Good Friday

Homily 1 - 2022

St John’s Gospel that we read today is the only one of the four that mentions the presence of Mary, the mother of Jesus, at the crucifixion. John’s mention of her was more theology than history. However, this afternoon I invite you to reflect on Mary’s presence, not in the way that John did, but using your imagination.

We all have our unique sense of Mary and what she was like. This afternoon, I would like to raise a few issues of my own. John gives us permission to think of her, not standing at a distance, but present right at the foot of the cross, close enough to speak to him.

Throughout her life, Luke showed us a Mary who let life touch her, who “treasured” her various, often challenging experiences, and “pondered them in her heart”. My sense was that she had learnt to look for and to perceive the presence and action of God in whatever happened. She developed her sense of God, the “God of surprises”, the God who consistently, though as often as not puzzlingly, loved. More than that, she had learnt to open herself to the power and call of God in every circumstance. She had learnt to trust God, to say “Yes” to God. Her constant response to God was summed up in the story of her Annunciation: “Be it done unto me according to your word”. She trusted experience.

I wonder at times who influenced whom in the family life in Nazareth. Was it Mary’s spirituality that Jesus caught? or Jesus’ spirituality that Mary caught? I suppose that Mary’s influence was the greater, at least while Jesus was still growing up. Then, it probably became “two-way”. During his final prayer on the Mount of Olives, Jesus’ prayer to his Father was “not my will but yours be done”. Had he absorbed that response from his mother?

As she stood now at the foot of the cross, what might Mary have been thinking or saying? Would she have yearned to talk her son out of going through with his tortured death — a radically differently motivated echo of the Jewish leaders’ mocking taunt, “If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross”?

In today’s Second Reading, the inspired author spoke of Jesus as “not incapable of feeling our weaknesses with us; but we have one who has been tempted in every way that we are, though he is without sin.” Could the same be said of Mary? Was this her equivalent of Jesus’ struggle with himself in the garden?

Mary was able to swallow every natural motherly instinct and somehow encourage her son in his determination to keep hanging there, to bear his suffering, and to persevere in his determination to do what integrity and love demanded. She knew in her bones that God would still be up to something somehow. She had learnt that God’s way is always the way of love.

If her first “Fiat” at the annunciation had been challenging, her “Fiat” now to God’s will for her son and for herself was history-making.