing, now at length the sword had passed.”
And now, she had to lay in the tomb the same Child she had once laid in a manger. Again, we do not see her running from the pain — she stood by her Son at the foot of the Cross and held Him after He was brought down from it. Neither did she refuse to acknowledge the sorrow in a stoic denial of reality. Church tradition shows us a weeping, sorrowing Mother, filled with agony at the loss of her beloved child.
As Mary waited in silence for her Son to rise from the dead, perhaps she recalled the first moments of her pregnancy. From the moment of her Son’s conception, she humbly and joyfully accepted the honor of bearing the Messiah, not shrinking from the great challenges that would come. She did not worry or fret over telling Joseph that she was with child, but joyfully accepted bearing God within herself.
In her early pregnancy, before she saw her belly swell or felt her unborn Child’s movements, she still had faith that she was carrying the living Messiah, looking forward to His birth. After her Son’s burial, He was again enshrouded in silence, and she could not see or feel Him. Yet, she still looked forward, in faith, to His resurrection.
Pope John Paul II wrote in his General Audience on April 3, 1996, that Mary was the first believer in the resurrection: “In the darkness that envelops creation, she remains alone to keep alive the flame of faith, preparing to welcome the joyful and surprising announcement of the resurrection.”
And Christ came to His mother amid her steadfast faith and hope. While Sacred Scripture does not relate that first encounter between the risen Christ and His mother, pious tradition dating back to the Church fathers holds that He first appeared to her, as explained by Crisis Magazine. The Blessed Mother was not present with the group of women who saw His empty tomb, which, St. Pope John Paul II writes, indicates that Christ had already appeared to her.
“How could the Blessed Virgin, present in the first community of disciples (cf. Acts 1:14), be excluded from those who met her divine Son after he had risen from the dead?” the Pope wrote in his May 21, 1997, General Audience. “Indeed, it is legitimate to think that the Mother was probably the first person to whom the risen Jesus appeared. Could not Mary’s absence from the group of women who went to the tomb at dawn (cf. Mk 16:1; Mt 28:1) indicate that she had already met Jesus? This inference would also be confirmed by the fact that the first witnesses of the Resurrection, by Jesus’ will, were the women who had remained faithful at the foot of the Cross and therefore were more steadfast in faith.”
As we contemplate the sorrows, hope, and eventual joy of the Blessed Mother, let us take her as an example for our own lives. May we trust in God amid our fears, sorrows, and anxieties, and look forward to the good that He has prepared and promised.
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