“Mary Queen of Heaven, have pity on me a sinner, a poor poor sinner…” (Saint Bernadette Soubarous of Lourdes).
After Christ died, Saint John took the Blessed Virgin into his home and acted as her son and treated her as his mother.
I know this because Christ asked him to do this from the Cross, before He died, and we are told in the Gospel that Saint John did this thing…
“When Jesus saw His mother there, and the disciple whom He loved standing nearby, He said to her, ‘Woman, here is your son,’ and to the disciple, ‘Here is your mother.’ From that time on, this disciple took her into his home.” (John 19”26-27).
And I have been thinking about that and how that might have been and looked.
Christ was executed as a criminal. When Saint Paul the Apostle was martyred – some sixty years after the death of Christ – he was not crucified, he was beheaded. The reason for this was that Saint Paul was a Roman citizen, and it was against Roman law to execute a Roman citizen by crucifixion. In other words, the method of execution reserved for Christ was afforded only to the most lowly of the low.
Christ was executed in the company of criminals. I mean real criminals… We call them thieves in the Scriptures, but to have been crucified, they surely must have committed truly terrible crimes. And the foot of a cross is a truly lonely place. After all, who comes in support of the worst of criminals? Who wants to acknowledge a connection to a person who is completely and utterly rejected by society? That criminal will die, and their supporters would have to return to their homes. They would remain the subject of gossip and speculation. Their lives would be tainted by the experience of the condemned. In some ways, they too would be condemned by association.
And I have been thinking about that today as I reflect on the experience of Saint John the Apostle. Can you imagine how much he loved Christ and how sorrowful his heart was at watching his Beloved die on that Cross, when he accepted Christ’s Mother as his own? Can you imagine how much he would have opened himself to God without any thought to the consequences?
In that acceptance, he knew that no woman would want to marry him and live in a home with the mother of a condemned executed criminal. He knew that it would be harder to earn money and make a living once people knew who he was and with whom he lived. He knew that the other disciples had run away and so he perhaps assumed that he would be completely alone – that the entire movement, the entire teachings of Christ had been destroyed and that all followers of Christ followed no more.
It is one thing to follow a movement when you are surrounded by others, but quite another to stand alone at the foot of the Cross clinging to a belief and faith that had no fixture in the Earthly world.
And I have been thinking about that today. For it seems that Saint John the Beloved, had a faith that I would never be able to comprehend. For he maintained his faith at the Foot of the Cross in the face of an apparent total destruction.
And it seems to me today, that the presence of the Blessed Virgin was a significant influence for that…
And knowing that today, I pray the dying prayer of Saint Bernadette Soubarous of Lourdes, “Mary Queen of Heaven, have pity on me a sinner, a poor poor sinner…”
For with prayer, I stand on Holy Ground where everything is clear. Here. At the Foot of the Cross.
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